Let’s begin by returning to our passage from the Epistle of St. James:
What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.
Some of the other modern translations have “cravings” rather than passions, which further drives the point home.
Whenever I hear this language of craving and desire, I recall my time teaching world religions to middle-schoolers. Buddhism in particular has a lot to say about desire: Life is full of suffering. Suffering is caused by desire. Once, in class, we were reading about Buddhist monasticism, and my students were reacting to some of the precepts that Buddhist monks and nuns have to follow, like not eating after noon and not watching shows. The kids were just horrified at the idea of going so long without food every day. You can’t eat. You can’t watch TV. What in the world is left to do? I think this was before the health trend of intermittent fasting came onto the scene!
All of those disciplines, whether in Buddhism, in Christianity, or in secular wellness culture, are designed to free people from the suffering caused by desire. Food is a pretty easy example. Say I have a craving for apple pie. I really, really want apple pie. And I don’t get it, so I’m sad. But even if I do get it, I’ll probably eat too much of it and get a bellyache. So there’s suffering, however small it might be. Apply that same principle to everything, from college admissions to romance.
James is writing to an early Christian community that is getting all messed up because of different desires. This shouldn’t be that surprising. Jesus’ disciples, in Mark, are getting into fights with one another because of their desire for greatness. This is what people do. We want things, and we get into trouble because we don’t get them. Or we want things, and we get them, and we keep craving them because it’s never quite enough.
There’s a remarkable harmony between the Buddhist and Christian teaching on this subject. (I think we can charitably hope that this is one of the things behind the pope’s confusing and misleading remarks on Singapore last week.) We are addicted to unsatisfying things. We crave things that don’t last. But I think here’s where the similarity ends, because the prescription for this illness is very different. For Buddhism, the prescription is to empty yourself of all desire so that you have no suffering. There’s no good place for desire because there is nothing in the world really worth desiring, nothing that actually lasts.
Christianity suggests, instead, that the problem is not desire itself, but what we desire and how. The Catechism even goes so far as to say that the term “passions” “belongs to the Christian patrimony” (1763) and that the passions are “natural components of the human psyche” (1764). Not, in other words, just something irredeemably bad that we need to avoid at all cost. It’s not bad to desire food, sex, material success—all of those things are good in the right place and time. But it is bad to desire temporary goods more than permanent goods. When you’re focused on earthly things as your main goal, you’re destined for failure because these things won’t last. But if you desire the eternal, infinite thing—God—above all else, the other desires can find their place.
Let me give a simple analogy. My one-year-old daughter loves to eat. I think that, like my former middle school students, she would be horrified at the idea of not eating after noon. And at certain points I think it would be fair to say that she loves the food more than she loves me or her mother. Like all babies, she is a creature of desire. She wants. She gets upset when she doesn’t get what she wants. She is hard to keep satisfied.
As we grow up, as we get more mature (if we do mature), we learn that these things that we enjoy actually have a source. And so at some point in your life you realize that it’s your mother whom you should love, not just the things she gives you. Because there are no things without the source.
But how do we do this? How do we love God more than the good things of this world? It’s much easier said than done.
We have a hint in our Gospel. Jesus tells us, “If any one would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” It’s a weird statement, because probably we shouldn’t want to be first at all. But Jesus has just been telling us about how the divine Son—who is certainly the first of everything that is—must suffer and die.
It sounds a bit like we’re supposed to act like Jesus—which is more than just easier said than done. It’s impossible. Because, you know, we are not God.
There, again, is the biggest difference between Christianity and not just Buddhism, but every other religion and philosophy that I can think of. It’s not just that it’s not about you. Because there is a way of saying it’s not about you that makes it all about you—all about how good you have to be and how hard you have to work to serve others. But for Christianity, it really isn’t about you at all. It’s about Jesus.
So the point of this impossibly, perfectly good human being who somehow enters into suffering and death for the sake of everyone else, is not first that we need to be like him—that comes later—but that we need to be him. The Christian life is not about working hard until you love the right things; it’s about uniting yourself with the one person who gets love right. That’s what we do in baptism; that’s what we do when we receive the Blessed Sacrament. And it’s then, when we are part of the body of Christ, and no longer just ourselves, that our desires and cravings can reform and improve. It’s only when we grow into Christ that we really “grow up.”
This may seem like an impractical thing when life is full of lists of what we should and shouldn’t do. But in another way, it is the most practical thing in the world. What for many people seem like optional, extra things—prayer, going to church, receiving the Eucharist, confessing your sins—are actually the most important things. They are indispensable, and they are not really that complicated.
We can never be good in a permanent way without being attached to the source of all goodness. So come to Jesus. Seek him. Worship him. Receive him. Become part of him in Holy Communion so that our “sinful bodies”—that is, the bodies weighed down with disordered desire—“may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.”