Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Is Your Faith a Wall or a Door?

"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love"(Gal.5:6).

     Every Christian will likely recount when he or she the made the conscious decision to follow Christ.  Some of the stories are quite dramatic, the classic sinner to saint repentance; these are narratives of great clarity and inspiration.  However, not many of us have had such conversions.  Most conversions can be likened to an extended dating between couples when at some point total commitment becomes imperative.  For us Catholics, that is usually Confirmation.
     The calling of Elisha in 1Kings and Jesus' call in Luke provide a couple of notable differences as outlined by theologian Reginald Fuller. Elisha's call was not the complete abandonment of his life, but rather an added responsibility to serve God as a prophet.  Jesus' call was absolute and urgent.  One had to respond immediately to the desire to follow Christ and completely ("No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God"-Lk.9:62).  Another significant difference noted by Fuller was that Elisha was not called to follow Elijah, but to succeed him as a prophet.  Jesus' disciples were not called to replace him, or even to succeed him, as much as continue to be led by him through the presence of the Spirit. Despite the tendency to set up structures of hierarchy and obedience in the institutional Church, every Christian from Pope to the most despised criminal who hears God's voice is accountable to Christ. We all minister as servants, but possess the baptized nature of priest, prophet and king for the mission.
     As we continue in our reading of St.Paul's letter to the Galatians, he negotiates the concept of the nature of our freedom in Christ in responding to our call.  Paul uses the highly-charged terms flesh and spirit.  In this context, Paul uses the word flesh to mean our human natures---instinctual and rational (lower and higher, respectively), not the carnal appetite alone as so many misreads. Spirit is capitalized and refers to the Holy Spirit.  Paul associates this "flesh nature" as that which seeks to justify oneself before God in following rules and thus meriting justification; rather, Paul speaks of being led by the Spirit.  The Spirit is liberation from law, from the futility of realizing righteousness through observance of rules of spiritual discipline (Law) alone.  As Christ came "not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, so Paul preaches freedom from finding righteousness in the Law in declaring that "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." The Spirit releases us not from practicing the Law, but from the necessity of finding salvation through observance of the Law. 
     Our calling is to a relationship with a living God through Christ.  We don't have to abandon the Law, but it must serve, first and foremost, the chief commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.  Jesus adds the ethical necessity of expressing this love "and your neighbor as yourself."  Paul's "only thing that counts" is our inherent freedom from placing observance before relationship; relationship always comes first, and that is why faith and discernment and connection to a community of professed believers is essential.  In seeking God, we're looking for Him as a community of believers.
     Faith, misunderstood as short-sighted obedience to rules rather than relationship, is a wall to our spiritual life and prevents us from accessing God's love and grace.  As Paul writes in Romans about the futility of this struggle: "For what I want to do I do not, but what I hate I do."  He is speaking of the futility of overcoming our "flesh" without the Spirit---reaching God by rules rather than by responding to a direct overture of God through Christ.  For it is in this relationship in the Spirit that Paul proclaims "...if you are led by the Spirit you are no longer under the Law".  To be "under" the Law means that to be "walled in" by the Law, prevented by the Law--The Wall.  The Spirit is the door Christ opened in his sacrifice, and we are asked to step through it.  Liberation can be a scary thing, though, because it is not possible to always know the nature of this transformation, where it will lead once we are committed. But that is the nature of faith. Consider the words of St. Paul: All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything (1Cor. 13:17).

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

The Heart of Grace: Love

Christian grace is the undeserved favor of God towards us; we don’t deserve God’s love because of what we have achieved, the good we have done.  God loves us because he desires communion with us.  In other words, God’s love exists independent of our actions, or even of our awareness of Him.  As we respond to this love over time, this becomes our story of salvation.  Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s greatest act of love, “for no one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for a friend”(John 15:13).  We are the friends of God when we show our love for one another; this is God’s “command” expressed in Jesus’ great command, but more importantly, revealed in his actions. It's not so much "What would Jesus do", but rather "What did Jesus do?"

In today’s reading from 1 Samuel, Nathan, the prophet who succeeded Samuel, helped David face his great sin of abusing his power by taking his loyal friend’s wife as his secret lover while his friend was away at war fighting for Israel.  How does one tell a king he is a great sinner effectively?  He does it with a story.  Likewise, Jesus in today’s gospel tells a story of the Pharisee, Simon.  In both instances, a painful truth had to be communicated, and because both King David and Simon had a sense of God’s love, Nathan and Jesus used parable rather than condemnation to reveal the need for repentance.

Jack Kavanaugh, a Jesuit scholar aptly observes that “Our resistance to repentance parallels our resistance to love. If we experience ourselves unable to trust fully that God could love us unconditionally, the indirect method of parables sometimes is the most efficient strategy to help us accept the mystery of our redemption.”

Paul, likewise, recounted his salvation in sharing a story, not providing a scholarly treatise on grace. He recounts God’s love revealed to him while he was persecuting the Church,  

"how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, and progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my race, since I was, even more, a zealot for my ancestral traditions. But when God, who from my mother’s womb had set me apart and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me,  so that I might proclaim him to the Gentiles…."

We witness to the truth of God’s love by striving to love one another as God loves us.  This is our liberation from the Law.  It isn’t that we can just disregard the commandments of God as revealed in earlier times (we can’t simply commit adultery by claiming not to be bound by the Law), but rather we fulfill the Law in loving one another as we have been loved by God.

Our confronting the sinners in this world begins not with condemnation, but with the story of our graced lives.  We share our table with sinners because we all have sinned and fallen short of meriting God’s favor. We gather to worship not because we are saints, but because we are sinners striving for sainthood.