Justification by Faith & Good Works Afterward by The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
Posted on
March 15, 2015, Trinity Church Hartford
Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year B
Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21
Now don’t panic. This morning I want to do a little theology with you. It won’t take long and it won’t hurt much so please don’t space out or let your eyes immediately glaze over or start thinking about what’s for lunch. From time to time a little theology can be a good thing if it reminds us of some core beliefs of our faith, helps to clarify what we believe, and leads to some contemporary application and perhaps even some revisions in those core beliefs. Lent is a time for self-reflection and a little theology might help that process. So here goes.
One of the hardest and most challenging parts of traditional Christian theology, at least for many of us, is the claim that given the universal, sinful nature of human beings, no human action or work, or even a whole lifetime of them, is ever sufficient to earn or merit our salvation, salvation meaning living fully and fulfillingly in the loving arms of God. If salvation does come to us, it comes solely through the action of God, through God’s sheer grace and mercy, not through human worthiness. Now much of traditional theology has insisted that no human deed, no matter how good it is in human eyes or how well-intentioned it might be, can ever be good enough to allow us to achieve or be worthy of our own salvation. As Paul clearly says in the epistle this morning: For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast.
This Pauline claim lies at the very foundation of the Protestant Reformation from which we in the Episcopal or Anglican tradition are directly descended. When Martin Luther rebelled against much of Roman Catholic theology in the 16th century, it was a rebellion against the view that human beings could perform enough good deeds, among which were prayer, saying the rosary, obeying the priests, participating in the sacraments, venerating saints and their relics, dispensing charity to the poor, or enriching the coffers of the church, so that they could earn or merit God’s favor. This was known by the reformers as the problem of justification, which comes from the word for justice. If the demands of strict justice in divine-human relations were to be met then it would only be just if God rewarded persons for their meritorious works or damned them for their sins. But no human beings were capable of that degree of merit given their sinful natures (Luther said their depravity or utter corruption). Therefore if salvation was to be attained, and the demands of justice were to be met, God would have to override those demands, and treat sinful humans as if they had attained a state of justice that should be rewarded with salvation. God would have to justify them since they could not justify themselves. And according to reformation theology God did justify at least some persons, (if not all, as Calvin argued in his doctrine of predestination), by a divine act of unearned and unmerited grace. The recipients of that divine grace could do only one thing: acknowledge their justification by a willingness to trust that it had really happened: and this willingness was the act of faith (which Luther even suggested could not sneak in the back door and be counted as a human work. Faith itself was an act of God. This is known theologically as justification by faith alone.
While this theological claim is central to the Protestant tradition it has raised for many people the question of whether works or deeds still matter at all. If they can’t earn us our salvation why do them at all? Do they have any meaning? If they are valueless in God’s eyes how can they have value in human eyes?
Now we all are addicted to or engaged in work or labor of some kind. And we know that it is performed for a variety of reasons. We work to earn the money needed to provide the basic necessities of life: clothing, food, recreation, and shelter. We also work sometimes for the sheer delight of what we are doing (anyone with a hobby or an exercise routine knows the intrinsic pleasure of that kind of work). Many of us work to benefit others who cannot labor for themselves. And some of us, perhaps all of us to some degree, labor, or get others to labor for us, because we want to acquire as much as we can of the world’s goods, often over and above what is necessary for a healthy and meaningful life. We engage in the work of acquisition and accumulation of goods primarily in order to be honored and esteemed by others or to gain power over them. When carried to an extreme this form of labor is driven by selfishness, the desire to have more and to be more than our neighbors or competitors. In this form of labor we do good works because they allow us to possess more and to receive more praise than lesser expenditures of labor would secure for us. We want to achieve our rewards and be able to claim that they are ours because we earned them by our labor. We want to display publically how important we are by pointing to the luxuries our hard work has gotten for us.
Are we to conclude that all these forms of labor are worthless because they cannot earn us our salvation? The answer, I think, is surely “no”. While not all forms of labor for acquiring the essentials for living a whole and healthy life are pleasant, and when carried to an extreme can even be pernicious, there is often something intrinsically rewarding about working to exercise the faculties that God has given us and in doing so contributing to our own well-being and to the well-being of our families and communities. No one wants to be only a recipient of the labors of others: we want to be able to make our own contributions to our own welfare and when possible to the welfare of others.
What the theology of justification raises for us, however, is the question of the spirit or state of mind with which we perform our labors and good works. Luther and his descendants, including our Puritan forebears here in New England, made it clear that the spirit of work should be the spirit of gratitude or thanksgiving for the salvation they had already received without having earned it by their labor, not the spirit of acquisition or achievement. As full recipients of divine grace and favor, they were to work for the glory of God, to show forth to the world God’s mercy, compassion, and love. They worked not to gain but to give. They knew that we’ve already been given the gift of new life in Jesus Christ. And through that gift we have been freed from the need for self-aggrandizement and self-promotion and, as a result, freed for helping others achieve access to the basic and essential goods that make life joyful, just, fair, and abundant according to the principles of social justice. We have been gifted with the abundance of God’s grace and now we are to share that abundance, including its material aspects, with others.
As Jesus says in this morning’s gospel, “those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God." Notice that the purpose of “doing what is true,” that is, what conforms to God’s intention for the world, is not that we might acquire more excess stuff or standing or success, but rather that we may point beyond ourselves to the true source of all meaningful living, namely God.
In this Lenten season we might make a part of our Lenten meditations thinking about what a difference it would make if we went about our labors in the world understanding them as the means by which we can offer to others what God has already gifted us with, in thanksgiving to God for his forgiveness and unqualified acceptance of us. In that spirit we would have a ready principle by which to evaluate our labor or our deeds: we can ask, without fear, of any deed we contemplate doing: how does this act or work demonstrate the mercy and grace of God, not how does it add to the excess pile of goods and honors we have heaped up for ourselves to show how great and successful we are. True labor is labor for the welfare of others, not for ourselves, precisely because our most essential welfare has already been secured for us by God. And this labor arising out of thanksgiving for our new life in Christ does itself have a kind of intrinsic satisfaction to it as anyone who has genuinely given herself to the care and nurture of others will soon discover. Self-giving labor turns out to be more pleasing to us than the labor aimed at securing more unnecessary acquisitions for ourselves. And the intrinsically satisfying labor of a hobby or a vocation or an avocation also allows us to refresh and recreate ourselves, providing us the resources to give even more amply to the benefit of others.
In short, labor done not to attain salvation but to demonstrate the fruits it has already brought us, is labor that frees us from self-preoccupation and for the benefit of others. If we view all of labor in its various forms as opportunities to show forth the glory of God and for the well-being of others, then we might well find ourselves no longer laboring in agony and fear for our own advancement or putting our own interests ahead of those of others. Instead we will labor joyfully as God’s stewards whose every labor casts glory on the One who has brought us out of the pit of selfishness and into the kingdom of true justice and delight in the fellowship of others. We will then be free from the never-ending race to hoard up the goods of the world. In the spirit of thanksgiving to God we can labor to justly distribute those good things of this world to all God’s people who truly have need and whose own labors are insufficient to provide themselves with the welfare and well-being that God intends for all God’s people. That is the true labor God calls us to; it is labor that, as Jesus says in the Gospel, has come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that all our deeds have been done in God. And it is to that labor that we are called. Thus endeth the theology lesson. You may now resume your normal lives.