WHO GETS TO BAT LAST?
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
October 31, 2020
A friend of mine is fond of quoting an old saying, based
upon a metaphor from the world of baseball, which says that “nature always bats
last.” The point is that if people persist in behaviors that upend or destroy the
good things that this world provides for us, ultimately those behaviors will
cause our doom. It’s true on both the personal level and the communal level.
For example, if I smoke or drink or eat too much over a prolonged period of
time, my body will eventually erupt with health problems: nature bats last. If we
choose to deny or ignore the activities that contribute to global climate
change, eventually the earth will push back against that: nature bats last. If
I choose isolate myself or others from meaningful community life and the
experiences of justice, love, and peace, the results will be violence, hatred,
depression, racism, substance abuse, and estrangement: we were all created to
be part of a single human family and nature always bats last.
And if we spend our lives trying desperately to postpone or
deny the reality of our own mortality, death will find us eventually anyway. Nature
always bats last. To the extent that we are all merely human, it’s hard to deny
the wisdom of this.
But here’s where today’s Feast of All Saints and today’s
scriptures turn that old adage upside down, because as the great theologian and
priest Karl Rahner once said, in the light of Christ there is no longer any
such thing as to be “merely human.” When Jesus arrived in this world, he wedded
human nature to none less than almighty God. And in truth, it is always God who
bats last. It is only God who cannot ever be frustrated by or limited to the
conditions that we humans create for ourselves while we live in this world. In fact
God can and God does upend those conditions. The bible is really a radical
book, and our Christian faith is a radical faith, if we really embrace it.
It’s in all the readings today. In the first one from
Revelations, we hear from a bewildered St. John who is confronted by a vision
of heavenly glory that he simply cannot fathom. “Who are all these people?” he
asks, “And where did they come from?” And he reports that this host of people
was and is from every nation, race, people, and tongue. If nature really bats
last, then the crowd should have been limited to the devout Christians and Jews
who did what they were supposed to do during their lives. But nature doesn’t
bat last: God does, grace does. Pure love does.
And have you ever wondered over that verse which explains
that those people clothed in the dazzlingly white robes are the ones who have
washed them in the “Blood of the Lamb?” If nature bats last, then those robes
should have been dazzlingly red after a bath in blood. Not white. But it’s not
nature, but God who bats last. When our nature is joined with Christ’s grace,
the world is upside down.
It’s why John says again in the second reading that although
we can be sure that we are already God’s children while on this earth, “what we
shall later be has not yet been revealed.” We can’t really imagine our final
destiny now, or what God will look like when we see him face to face. Because here
we see only nature – our own and that of the world around us. But nature alone
doesn’t have the final word.
And in today’s gospel of Matthew – the Beatitudes from Jesus’s
Sermon on the Mount, his followers are presented with a whole list of things
that seem like contradictions, the very opposite of what seems obviously “natural.”
- They and we are to count it as a blessing when we are poor in spirit, when we suffer, when we seek righteousness but don't yet find it here, when we are persecuted, insulted, and hated for trying to do the right thing.
And very often, faithful Christian believers go to their
graves without any of those things being made right, or even made better. If nature
bats last, we seem to be doomed. Or maybe even foolish. What could be more natural
and final then to die?
But nature alone does not bat last. God does. We Christians
worship a savior who truly died as a human being. That was his nature – like ours.
But he rose because God is not constrained by any seemingly impossible human
situation – even death. Which is why on this Feast of All Saints we rejoice
that those who seem to us to be so dead, so far away, but they are in fact so
alive and so close to us, especially here around this Eucharist table. Nature seems
to have batted last – but we’re now in to extra innings.
In a moment we will be honoring by name those who have left
us this year, but we are not just remembering them as if they are no longer. We
are recognizing them because they are here, now, at prayer and worship with us.
If that seems incredible to understand, well, by the light of merely human
nature it very well may be. But that’s not how we believers travel through
life.
We walk by faith, and not only by sight; by grace, and not
only by nature. These loved ones surround us here, and would love nothing more
than for us to know that, and to rejoice in that, and to thank God – literally –
that it is God who bats last.
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