Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Are we
saved - justified, made righteous, accepted by God - through our faith or our
works? This question came to a head during the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther
(1483-1546) and the other reformers stressed faith—Sole fide!/Faith
Alone!—in contrast to the apparent Roman Catholic emphasis on works (doing good
deeds, cashing in the merits of the saints). It
feels as if we're caught in a cage fight between
Paul and James. Paul, representing “faith,”
and James, “works.” Paul vs.
James. Faith vs. works. Or, at least that’s how it’s been framed, especially
since the Reformation. Protestants claim
that we are justified by faith.
Protestants claim that Roman Catholics believe we are justified by
works, by good deeds, and the good works the saints. Roman
Catholic theology suggests that we are justified by faith and works. But it’s complicated, and I really don’t want
to relive the Reformation—and I don’t think you want to either.
But we
need to spend a little time there. When
Martin Luther “rediscovered” the gospel in his reading of Romans 3, it transformed his life. Up to that time he was living under the excruciating
burden of trying to earn the favour of a demanding, judging God,
working to atone for his sins, wrestle
with his guilt, his doubt, the struggles of his life. He was existentially challenged by the
question—how can one stand justified before
a just God? Luther said, “I hated the word ‘justice
of God,’…the justice by which God punishes sinners and the unjust.”[1] During
a religious experience, in 1519, he came to see
that we are justified by grace, freely given by God, which we receive through
faith. Paul wrote to the Christian
community in Rome, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;
they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is
in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as sacrifice of atonement by his blood,
effective through faith” (Romans 3:23-24).
Justified by grace as a gift…effective through faith. We hear this echoed in Ephesians, “For it is
by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it
is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). Luther’s
rediscovery of the gospel was more than an intellectual exercise. It was the result of a profound
psycho-theological experience that pierced his soul, offered release from the psychological
demons that possessed and bound him, thus setting him free, “fired into the world,” as Luther said, “with
a velocity not my own.”
It was
because of Luther’s discovery of grace, and the new value that he placed on grace,
which led him to be suspicious of any view that diluted or distorted its
importance. For many years of his life
he suffered under the thought that he could only
be justified in the eyes of a demanding God through doing good works, striving to
do good, being good.
As we know, that’s a losing battle.
That’s why Luther was suspicious of the book of James. Because James seems to convey a different
message than Paul’s. James writes, “What
good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not
have works? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.…Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says,
‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, and he was
called the friend of God. You see that a person is
justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:23-24). Luther didn’t like the book of
James. He wanted it excised from the New Testament. Luther called it the “epistle of straw.”
The reason he didn’t like it, and wanted it removed was because if James stood on its own, if we had only James and
not the rest of the New Testament, we would never hear the good news of God’s grace.
In response to the
Reformation, the Roman Catholics gathered at the Council of Trent, which met
between 1545 and 1563, to solidify their base, and correct the “heresies” of
the Protestants. Canon 9 from Trent’s
Decree of Justification states: “If anyone says that the sinner is justified by
faith alone, so that he understands that nothing else is required to cooperate
in order to obtain the grace of justification, and that it is not in any way
necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the action of his own will, let
him be anathema.” So, there you have it.
This
tension between faith and works didn’t originate during the Reformation, it
goes back to the early church; and it's still alive today. If we return to James and Paul, and
their apparent contradictions, we see that this,
too, is complex. We know from the book
of Acts that James, along with Peter, were leaders of the church in
Jerusalem. We know that Paul and James
were at odds with each other at times. You could
say they had issues. James was the leader of Jewish
Christians in the land of the Jews, who understood following Jesus as a Jewish
thing, and continued to observe Torah (the Law). Paul, a Jew, felt called to
spread the gospel to the Gentiles, to the non-Jewish communities in the Roman
Empire, and never required Gentiles to become
Jews, never required Gentiles to follow
Torah in order to be followers of Jesus. James and Paul had to
work things out, as the early church as a whole had to work out the
Jewish-Gentile question. But it would be
incorrect to suggest that James was written in response to Paul’s radical
ideas.[2]
The
contemporary popular writer Reza Aslan, who is not
a Bible scholar, suggests otherwise in his
best-seller Zealot. Aslan suggests
that, “…while James and Paul were living, James strongly
resisted Paul’s law-free version of the gospel. As Aslan puts it, James
“excoriated the heretic Paul for abandoning the Torah.”[3] This might sound sensational, but it isn’t anything
new; the idea goes back at
least to the early nineteenth century, to the German biblical
scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860). Contemporary New Testament
scholars completely reject F. C. Baur, and Aslan’s claims. It’s incorrect to suggest that James was
written in response to Paul. We don’t
really know who wrote James, it was probably not the James mentioned in Acts,
who knew Paul. Scholars suspect that the
author of James was influenced by James, and the epistle of James was probably
responding to the pro-grace/anti-works sentiment that we find in Ephesians,
which wasn’t written by Paul, but someone influenced by Paul’s ministry.[4] I told you it was complex.
While Paul is certainly
the theologian of grace, he never, ever said that as a follower of Christ that works are
unimportant. Paul never tells people to avoid good works or that works don’t
matter; he never says you just have to believe.
He never suggests that participating “en Christos,” in Christ, one of his favorite phrases, exempts one from
doing good. He encouraged his people to
care for the needs of the saints (Rom. 12:13), offer hospitality (Rom. 12:13; 1 Tim. 5:10), to suffer
with those that suffer and rejoice with those that rejoice (1 Cor. 12:13), he called
them to a love that is patient and kind, that bears, believes, hopes, endures all
things (1 Cor. 13:4-7). For Paul, as a
Jew, one’s life with God always has an ethical dimension. There are plenty of places where Paul says
that we will be judged for our works. “Salvation
is by grace but judgment is according to works; works are the conditions of
remaining “in” but they do not earn salvation.”[5]
Works matter because, according to Paul, God is working
out something through us, through our lives: salvation, redemption, justice. Doesn’t Paul say to the Philippians, “Work
out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12)? When we are in Christ
we become co-workers with the “work” of God in the world; when we
experience the grace of God we begin to realize what God is doing in us and
through us. Paul writes to the
Philippians, “I am confident that he who began a good work in you will bring it
to completion until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).
In this sense, what we have in James, in
fact, resonates with Paul. Faith without works
is dead. Faith alone—that is, sterile belief,
merely affirming theological ideas through intellectual assent, simply accepting the beliefs of your family or
community or nation—doesn’t count for much unless your faith is flowing from
grace and is then enacted, embodied, lived out in your life in concrete,
tangible ways. As I shared last week, when
we reduce Christian truth to ideas and belief, we can say, “I believe in God”
or “I believe Jesus was the Son of God” or “I believe Jesus Christ is my Lord
and Savior,” and think that’s good enough. Then we can go about
living our life with little or no evidence that such confessions have made any
difference. This is called functional atheism.
The great African-American mystic and theologian
Howard Thurman (1899-1981) said something similar, “The real
atheist is not necessarily the [one] who denies the existence of God but rather
the [one] who, day after day, and week after week, subscribes to a faith in God
with [one’s] lips while acting on the vital assumption that there is no God.”[6] We need to
be reading more Thurman these days.
Faith vs. works? It’s a false tension, a false dichotomy. As
is true with the most profound truths in the world, “either/or” thinking never
takes us far. The tension of “both/and” is the way of paradox, it’s the royal way of the Holy. The church has always known that
faith and works go together. Cyprian (c.200-258), the Bishop of Carthage, writing in the third century said, “How can a
man say that he believes in Christ, who does not do what Christ commanded him
to do? Or when shall he attain to the reward of faith, who will not keep the faith of the commandment?”
And what is the one new commandment that Christ summons us to live out?
That we love another (Jn. 13:34).
It
is grace that justifies us, and that grace then activates something in us that
evokes deeper faith and trust in God and
faithful action from us. Grace is always
generative. It generates further acts of
grace, inspires courageous demonstrations of love and sacrifice and even
suffering for the sake of the beloved.
When we experience God’s grace we become more graceful. When we accept
God’s acceptance of us in our sin, we become more accepting. Grace unlocks the
doors of our hearts, hearts that live in fearful, narrow, confined spaces. Grace flings the doors of our hearts wide
open and leads us out to broader place to live and breathe. When we experience
the expansiveness of grace, we find ourselves being more expansive in our views
and actions. When we’ve been on the receiving end of God’s generosity, we
become more generous, we become cheerful in our giving, to the point of
hilarity, for God loves a hilarious giver” (2 Cor. 9:7). When you know that God
has not withheld love from you—and you know this in the core of your being, the
depths of your soul—you find yourself free to give your love away, holding
nothing back. When you realize that God’s grace flows from a deep, unfathomable
source that gushes up and pours down upon us like a fountain (one of Calvin’s
favorite images of God), grace upon grace flowing down upon us, pouring into
our lives, we then find ourselves pouring out grace upon all God’s children. I’ve
found that it often flows quite naturally, you don’t have think about it, you
often don’t have to work at it, it flows almost unconsciously.
Our
heart opens to God and then God opens our heart—or God opens our hearts and
then we open our hearts—and then our hearts break with compassion for our neighbour,
for “the least of these,” whomever crosses the threshold of our lives. When we experience God’s mercy, we find
ourselves doing “works of mercy,” as Dorothy Day (1897-1980) founder of the
Catholic Workers movement, put it. “The corporal works of mercy,” she said, “are to feed the
hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to ransom the
captive, to harbor the harborless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead.”[7]
Yes,
there are times when we need to choose to love, choose to be compassionate,
that we have work at it—and it’s tough, very tough. There are times when we don’t
want to be loving, don’t want to be compassionate, don’t want to be
forgiving. It’s a fight. We have to choose. But even these choices are driven by the
desire of love flowing through us. For
the most part, it’s not the result of a conscious decision; it flows naturally.
This,
it seems to me, was Jesus’ point in the parable. The sheep were doing the work of the kingdom
without even trying to do the work of the kingdom; they were just being
themselves, who they knew themselves to be by virtue of their status in the
kingdom, they were caring for the vulnerable, the marginalized, the hungry,
strangers, those in prison—not because they had to, not because it was expected
of them, not because it was the proper thing to do, not because it was the “Christian”
thing to do, not because they were trying to impress their neighbors,
and not because they were trying to work their way into heaven. The righteous
were unaware that they did anything to merit the kingdom. The sheep were not
conscious that they were even encountering Jesus, they were just following
their hearts, doing what was right, without working at it. And in the process of being guided by love, they
stumbled upon Jesus—who identifies not with the rich and powerful, not with
those with privilege, not with the majority nor the status quo, but almost always with the outcasts, the strangers, the
hungry, and the imprisoned, those abandoned by the world, forsaken by society,
those society considers “weak.” For God
is—first—the God of the oppressed. Jesus wants to “open our eyes to a deeper
dimension of life” beyond the realm of law, with its rules and regulations, its
duties and responsibilities.[8]
I
will close with a reading from an early Christian text, the letter of Clement
to the Christian community in Corinth.
It was written between the years 70 and 140. It addresses this works/faith tension and
beautifully resolves it. Being justified by grace, our life in Christ yields
acts and works of goodness. Works is
evidence of the faith at work in us. After
praising the faith of Abraham and others, Clement writes, “All these, therefore, were highly honored, and made great, not for their own sake, or for their own works, or for
the righteousness which they wrought, but through the operation of [God’s]
will. And we, too, being called by [God’s] will in Christ Jesus, are
not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or
godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that
faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to
whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
“What shall we do?” he
asks. “Shall we become slothful in
well-doing, and cease from the practice of love? God forbid that any such
course should be followed by us! But rather let us hasten with all
energy and readiness of mind to perform every good work. For the Creator
and Lord of all Himself rejoices in His works ... We see, then, how all
righteous men have been adorned with good works, and how the Lord Himself, adorning
Himself with His works, rejoiced. Having therefore such an example, let us
without delay accede to His will, and let us work the work of righteousness
with our whole strength.”[9]
So, let us hasten with
all energy and readiness of mind to perform every good work—working the work of
righteousness, reconciliation, goodness, justice with our whole strength. For, like Paul, “I am confident that the one
who began a good work in us will bring it to completion.”
[2] Greg Carey, “James and Paul,” The Huffington Post, 13th
November 2013.
[3] Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
(Random House, 2013), 197, cited in Carey.
[4] Carey.
[5]E. P.
Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).
[6] From an
unpublished essay “Barren or Fruitful?”
Cited in Howard Thurman, A Strange
Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life,
eds. Walker Earl Fluker and Catherin Tumber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 27.
[7] Dorothy Day,
Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, ed.
Roberts Ellsberg (Maryknollw, NY: Orbis Books, 2005).
[8] From Rudolf
Bultmann’s sermon on this text, cited by David Congdon, The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,
2016), 95
[9] 1 Clement, chapters32 and 33.
