(Given at the 5:30 pm Sunday youth Mass at OLP)
There were times in high school where it was difficult to explain my faith to my friends. Maybe some of you, especially our young people here, can relate. And there were areas where it’s like, if only I knew then, what I know now. Especially when it came to the idea of faith and works, and how that all fits together. Well, our readings today can help with this. But before we dive in, it’s worth noting that the Church never uses the term “Faith and works” as a phrase in any of her official documents. Not in the Catechism nor even in the documents from the Ecumenical Council of Trent responding to the Protestant Reformation. We should keep this in mind when talking to non-Catholics. Anyway, starting with the second reading from St. Paul, he says, “This saying is trustworthy: If we have died with [Jesus] we shall also live with him; if we persevere we shall also reign with him. But if we deny him he will deny us. If we are unfaithful he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.” This is a succinct overview of the Catholic understanding of salvation in one’s life. St. Paul says elsewhere that to die with Christ is to be baptized. Just as Christ entered the tomb, so we enter the waters of baptism. We are baptized into Christ’s death. We leave the waters of baptism anew, born again, just as Naaman did in our first reading. His leprosy was cleansed through the waters of the Jordan, our spiritual leprosy, sin, is cleansed through the waters of baptism. Thus, we live with Christ from baptism and concurrently have received that saving faith as a sheer gift from God. We have initial justification. Then Paul says, if we persevere we shall also reign with him. If we persevere throughout life in the grace we received at baptism, and don’t lose it through deadly sin, then we will reign with Christ in heaven. Paul continues, but if we deny him, he will deny us. This is essentially what we are doing when we sin mortally or deadly as St. John indicates in his first letter. Actions speak louder than words, and if we turn away from God in such a way, losing his grace within us, he will honor that choice. He is true to his promises and one of those promises is to not interfere with our free will. He won’t ever force us to love him or to stay with him if we don’t want to. This is where good works come into play. They flow from our saving faith and help us to persevere and grow in God’s grace. We can’t just sit back and do nothing once we are saved. We can’t just intellectually believe and that’s it. We have to act, like the Samaritan leper who was cleansed in our gospel passage. As St. Paul says elsewhere, we are saved by faith working through love. There is much more I could say on this topic, but suffice it to say that we Catholics believe that we are saved by faith alone IF, as Pope Benedict and the Council of Trent stated, it means the faith that is working through love, i.e. good works. We don’t regularly use the term faith alone because it can be so misleading and it’s not actually in scripture except in James where he says one is not saved by faith alone, meaning simply mere belief We don’t believe we can earn salvation or get into heaven. We can’t do anything of the sort without God’s Grace. As Jesus says so matter of fact in John’s gospel: without me you can do nothing.