The wages of sin is death. In other words, what Adam earned by sinning was death – the passing away of individual human beings. Adam brought death to the human race because he separated his mind and heart from God. God did not create us for death, He created us for life, but that life comes from Him. The highest and most lifegiving source of human life: communion with God – has been severed through the choices of our first parents. Physical death is just one kind of death, there is a kind of emotional death, a kind of spiritual death. We will experience death in various ways during our time on earth – we will also experience life in various ways. God clearly created us for happiness and life, but we are mysteriously drawn to the darkness of sin – tempted – to flirt with death. Death continues to exert power over us even though we’ve been baptised and even though we practice the faith. We continue to experience sorrow and suffering because of our own sin and because of the sins of others.
Epiphany
Several days ago we celebrated the Nativity of our Lord – His birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary – today we celebrate His Epiphany. The word Epiphany brings together two important ideas: light and knowledge. Light is something we almost take for granted: the human race used to be much more dependent upon natural light to perform daily activities. When the days became shorter, the kinds of activities that you could expect to do were different from when the days were longer. Summer and Winter were not just warmer and colder, but the change in the amount of daylight meant that you couldn’t work the same way all day every day of the year. Today we have enough artificial light to work almost the same way all year long – most people work on screens that produce their own light and it is only some combination of discipline, boredom, and exhaustion that make us set them aside. We get light from electricity, and we have a fairly extensive control over electricity so how much light the natural world is willing to provide us with at any given time hardly seems limiting.
Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas
Saint Hilary of Poitiers said, “I will not endure to hear that Christ was born of Mary unless I also hear, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.'” Today we read the Prologue of John’s Gospel and it is an important part of faith in the Incarnation. Christmas has so much humanity about it, and yet we must make an act of faith to be lifted into the true meaning of Christmas. We can tell from John’s first letter how important the truth is, and how tempting it can be to depart from the truth. The “latest Christian breakthrough” should never be something we consent to without “testing the spirits.” Saint Hilary was fighting against those who wanted to reject the Divinity of Christ over a thousand years ago. That’s a heresy we refer to now as Arianism, and even though we could say that we’ve “dealt with it” at this point in the Church’s history, Arianism was very popular for hundreds of years and the same ideas resurfaced in the wake of Protestantism. Even today, the Jehovah’s Witnesses espouse similar principals. The temptation to look at Christmas as a very touching human story of a birth of a religious teacher that took place under adverse circumstances, is the same temptation of Arianism. What’s important about the birth of Jesus Christ is who He really is: God, the Son of God.