Saved by God’s Grace Received Through Faith and Lived in Love, 28th Thursday (I), October 14, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Callistus
October 14, 2021
Rom 3:21-30, Ps 130, Lk 11:47-54

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus finishes his very sharp words about those Pharisees who for all their conspicuous religious practices turn out to be murderers on the inside: in imitation of the way their ancestors killed the prophets, they would conspire to have Jesus himself killed. Their essential defect in the understanding of their relationship with God was a focus on their own external actions in fulfillment of the law of the Covenant rather than on whether they were branches attached to God the Vine, whether they were in fact loving God with all they had and loving their neighbor to the extreme or whether they were opposing God and hating or slaying their neighbor. They had become, as Pope Francis said a few years ago in a daily Mass homily, ideologues, those who were living by “moral principles” or by the “law” but were no longer truly living in a relationship with God. Jesus said they had thrown away the key of knowledge — the real, living relationship with God himself, a God who changes us — and had both failed to enter the kingdom themselves but were preventing others from entering.
• St. Paul used to be a Pharisee and lived by a principle that one became right with God — justified — precisely through one’s own deeds but he grasped in and after his conversion, as he writes today, that we are “justified freely by [God’s] grace” (which means by God’s action, unmerited by us) and the way we respond to it, “by faith, apart from works of the law.” He writes about the proper ground of justification by grace through faith working through love today because it was an issue for the Church in Rome, where there were many “Judaized Christians,” Christians influenced by a Pharisaical mentality that said in order to be a good Christian, one first needed to be a good Jew, and to be a good Jew meant to keep the Mosaic law in its entirety. The emphasis in justification in their conception was on fidelity to the Mosaic law, and St. Paul was stressing, rather, that it’s faith in God — not just a belief that he exists but a trust in Him to whom we commit our entire lives — that saves both Greek and Jew, uncircumcised and circumcised. That doesn’t mean our deeds aren’t key. God’s grace received with faith is supposed to be transformative and performative: it’s supposed to change us and that change can’t help but be seen in the way we behave, as we strive and struggle to behave more and more according to God’s grace, according to faith. St. Paul would write in his letter to the Galatians that the goal is “faith working through love,” our faith is supposed to flow in charity toward God and neighbor. That’s why we can say that, while we’re not saved by our deeds, we are judged by our deeds — see Mt 25:31-46 and the way we respond to the poor, the hungry, the sick, the stranger, the imprisoned — because the way we treat our neighbor is an indication of the type of faith we have and whether we’ve responded in faith to the grace of God.
• This year we mark the 500th anniversary of Pope Leo X’s excommunication of Martin Luther and of the Diet of Worms where Luther was called to defend his beliefs before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and where he refused to recant what the Church was criticizing in his 95 theses and other writings. Central to the Reformation was the question of “justification,” of how we’re saved. Luther misunderstood the Catholic position and the Pope and Charles V misunderstood Luther’s. The misunderstandings just grew over the course of centuries due to schism. The theological issues were clarify and resolved in a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed by the Church and the World Lutheran Federation in 1999 — and subsequently by various other Protestant denominations. It teaches clearly, “Justification is the forgiveness of sins (cf. Rom 3:23-25; Acts 13:39; Lk 18:14), liberation from the dominating power of sin and death (Rom 5:12-21) and from the curse of the law (Gal 3:10-14). It is acceptance into communion with God: already now, but then fully in God’s coming kingdom (Rom 5:1f). It unites with Christ and with his death and resurrection (Rom 6:5). It occurs in the reception of the Holy Spirit in baptism and incorporation into the one body (Rom 8:1f, 9f; I Cor 12:12f). All this is from God alone, for Christ’s sake, by grace, through faith in “the gospel of God’s Son” (Rom 1:1-3). The justified live by faith that comes from the Word of Christ (Rom 10:17) and is active through love (Gal 5:6), the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22f). … That is why the Apostle says to the justified: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil 2:12f).” It repeats later, “In faith we together hold the conviction that justification is the work of the triune God. The Father sent his Son into the world to save sinners. The foundation and presupposition of justification is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Justification thus means that Christ himself is our righteousness, in which we share through the Holy Spirit in accord with the will of the Father. Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works. … Through Christ alone are we justified, when we receive this salvation in faith. Faith is itself God’s gift through the Holy Spirit who works through word and sacrament in the community of believers and who, at the same time, leads believers into that renewal of life which God will bring to completion in eternal life. … As sinners our new life is solely due to the forgiving and renewing mercy that God imparts as a gift and we receive in faith, and never can merit in any way.” About works, it stresses, “We confess together that good works – a Christian life lived in faith, hope and love – follow justification and are its fruits. When the justified live in Christ and act in the grace they receive, they bring forth, in biblical terms, good fruit. … Both Jesus and the apostolic Scriptures admonish Christians to bring forth the works of love. According to Catholic understanding, good works, made possible by grace and the working of the Holy Spirit, contribute to growth in grace, so that the righteousness that comes from God is preserved and communion with Christ is deepened. When Catholics affirm the ‘meritorious’ character of good works, they wish to say that, according to the biblical witness, a reward in heaven is promised to these works. Their intention is to emphasize the responsibility of persons for their actions, not to contest the character of those works as gifts, or far less to deny that justification always remains the unmerited gift of grace.”
• Someone whose life stresses the gratuity of God’s grace, and who never ceased to be instrument to share that unmerited mercy with others, is the holy one the Church celebrates today. St. Callistus was a slave in life before he became a true slave of Christ. He managed his master’s assets. Eventually, either through mismanagement or theft, he lost them and ran away. He was caught, sentenced to manual labor (a particularly hard form of slavery) and sent to the mines. Through various interventions, the Christians in those mines were liberated. Callistus was eventually entrusted by Pope St. Zephyrinus as the steward of Christian cemeteries (the underground catacombs), was ordained a deacon, and after St. Zephyrinus’ death was elected his successor. And because he had made the journey from sin to grace, from slavery to freedom, from earthly life to life according to the Spirit, he sought to make it possible for other to receive that gift. The mercy he showed toward sinners scandalized many of the priests of Rome and beyond as he made it much easier for those who had been misled by sects and heretics to be welcomed back into the fold, for reducing the length of penances necessary for those who had committed sins like murder, abortion, primitive contraception and apostasy to be readmitted to communion, and for recognizing the marriages among different social classes in Rome against Roman law. There were some — among them the priest and future anti-pope Hippolytus in Rome — who thought he was mistaken to be so lenient, but it seems that they were much more concerned with giving strong penances to show the severity of sin — and having people “work out their salvation” through deeds of penance — than in recognizing conversion when it had happened and facilitating the life of grace. Callistus also set up diakonia for the poor throughout the city and eventually gave all that he had, including his life, for God and for his people. At the beginning of Mass, we asked God, through his intercession and by his example, to strengthen us so that “rescued from the slavery of corruption, we may merit an incorruptible inheritance.” That redemption is the work of God’s grace received through faith and lived in love.
• Today at Mass we have a chance to focus on God’s continuous work of sanctification that flows from justification. We see the same interplay between grace, faith and works. We begin by God’s grace: “Blessed are you, O Lord, God of all creation, for through your goodness we have this bread [wine] we offer you, fruit of the earth .” We receive it with faith working through love: “and work of human hands.” God’s self-gift in the Eucharist is, together with the grace of baptism, the greatest grace in life, and we come here saying our “Amen!,” and then seeking to receive from God’s generous and unmerited loving action the strength to make our whole life a commentary on the words of consecration, giving our body and blood out of love for God and others, imitating the faith-filled love of St. Callistus in whatever ways God graciously will allow.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
ROM 3:21-30

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