Deconstruction
Deconstruction
By Fr Michael Casey
Today’s Gospel includes the parable of the seed and its harvest with the lesson that death is the necessary means of entrance into life; it is only when the seed lets go of its present life and dies that it brings forth fruit. The foolishness and scandal of the cross is part of the essential message of the New Testament, and yet it is not so easy to see how this stark proposition can be termed “good news”.
When we are in the midst of life, full of gratitude for God’s bountiful gifts – enjoying the resources we have, the love in which we share, good health and life itself – it seems like a cruel sentence that we must relinquish all of these in order to receive what God has promised. As some of Jesus’ first disciples said, “This is a hard saying, who is able to hear it?” (John 6:60). Indeed, such a precept is a narrow gate through which we must pass to enter into life – the eye of a needle at which we affluent camels balk.
No wonder there is a near-universal tendency to water down the costly demands of Gospel discipleship – we try to convert Christianity into a feel-good or do-good religion. In this way following Christ becomes a means of enhancing our present lives – and much more marketable for that! But is this really the good news that Jesus proclaimed?
In the mind of St Paul the good things of this world are not the ultimate prize, for he writes,“If for this life only we have hope in Christ Jesus then, of all people, we are the most to be pitied.” (1 Corinthians 15:19). Faith, as the Epistle to Hebrews reminds us, is necessarily connected to our hope in realities that are not yet present (Hebrews 11:1). An appreciation of these invisible realities makes the goods of this life seem of less than absolute value; St Paul goes so far as to dismiss his own assets as “so much rubbish” (Philippians 3:8).
If Christ’s unambiguous call to death through taking up the cross is to be seen as good news, then it must be because it proclaims the possibility of a much richer and fuller and more abundant life, “which eye has not seen, nor ear heard nor has it entered the human heart to imagine” (1 Corinthians 2:19). This precept is not a summons to annihilation, nor to a life of misery; it is, rather, an invitation to give priority to the higher gifts of God (1 Corinthians 12:30), to set our hearts on things that are above, not on those below (Colossians 3:1-2).
The seed that dies does no more than relinquish the mediocre level of existence with which it is familiar in the process of moving to a more bountiful stage of its life-cycle. So also with us. Christian self-denial is part of the means by which a different self is affirmed; if we leave behind the life we know it is only to make the transition to a life of which we have experienced only the faintest glimmers, sharing in the very life of God for ever.
St Gregory the Great insists that the only reasonable motivation for detachment is that we are in the process of being attached to something else. To climb a ladder we have to let go of one rung in order to grasp the next. In the same way, the only plausible reason for consenting to message of Jesus is that we have dimly experienced that dying to self is the means by which we open ourselves to the gift of eternal life. This is good news in all seasons, not only when we feel that life and happiness are slipping away from us, but even when everything is rosy. The mercy of God has prepared for us something far better than anything we know, and it is worth losing anything and everything in order to obtain it.
