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As those of you who have been following Gospel according to Superheroes know, I find a lot of wisdom for our Faith in the app game Sky: Children of the Light. This beautiful game lets you explore and fly around the various realms of the world of Sky, each corresponding to a different stage in life. As you go along the way, you collect these people made of light that help strengthen your cape so you can fly farther.
As you reach the end of the game, you learn that these lights are the spirits of characters, just like you, that have been turned into statues in this land of darkness and storm. Your job is to return these lights to their statues so they can move on. In doing so, you lose all the power in your wings and die.
This being a game, though, you are not meant to be dead forever. After going through a heaven-like journey, you are told your character will be reborn and you are plopped back right to where you started.
A game is no fun if you die before the end. Your character has to be alive for the game to be played. God feels the same way about us.
That is precisely what we hear in the Wisdom of Solomon this morning: “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” God is a creator, the Creator really. He doesn’t want to see any of His creation destroyed. He wants us to have life and to have it abundantly.
We see this characteristic of God through the work of Jesus Christ in this world. In today’s reading from Mark, we see Jesus called to perform a healing. Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, asks Jesus to help heal his dying daughter. However, by the time Jesus arrives, the daughter is already dead.
That doesn’t stop Jesus though. He tells the mourners that the girl “is not dead but sleeping”, and after laying a hand on her, calling her to rise, she immediately gets up and walks.
Jesus knows the point of all creation is not to die but to live. It is for that reason that Jesus came down to be with us, to be one of us, and to die for us, so that death would not have dominion over us but that instead we could be brought to new life in Him. It was not an easy thing that Jesus did for us. It was, instead, an act of pure selfless love to keep us living.
This action is the very thing that is mirrored in the game Sky. Your character in the game sacrifices his/her life to save others, just as Jesus did for us. It is a recognition that life is meant to be lived and that God does not want us to die.
Our Christ-like role in Sky is also a reminder of our task to lead others to our Lord Jesus. We too are called to remember that God wants all of us to have life. That means supporting our neighbor when he/she is going through hard times. It even means doing all we can to protect one another, even from disease and bodily harm, like with Jairus’ daughter in the Gospel. Most of all, it means showing others the same love that Jesus shows us so that we can let Jesus bringing all of creation away from death into the life that God created us to live in the first place.