The Curse Of Eternal Life--How's That?

Saturday of 5th Sunday in Course 2023

How could eternal life be a curse? We’ve always been told that our end, our goal in life, is to live forever. True enough, and the liturgy reinforces that idea frequently, especially with the constant repetition of per omnia saecula saeculorum, or “forever and ever, Amen” So how could eternal life be a curse?

Well, God Himself gives a kind of explanation, in the part of Genesis 3 that we rarely hear, but do hear today. His angels expel Adam and Eve after their sin, but not so much because they have sinned, but because they would, if they remained in the garden, have access to the Tree of Life. They have already messed up badly by partaking of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and learned the hard way that they didn’t learn of goodness by doing so, just of evil. So God covered their nakedness–their vulnerability to evil–with leather garments, thus Himself making the first animal sacrifice out of love for humans. But “[man] must not be allowed to put out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life also, and thus eat of it and live forever.” Why? Because eternal life without seeing the face of God is no blessing. It is a curse.

Jonathan Swift captured the essence of the curse in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels. “On the island of Luggnagg, he encounters the struldbrugs, people who are immortal. They do not have the gift of eternal youth, but suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered legally dead at the age of eighty.” So that would have been the fate of Adam and Eve if they and their offspring had attained eternal life in their unredeemed condition. And that’s why their expulsion from Paradise was an act of love and mercy, not of wrath and cruelty. That’s why we prayed today “in every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.”

Now when Jesus is moved with pity for the thousands who came to Him, St. Mark pictures Him saying that to His disciples: “I am incredibly moved at the hunger of this crowd.” If you can remember how you felt when the Twin Towers fell in September, 2001, or when an earthquake killed thousands in the Middle East or Haiti, you recall the emotional reaction in your gut. And that’s what had happened to Our Lord. So the same compassion that caused the Trinity to expel humans from the garden was poured out in the miracle of multiplication of seven loaves and a tiny number of tiny fish. That laughably small supply–hardly enough for the twelve apostles–filled four thousand stomachs and left seven baskets of surplus food. You see, the largesse of Our Lord is beyond human comprehension. His reality is ineffable. That’s a great word to get an idea of God’s being, weak as our language is. The word means “incapable of explanation or description.” Meditate on that notion for a while today. God is so wonderful, that wonder, that reality, defies any description in any human language. Blessed be God forever.