MODELLING OURSELVES ON THE HEAVENLY MAN

SUNDAY, SEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

1 Sam 26:2,7-9,11-13,22-23; Ps 103:1-4,8,10,12-13; 1 Cor 15:45-49; Lk 6:27-38

Contemplating Spiritual Things

The Church led us through the creation stories and how the man and woman God created in his image and intends to make into his likeness fell short of the glory God planned for them by exercising their free will in disobedience to God. By choosing to disobey God, they entered the path of pain, suffering, and death. These characterise the path of knowledge of good and evil. The loss of God’s assisting grace with them in the Garden set them on the path that would reveal the weakness of human nature without God. The weak and corrupted human nature is what they passed on to us, their children. The orientation to the earth, which their sin inculcated in the common nature, is what Paul affirms we all participate in. “The first man, Adam, as scripture says, became a living soul; but the last Adam has become a life-giving spirit. That is, first the one with the soul, not the spirit, and after that, the one with the spirit.” Because we inherited the life of Adam, we also inherited his death, which is admixed with his life inextricably. The former he received from God as a blessing, the latter is a consequence of his choice to disobey the word of God.

While living the earthly life we inherited from our first parents, God gives us another opportunity to be born of a different and spiritual stock. So, while the flesh must serve the sentence God passed on it because of the sin of Adam and Eve, the opportunity for a new and spiritual life is given to us by the Incarnation of the Eternal Word. Hence, while nature forces us into slavery to sin, death, and decay, the spirit lifts us to a new life of goodness, light, and truth. Saint Paul captures this as follows: “The first man, being from the earth, is earthly by nature; the second man is from heaven. As this earthly man was, so are we on earth; and as the heavenly man is, so are we in heaven. And we, who have been modelled on the earthly man, will be modelled on the heavenly man.” We model our life on the earthly man by following the desires of our fallen nature. We wax strong in natural life, and all it entails, by following these disordered desires. Similarly, we model our lives on the spiritual or heavenly life by following the desires of the spirit, which receives life from the Holy Spirit through the ministration of Jesus Christ. Our spiritual life belongs to the spiritual Man who is a life-giving Spirit. The two lives cannot grow at the same time for one preys on the other. To grow in one is to decline in the other.

The gospel gives us the injunctions of the life-giving Spirit or the heavenly man, which help us to share in his life. The principle of our natural or earthly life is the union between man and woman, but the principle of our spiritual life is the union between the word of God and an obedient or faithful heart. Hence, Jesus proclaims: “I say this to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly. To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too; to the man who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic.” These are events that kill the earthly man in us. But because we do them in obedience to the word of God, they also gender a spiritual or heavenly life in us. Thus, obedience to the life-giving Spirit ends the life of the earthly man in us and gives us a new spiritual birth in the Spirit. So, Adam is perpetuated in us when we continue in disobedience to the word of God, and Jesus Christ is instantiated in us when we obey the word of God that gives spiritual life.

Subsequently, we model ourselves in the pattern of the spiritual or heavenly man by obediential faith in the word of God. The same obediential faith destroys the image of the model of the earthly man innate in us. The first reading sets David as an example of someone who consistently destroyed the earthly model of life in him by his obedience to the word of God and the rejection of his natural tendencies. King Saul, who sought to kill him, was placed at his mercy. The first reference for his action was a recurse to the word of God. Abishai advised him to do what every other man would do, to harm his enemy who sought to take his life. “David answered Abishai, ‘Do not kill him, for who can lift his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be without guilt? The Lord forbid that I should raise my hand against the Lord’s anointed!” The faithful obedience to the will of God and his word made David a man born of the Spirit and pleasing to God. David was born a spiritual man through his constant pondering on the word of God. Thus, frequent reading, meditation, and contemplation of the word of God gradually eliminate the earthly man in us and renew us in the life of the heavenly man, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let us pray: Grant, we pray, almighty God, that, always pondering spiritual things, we may carry out in both word and deed that which is pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.