A homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 27, 2021
Wis 1:13-15; 2:23-24, 2 Cor 8:7, 9, 13-15, Mk 5:21-43 or 5:21-24, 35b-43
Ever since video games evolved beyond Pong and Space Invaders, they’ve had a feature that every player has counted on:
The reset button.
Bang-bang! You’re dead.
Game over?
No, just hit the reset button and you get a new life.
Wow. Talk about a statement chock-full of theological, philosophical, psychological and practical significance!
To start, and at the risk of using a glib metaphor for the core of our faith, the cruel, brutal death of Our Lord Jesus Christ as atonement for all of humanity’s sins and his glorious resurrection gave us a divine reset. All of us. His salvific action crushed the power of death and opened the gates of eternal life to all.
And to pass through those gates, all we have to do is follow the Way of Christ.
The Law of Love.
Simple.
Not always easy, not always obvious, but simple.
Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. Accept God’s kingdom as a child would.
Confess your sins, ask for God’s forgiveness and strive to go and sin no more. Get right with God.
And so, by envisioning a video game reset button, we have an everyday image of salvation, simplistic though it may be.
But because we’re human and flawed and fall for temptations, we run a few risks when we see God’s justification as part of some sort of everyday gameplay.
Maybe we get overly reliant on that reset and all too frequently give in to the urge to choose an unholy path, knowing — or maybe not caring one way or the other — that God’s mercy and forgiveness are unlimited. In this version of the game of life, we walk into a figurative buzzsaw, we fail, and we hit the reset button. Then we do it again. And again.
What was that part about “Go and sin no more”?
What’s that expression about doing the same (sinful) thing over and over and expecting different results?
Children of God — us — who have a mature relationship with their Creator will pick themselves up, dust themselves off, thank God for the reset, and climb back onto The Way of Christ. The Road to Heaven.
Moving forward. Not backsliding or falling off and returning to the same perilous spot, only to fall again.
You see, in video games, the winning strategy that relied on the reset button was fundamentally based on the notion of “Well, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else.”
How many times do we have to fail before we figure out what God wants from us? What God wants for us?
We may not know the full extent of God’s plan for each of us — because no one truly knows the mind of God — but we have the Law and the Prophets and the words and actions of Jesus to steer us.
What incredible gifts!
Now, the other challenge that the evolution of video games and all computer-generated imagery poses for us is our fading ability to be awed, especially by our Messiah’s miracles. When he brought the girl back to life, when he lifted Lazarus from the grave, when his divine power cured the hemorrhagic woman and so, so many other afflicted people, all of those miracles were done in real life in real time by the greatest force in the universe.
Though they were resets of a sort, they weren’t programmed into computer cheat codes applied to a cartoon character or multi-player avatar appearing on a high-def color screen and rumbling with simulated gunfire through subwoofers. They had actual consequences for everyone involved.
They weren’t “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that before.”
They were a glimpse — and only a glimpse — of what Almighty means.
All.
Mighty.
All-Loving.
All Good.
And a key factor in how we sustain our faith in someone so incredibly large yet so incredibly intimate is by maintaining our sense of awe. Especially these days, as we see so many of our brothers and sisters finding faith and religious observance inconvenient.
Remember: Humans’ ability to use computers or cameras or paintbrushes to re-create resurrections or sunrises or thunderstorms is in itself a gift from God. Every one of those re-creations is what the word says: a repeat of Creation, not a creation in itself. A reflection. New, but not truly original. Beautiful, but not truly awe-inspiring.
Nowhere near how awesome God is.
God created everything, including the reset button, with all its theological, philosophical, psychological and practical significance. The best way we can show our gratitude is to use it wisely. And be awed by how this divine reset uplifts our lives.
