Reflection
“Tell me what you love, and I’ll tell you what will become of you.” That pretty much summarizes today’s first reading from James, a passage that gets to the heart of who we are as human beings. Our lives are driven by multiple desires, and we desire whatever we think will complete us, quiet our hungry, restless hearts, and draw us more fully to life. This is why James writes: “No one experiencing temptation should say, ‘I am being tempted by God,’” for God “tempts no one.” On the contrary, “each person is tempted when lured and enticed by their desires,” an unsettling statement that reminds us that the things that lead us astray are not tossed into our lives by a trickster God who delights in tripping us up; rather, it’s our own desires that bedevil us, our wayward loves that destroy us. As James starkly warns: “Then desire conceives and brings forth sin, and when sin reaches maturity, it gives birth to death.”
Sin is born from misguided desires that spring from misplaced loves. This doesn’t mean that the things we love are bad, but that we often love good things in the wrong way by giving them a higher place in our lives than they deserve. Our goal is to “receive the crown of life” that comes from being with God and the saints in heaven; however, sin “gives birth to death” precisely because it is behavior that gradually—one act after another—turns us away from God, sometimes so much so that we eventually become utterly unmindful of God, living as if God didn’t even exist. That’s about as far from the “crown of life” that we can possibly be.
“Tell me what you love, and I’ll tell you what will become of you.” It’s all really pretty simple.
If we love God most of all, doing our best to make God the preeminent desire of our hearts, far from giving “birth to death,” love will lead us to the joy and life, abundance and liberation, intimacy and communion for which God created us in the first place.
