“God did not make death.”
This passage, from the Book of Wisdom, which assures us “God formed man to be imperishable,” can be compared to the Gospel account of the raising of Jairus’s daughter. En route to Jairus’s house, Jesus also cures a sick woman afflicted with chronic hemorrhages for more than a dozen years.
The modern man who reads these accounts through modern eyes might find them challenging. If “God did not make death,” death nevertheless seems to have pretty universally infiltrated creation. It’s so universal that we might even think it “normal.” And can modern man really believe these healing “stories?”
Well, like the woman and Jairus, the question is whether your faith will save you.
God did not make death. Man did. He did by choosing to break his relationship with God. You can’t cut yourself off from God and sustain yourself independently, because you are not self-sufficient. Modernity may sing the siren song of “autonomy,” but you were not responsible for your coming into existence—nor, in the normal run of things, are you responsible for when you will leave this life. (Euthanasia advocates push a fake “autonomy” in asserting your “right” to kill yourself: you might accelerate your meeting with death, but on the fundamental question—whether or not you will die—that encounter will be unavoidable.)
When God says that by sinning, Adam and Eve will die, it’s not a “punishment” God selects (as if he could have picked another, like how a parent can choose a time-out or sending a child to his room without supper). As my first theology professor, Fr. Walery Jasiński, used to put it, God no more “punishes” us with death than the electric plant “punishes” the house that cuts the service wires: if you disconnect from God, death is unavoidable because you are not self-sufficient. We may momentarily feign self-sufficiency, just as cut flowers initially appear as pretty as those on the rosebush. But come morning, wilt is apparent, and in a few days, those blossoms will be tossed.
Death is “normal” statistically, in the sense that all human beings share a fallen human nature. (We are brothers and sisters, even if we are siblings alienated by sin.) But God did not intend this situation for us, nor does he leave us in it (unless, of course, by a perverted “right to choose,” we insist we want to be.)
The Resurrection is Jesus’ conquest of sin and death. It’s why St. Paul insists that if Jesus is not resurrected, “your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). Jesus’ resurrection is not separable from his passion and death any more than death is separable from sin. If we cut ourselves off from God, we will die. If Jesus did not rise, he would have conquered nothing. He would have just been another dead man, tortured to death and left in a tomb.
But if Jesus did rise, it means that “God did not create death” and does not leave his creation in death’s grip. That is the good news of the Church. It is frankly baffling that, given man’s universal subjection to something he so fears as suffering and death, the recipe for fixing his lot leaves so many indifferent, if not searching for “answers” in some gauzy “spirituality” of their own making.
The lens of Jesus’s Resurrection is also how we need to read the Gospel. Jesus did not raise Jairus’s daughter because Jesus was a nice guy who did good things for people who asked him. (Shouldn’t a nice guy do things even if not asked?) Jesus did not heal the sick woman because he was on an Israel public health campaign with focus on gender-based afflictions.
Remember that the Gospels were written “so that you may believe” (John 20:31). They are not transcripts that record everything about Jesus. They are not the Evangelists’ “Dear Diary” notes (“Today, Jesus did X.”) They are inspired writings, written by human authors with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to highlight select events intended to bolster and sustain someone’s faith.
Jesus’ healings and raisings are signs. They are foretellings of the Resurrection. They point to what Jesus will accomplish. They declare that “God did not make death” or suffering. But they also point out—contrary to those who think an omnipotent God should magically rid the world of the consequences of evil human choice—that the “solution” to sin and death is not expecting God, like a privileged parent, to “fix it all” and “make it all better,” but to offer a way by human decision—by accepting the gift of faith and all it implies—to follow Christ through suffering and death to the Easter, to resurrection, to the “resurrection of the body” on the Last Day.
Just as Jesus tells the woman and, by his coming to Jairus’s house, confirms the man’s faith, “your faith has saved you.” Each of them, at the ends of their ropes and consciously bereft of human self-sufficiency, put their faith in Jesus, even though others think they’re fools. Modernity looks at putting faith in an “omnipotent” deity, who nevertheless declares that “God did not make death,” and tells man that if he believes that the grave is not a one-way street, then he has the faith of a fool.
That’s what’s at stake—and so we can be like modernity, or we can be like Jairus.