When I was in my first year of the seminary, there was a homily preached by one of the priests, Father John Loya was his name. It is a homily that I haven’t forgotten for 25 years. This happened 25 years ago and I still remember it. He liked to use props; I chose not to use a prop today because I didn’t want to scare the children. When he got up to preach the homily, he brandished a big butcher’s knife, he held it up and he said, “Gentlemen, you must die.” And then he said, “Die, die, die.” And that stuck in my mind.
What did he mean by that? We hear in the Saint Paul’s letter today, the second reading from Saint Paul to the Romans, he is talking about how we must die so that we can rise and live with Christ. He says, “Consequently, you too must think of yourselves as being dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus.” We must be dead to sin.
The great thing about death is, and we’re not even talking about the end of our lives death, when we die spiritually to sin, we can then live in the resurrected life right here on this world.
Have any of you read or heard of C.S. Lewis? He has a fascinating book called The Screw Tape Letters. Anybody read that? Screw Tape Letters. It is a fictional story kind of like a parable, but he’s telling the story of a man who is facing his own death. It’s called the Screw Tape Letters because it is Satan messing with his mind throughout his life. He illustrates it in two ways.
One is by a lizard and it’s the classic ‘you’ve got an Angel on one side, devil on the other side’ like that cartoon. On the one side he has this lizard and this lizard starts off very small but then the lizard starts whispering into his ear and begins tempting him to do things. When he gives in to the temptation, the lizard gets bigger. The more he gives into the temptation, the larger the lizard gets. Then sometimes he overcomes the temptation, and the lizard begins to shrink a little bit. Finally, at one point, the Angel on his good side says to him, “If you want, I can kill that lizard.” The man said to him, “Well, I don’t want you to kill it. Just make it smaller.” Why did he say that, “I don’t want you to kill it, just make it smaller.” Sometimes there’s a sin in our life that we don’t really want to give up or we don’t really want to quit. It’s crazy right? You would think, why do I want it? I don’t want that sin. But we don’t allow our guardian angels to kill that sin. We say, “Just make it smaller. Don’t make it so difficult, just make it smaller.”
Saint Augustine related to this in his confessions. He said to God, “Give me chastity, but not yet.” So, even Saint Augustine was like that. Give me chastity but just not yet. There’s a part of us for some reason that doesn’t want this sin to die. It doesn’t want this lizard to be gone from our backs.
Saint Paul is telling us that we must die completely to sin so that we may rise, and whatever that lizard is on our backs, we can actually ask God to kill it. Not just make it smaller, not just make it more manageable, but to kill it.
Probably and surely every one of us in our lives has some kind of sin that we can relate to with that. Some kind of sin that we’ve been trying to manage or just make it smaller, not so big a part of our lives when really it needs to be killed. We need to die, die, die.
Jesus is telling us this in the Gospel is well. He is telling us the cost and the condition of discipleship. He begins with this litany that we need to love Him above every other person, every other thing in our lives, but then He tells us that whoever finds his life loses it, and whoever loses his life finds it. What He’s telling us is that if we die to our sins in this world, we can truly live the life of the resurrection, but we must die and we must die completely.
In a moment of silence after the homily, I invite you to close your eyes. The thing about God is He allows us to be perfectly free. So, unless we say to God, I give you permission to kill this sin in my life, He’s going to permit it. I invite you to actually take it seriously and give God the permission and tell Him, “I want you to kill this sin in my life. Don’t just make it smaller, don’t just make it more manageable, I want you to kill it.”
“Consequently, you too must think of yourselves as being dead to sin and living for Christ.”
