The Meaning of Life

25 July 2025  Matthew 20:20-28  

The Feast of St. James, Apostle

“The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” Matthew 20:28

Thomas Joseph White, Rector of the Angelicum in Rome, was teaching a week-long class in China to about forty young Chinese philosophers on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Observers from the Chinese Communist party attended each class, so the students had to be rather circumspect in the questions they asked, if they asked any. The meals following classes, however, were busy and crowded, and students spoke more freely because it was harder to be overheard. Fr. White asked one of the students why they all came to a class about a medieval European philosopher, and he replied, “Father, we know that communism is a failed system, but what we don’t know is the meaning of life. We wonder if it might have something to do with Christianity” (First Things, August/September 2025, p. 28).

So that is our job. We must tell people the meaning of life.

The Apostles James and John were nicknamed the “Sons of Thunder,” but it was likely not because of their personalities, but their mother’s. Salome was ambitious for her boys, and in front of all the other disciples she askedthat they get corner offices in the Kingdom of God. Jesus told her that seat assignments in heaven are irrelevant to His purpose in this life. The meaning of life is not about having positions of power and influence, even if it is power and influence in a very good cause.

The meaning of life is to proclaim the reality of God, and the Good News of His incarnation in Jesus Christ.

The essential promise of Christianity is that God wants to give to us His eternal life. He wants to graft our lives onto His life, and to that end He has come to us Himself in Jesus to extend that invitation.

To believe this is to see that God is the source of all the intelligence and goodness in the universe. To believe this is to see that God makes Himself understandable and approachable, that He has made the universe understandable and approachable so that we can see signs of His goodness and intelligence everywhere. To believe this is to understand that we become intelligible to ourselves only when we see ourselves in communion with God. To believe this is to know that there is no more important news to proclaim, especially for a human race that is having trouble seeing God,that in the last century has experienced the most extravagant efforts in history to stamp out religious belief, a human race that has grown dull and disillusioned, anxious and angry, hopeless, helpless and hiding behind screens so we don’t have to look at the mess we have made.

Matthias Grunewald’s painting Crucifixion, was made as a panel for the Isenheim Altarpiece, in the hospital chapel at St. Anthony’s monastery. The monastery hospital specialized in the treatment of ergotism, a particular painful disease resulting in the loss of fingers and toes to gangrene. Jesus is gruesomely portrayed as a victim of the disease, with John the Baptist next to the cross pointing to Jesus and holding a Bible open to the text, “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30). Karl Barth, often called the greatest theologian of the 20^th century, kept a copy of this picture over his desk for his entire career. It reminded him that when humans have done the worst thing that they can possibly do, put God to death and exile people to lostness in sin, God continues not only to give His life for us, but far more significantly, give His life to us. The Church’s role, every disciple’s role, Barth said, is to be John the Baptist in Grunewald’s painting: point to Jesus and say, “He must increase.” He is still the one and only answer, the one and only hope.

That is the meaning of life.