Twenty Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 14, 2024 Column Father De Celles News
Fr. Sabas Banshirahe, a priest of the Diocese of Kigoma in Tanzania, will be preaching at all the Masses in his Missionary Appeal. Since I don’t get to preach, I thought I’d use this column to share some of my thoughts on today’s readings.
“Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am?” In a way, this question of Jesus is perhaps the most important question any man can ask himself: “Who do I say Jesus is?” And St. Peter gives the most important answer any man can give: “You are the Christ,” the Messiah, the Savior, the Lord.
This is the answer every Christian must give, the Christian’s fundamental profession of Faith. If we don’t believe this, the rest of the Gospel is useless, meaningless. But because we believe that Jesus is the Christ, all the other things he said make sense, and we can believe in them and be open to the grace and the life they offer.
Faith in Jesus as the Christ—as the Redeemer, Messiah, Son of God— is the key to our salvation.
But is faith all we need? Some of our protestant brothers and sisters, especially evangelicals, think so, believing that we are “saved by faith alone”: “Sola Fide.”
Now, not all Protestants accept this doctrine nowadays. But the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther thought this way, and his many of his modern-day disciples still believe that there is nothing we can do to be saved, that Jesus did it all for us on the cross. So we can do nothing but believe in what Jesus does for us, and that belief will save us.
It doesn’t matter what else you do: if you do or don’t sin, do or do not obey the commandments, do or don’t receive the sacraments, do or do not you love your neighbor. As long as you believe in Jesus. As Luther wrote: “sin boldly, but believe more boldly.”
Now, Luther didn’t just make this notion of salvation by faith alone out of thin air. He based it on several statements made by St. Paul, and by Jesus himself. For example, St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans: “a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” And Jesus says: “he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” And if you were to take these kinds of statements on their own, they might seem to affirm that faith is the only thing that matters.
And Luther was not the first one to fall into this false understanding of faith. Some of the early Christians were also tempted to make this same mistake. And so St. James wrote to correct this error. As we read in today’s 2nd reading from St. James: “What good is it…if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? …faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
And as St. James goes on to say just a few verses later: “Even the demons believe–and shudder….You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”
St. Paul also acknowledged that our works are essential to our salvation. As he went on to write the Romans: “On the one hand, to those who persist in good work, …he will give eternal life. But for those who …reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger.”
But most importantly Jesus himself taught this. For example, when the rich young man asks him, “Teacher, what
…must I do, to have eternal life?” Jesus told him : “If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” Not “just believe” but “do this.”
Elsewhere Jesus tells us we must also do good works: “I was hungry and you gave me no food, ….And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
And in today’s gospel Jesus tells us: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
And Consider how Jesus also gives us the sacraments which he tells us we must partake in, not just have faith in. “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
Think of all that: that’s a lot we have to do to be saved, regardless of our faith.
Some Protestants who follow “sola fide” say that doing good works as simply being proof of our faith: “if someone believes, naturally they’ll do good things, if they say they believe but don’t do good things, they never really believed in the first place.”
But if that’s true why did the faith filled St. Paul write that he was afraid of losing his salvation by not doing what he should? “…I do not run aimlessly…but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”
Faith is the key to salvation, but it is not all there is to salvation. The key of faith opens the door to all that we need to know and to do to be saved.
In today’s Gospel from St. Luke Peter is the first to declare the Church’s faith in Christ. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, the evangelist points out that Jesus told Peter that this insight has come from directly from God, his Father. But later on when Peter refuses to believe Jesus that must to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die, Jesus says: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Friends, to think as God does, is to believe in Jesus and His Gospel. But the thing is, that Gospel has a content—Jesus taught us what God thinks, and how God wants us to live, and do and love. And to say we believe in Jesus, but reject the content of his teaching, including the things he said we must do to gain eternal life, whether it’s keeping the commandments, loving God and your neighbor, being baptized, receiving the Eucharist as his body and blood, or following the teachings and discipline of Peter and his successors, the Popes, if you reject those, well, as St. James says today: “what good is that?”
I am confident that many of our Protestant brothers and sisters who hold to “faith alone” not only have faith in Jesus Christ but also love Him, keep the Commandments and do many good works. But we must not be confused between the relationship between faith and love, and between believing and doing. Eternal life comes to us not because we believe it will, but because God loves us and allows us to choose to live in his love today and forever.
So let us have faith in Christ and live out the entirety of his teachings. Including the teaching passed on to us by St. James: “faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
Oremus pro invicem, et pro patria. Fr. De Celles