Memorial of Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues
Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
October 19, 2023
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/101923.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, “the Law” plays a central role in our readings.
At their best, laws are those commonly agreed-upon markers that guide the human community on its shared journey. Ideally conceived in the context of justice, every law will lead to a balance of well-being for all concerned.
It is in the human administration of law that we meet challenges. Such administration rests in the hands of “superiors” who are, like all of us, subject to prejudice, ignorance, domination, and arrogance. These individuals can regress to an interpretation of law that benefits only themselves and those they favor.
In our Gospel, Jesus vociferously condemns this corruption of the Law by the very people who have been entrusted with its integrity:
Woe to you, scholars of the law!
Luke 11:52
You have taken away the key of knowledge.
You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.
What is that “key of knowledge” Jesus refers to? I think it is this: that the Law is only peripheral. While it must be respected, it must also be transcended so that we live beyond it and into the Spirit Who generates it.
In our first reading, Paul makes an astounding statement that surely knocked the pharisaical legalists on their pins! Paul says that God’s righteousness is not found in the Law but solely in faith in Jesus Christ.
Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law,
Romans 3:21-22
though testified to by the law and the prophets,
the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ
for all who believe.
This passage in Romans is critical to the Christian understanding of “righteousness”. No one can achieve righteousness apart from the grace of God which is given to us solely as gift and not reward for our actions. But it is also essential that a person create an inner receptivity to grace, a receptivity achieved through the personal exercise of faith, hope, and love – that is, by the works of mercy.
Since the early 16th century, various Christian denominations have been trying to split the hair of this argument which is dubbed “Sola Fide (faith alone)”. The argument asks, “Are we made right with God by faith alone, or by faith demonstrated in good works?”.
Paul and Jesus addressed the question fifteen hundred years before anybody even thought up the Sola Fide conundrum. They did so in direct and simple language so that their listeners could learn and feel confident in their faith life.
The debate around “sola fide” can devolve into theological hair-splitting, an exercise that seems almost like an intellectual game. Contrary to hair-splitting, our faith life is fostered by a theology deeply rooted in spirituality and evidenced in reverent, grateful, and charitable living. Laws can help us with that pursuit but they can’t accomplish it. Only an active, loving faith, responsive to God’s grace, can unlock that door.
Prose: Excerpt from Lumen Fidei (The Light of Faith), the first encyclical of Pope Francis (June 29, 2013)
(This passage and the encyclical as a whole are so beautiful that I hope you will take time to savor the words, even in small doses. I broke it up into small sections because that’s the way I best prayed with it.)
Since faith is a light, it draws us into itself, inviting us to explore ever more fully the horizon which it illumines, all the better to know the object of our love. Christian theology is born of this desire. Clearly, theology is impossible without faith; it is part of the very process of faith, which seeks an ever deeper understanding of God’s self-disclosure culminating in Christ. It follows that theology is more than simply an effort of human reason to analyze and understand, along the lines of the experimental sciences. God cannot be reduced to an object. He is a subject who makes himself known and perceived in an interpersonal relationship. Right faith orients reason to open itself to the light which comes from God, so that reason, guided by love of the truth, can come to a deeper knowledge of God. The great medieval theologians and teachers rightly held that theology, as a science of faith, is a participation in God’s own knowledge of himself. It is not just our discourse about God, but first and foremost the acceptance and the pursuit of a deeper understanding of the word which God speaks to us, the word which God speaks about himself, for he is an eternal dialogue of communion, and he allows us to enter into this dialogue. Theology thus demands the humility to be "touched" by God, admitting its own limitations before the mystery, while striving to investigate, with the discipline proper to reason, the inexhaustible riches of this mystery.
Music: Spirit Seeking Light and Beauty – Janet Erskine Stuart, RSCJ
Lavish Mercy 