I preached this last weekend about one of my favorite topics: Catholic Math. I guess that is a bit unfair, because what I mean by Catholic Math is basically “theology”.
For example, how do we understand that God is both one and three? How do we understand that Jesus is fully God (100%) and fully man (100%)? How do we understand that Jesus is bodily present in the Eucharist, even if adding up all the hosts in the world we would have way more than a human body’s worth of Jesus? This last question was inspired by a young man preparing for First Communion who asked, Why does Jesus not run out of body?
The answer to all these questions is “Catholic Math”.
Catholic Math follows a different logic than worldly math, because worldly math is “zero sum”: if I have more, you have less; if I have everything, you have nothing. Without getting too dramatic, we could call this kind of math “Death Math”, meaning that it follows the logic of this world in which everything ends in death.
The normal trajectory of a human life starts out with a small young thing that grows and matures, and once he or she reaches fully maturity (around age 40…oh no, I just turned 40!), begins the slow decline until life runs out. This is the law of existence: everything living will one day die.
But Jesus has introduced a new way of calculating, what we are calling Catholic Math, or Eucharistic Math, or Resurrection Math. The logic of the Resurrection is that life “only gets better”, that faith, hope, and charity can grow and grow, marking our whole life until our life flourishes into eternal life. According to Resurrection Math, expressed in the funeral liturgy, “Life is changed, not ended”. Death, according to Resurrection Math, is the door to eternal life.
This is the Math that Jesus wants to introduce to the daughter of Jairus, the synagogue official. When he first enters the house, he says that the girl is “asleep” not dead. The response to this is ridicule. Jesus is not swayed by their ridicule and instead presses, living according to a different logic. Of course, with those for ears to hear, “asleep” is the word that is used throughout the New Testament for those who have died “in the Lord”. They live according to Resurrection Math, not Death Math. The connection to the Resurrection becomes clear when Jesus enters the young girl’s room and says “Talitha Qum!” This word “qum” means “arise” and is the same word (in Aramaic) for the Resurrection.
After Mass yesterday a woman from Iraq came to the sacristy and reminded me that the word is the same in Arabic. “Qum”—“arise”: Live according to a new logic, a new math.
This is the math that we are learning every time we receive Holy Communion. When we receive the host we are receiving Jesus’s risen body, not his dead body. That is why Jesus does not “run out of body”, to answer the question of the young man preparing for First Communion. Jesus’s body has passed from death to life through the Resurrection. Eucharistic Math is the Math of love. We all know that when we give love away we are not depleted in our love but actually grow in our love. This happens at the spiritual level in our everyday life. In Jesus this happens at the bodily level. His Body becomes share-able through the love with which he loves us: “This is my Body given up for you.”
We human beings taste this love even bodily in the love of a man and woman in marriage. The two people express their love bodily in such a way that a new human person (and a person is an infinite mystery) is born from their love. The couple becomes more, not less, through the giving of themselves in love.
This leads me to think about another instance of Catholic Math. Catholics often have big families. When kid number six comes along, we do not say that mom and dad now have to divide their love into six parts so that each kid has enough. As Catholics, we love the fruitfulness of family life because it is a sign that love grows. At the same time, as Catholics, we love the fruitfulness of those who give up marriage and family and children in order to serve the Kingdom of God. How is all this possible? Catholic Math!
Jesus tells us to “arise” “qum”, to lift up our hearts to a new logic, a new math, to the logic of love, to Resurrection Math. Von Balthasar says that Christ is both rich and poor at the same time. That is possible for us too: to give up the old way of counting, to let ourselves go in love, to become rich in what matters to God.