Episode 54: Year B – 1st Sunday of Advent
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we start a new Liturgical year, Year B. There are three details that we focus on for this upcoming First Sunday of Advent, each coming from a different reading. The detail from the first reading, taken from Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7, relates to the apologetical topic of the problem of God’s permission of sin. The detail from the second reading, taken from 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, is related. It deals with God’s freedom in distributing the grace of final perseverance. The detail from the Gospel, Mark 13:33-37, relates to knowledge of the day and hour of the final judgment.
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Hey everyone,
Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
In this episode, we start a new Liturgical year, Year B. There are three details that we’re going to focus on for this upcoming First Sunday of Advent, each coming from a different reading: the first reading, taken from Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7, the second reading, taken from 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, and the Gospel reading, taken from Mark 13:33-37. The detail from the first reading relates to the apologetical topic of the problem of God’s permission of sin. The detail from the second reading is related. It deals with God’s freedom in distributing the grace of final perseverance. The Gospel detail relates to knowledge of the day and hour of the final judgment.
Let’s get started with the first reading. I’m only going to read the relevant verses.
Isaiah 63:17 reads, “17 Why do you make us wander, LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we do not fear you?” Then, in 64:6-7, Isaiah laments, “For you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our crimes. 7 Yet, LORD, you are our father; we are the clay and you our potter: we are all the work of your hand.”
There are basically two complaints that Isaiah makes here: 1) he complains that God makes the Israelites wander from his ways and “hardens” their hearts, and 2) he laments that God hides his face from them.
There are a few apologetical topics that these details relate to. One is the problem of divine hiddenness, the problem of God allowing honest inquirers to fall short of arriving at knowledge that he exists. I’m going to pass over this one and simply refer you to my CD set Why Doesn’t God Show His Face? Making Sense of Divine Hiddenness, and the relevant chapters in book Prepare the Way: Overcoming Obstacles to God, the Gospel, and the Church.
The other apologetical topic is God’s causality relative to sin and the hardening of heart. The question here arises, “Does God actually make them sin and harden their hearts?”
Concerning whether God makes them sin, the answer is no. The authors of the Old Testament understood that God is ultimately in control of everything, subjecting everything to his divine providence. Consequently, they ascribe everything to his divine agency. And they do so without making clarifications as to what is subject to his providence by way of permission and what is subject to his providence by way of his direct causality. The sins of the Israelites were permitted by God, but not caused. As to why God cannot cause sin, see my article “God Does Not Cause Us to Sin” at catholic.com.
Now, concerning the “hardness of heart,” as Aquinas explains in his Summa Theologiae (I-II q.79 a.3), it depends on what we mean by “hardness of heart.” If, for example, by “hardness of heart” we mean the human cleaves to evil and turns away from God, we must say God is not the cause of such hardness, just as he is not the cause of sin.
However, if by “hardness of heart” we mean the heart’s lack of softness to be moved to desire and in fact live rightly, which is an effect of a withdrawal of grace, then we may say God causes such “hardness of heart.”
By “withdrawal of grace,” Aquinas means God doesn’t assist the person to avoid sin. When he treats this question in his Summa Contra Gentiles (Bk. 3, Chap. 162), Aquinas identifies two ways in which God may withhold such assistance: either by withholding the infusion of grace, whether habitual (sanctifying) or actual, or by withholding external protections from the occasions of sin.
Of course, this raises the question, “Is God’s withholding of such aids contrary to God’s all-good nature?” In other words, is the concept of an all-good God incompatible with the concept of a God who permits people to fall into sin as opposed to ensuring by his grace that they choose the good?
The answer is no. And the key is seeing why such permission is not contrary to justice. There two paths that we can take here.
The first comes straight from Aquinas. For him, God is not unjust for withholding such aids because God does so on account of some obstacle in man. Aquinas writes, “God, of His own accord, withholds His grace from those in whom He finds an obstacle: so that the cause of grace being withheld is not only the man who raises an obstacle to grace; but God, Who, of His own accord, withholds His grace” (Summa Theologiae I-II, q.79 a.3; emphasis added).
What does Aquinas mean by an “obstacle”? The answer is sin. This becomes clear in his reply to Objection 1, where he writes, “Hardheartedness, as regards the withholding of grace, are punishments.” And act of punishment can only be justly administered if there is a proportionate crime. Since “hardheartedness,” and the withholding of grace that brings it about, is conceived of as “punishment,” it follows that Aquinas conceives of the obstacle in man as sin. He confirms this in unequivocal terms in the next line of the same reply: “It is because he is already worsened by sin that he incurs [hardheartedness], eve as other punishments” (emphasis added).
Now, someone might counter, “Well, Aquinas’s argument here just kicks the can down the road, since the sin in man on account of which God withdraws grace is there in the first place ultimately because God permitted it. God’s permissive will in relation to sin is a sine qua non—that’s to say, that without which the sin would not be. So, the skeptic could argue that God is unjust for permitting this sin, the sin on account of which he withholds aids to help man avoid sin?”
To be honest, I agree with this counter. The question of God’s justice remains. So, what should we say in response?
In our first reading, Isaiah provides his response: “Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you our potter: we are all the work of your hand.” In other words, to question God’s justice for permitting his create rational creatures to be harden in their sin and even to permit them to sin in the first place is unjustified because God is sovereign. He’s the Creator and is free to create whatever order of providence he wants.
My response, similar to Isaiah’s, is that God is not unjust for permitting sin because the grace to preserve man from sin is not owed. Such a grace is precisely that, a grace—a gift that is over and above man’s nature as a rational animal. Since God is not bound to give what is above and beyond what is natural to man, to not give such a grace is thereby not a violation of justice. As Aquinas writes, “In things which are given gratuitously a person can give more or less, just as he pleases (provided he deprives nobody of his due), without any infringement of justice” (Summa Theologiae I:23:4 ad 3). Therefore, there is no conflict between God permitting sin and his goodness and/or justice.
Okay, on to the detail from the second reading, which is taken from 1 Corinthians 1:3-9. Starting with verse 4, Paul writes,
I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, 5 that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge—6 even as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you—7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; 8 ¶ who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 ¶ God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
The detail that I want to highlight for our purposes here is Paul’s statement that God will sustain the Corinthians “to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v.8). This relates to the topic of final perseverance.
There are two related questions: 1) Can a person merit such a gift?, and 2) If a person can’t merit it, is God unjust for not giving it?
To the first question, “Can a person merit such a gift?” If by “merit” we mean de condigno, then the answer is no. Merit de condigno refers to an equivalence or proportion that exists between a good action and the reward such that the reward is due to the good action. No such merit is possible for the grace of final perseverance.
In the first part of the second part of his Summa Theologiae, question 114, article 9, Aquinas explains this is so because the grace of final perseverance is a principle in virtue of which we can merit eternal life—the term of the movement that God causes within us. Since principles don’t fall under the category of what can be merited, but only the term of a movement, Aquinas concludes that the grace of final perseverance can’t be merited de condigno.
However, the grace of final perseverance is said to be merited de congruo. Merit de congruo refers to a reward that is given on account of some good action not because the reward is due to the good action but on account of the generosity of him who rewards.
So, as Aquinas argues in his reply to objection of the same article 9,
We impetrate in prayer things that we do not merit [de condigno], since God hears sinners who beseech the pardon of their sins, which they do not merit, as appears from Augustine on Jo. ix. 31, Now we know that God doth not hear sinners, otherwise it would have been useless for the publican to say: O God, be merciful to me a sinner, Luke 18:13. So too may we impetrate of God in prayer the grace of perseverance either for ourselves or for others, although it does not fall under merit [de condigno].
Now, if the grace of final perseverance is cannot be merited de condigno, then such a grace is pure gift. As Aquinas writes, “God freely bestows the good of perseverance on whomsoever He bestows it.”
This, of course, raises the question, “Is God unjust for not giving such a grace to some?” Like for our answers above, the answer is no. The reason is that such a grace is just that: a grace—a free gift that is over and above our nature. Since God is not bound to give what is over and above our nature as human beings, he’s not required in justice to himself or to us to give us this grace.
But what about the soul that ends up in hell? Wouldn’t that entail that God is unjust?
The answer is no because such a person would end up in hell on account of dying in a state of mortal sin—a definitive rejection of God. Thus, the imposed punishment of hell would be in proportion to that grave offense and thereby just. God’s permission is simply a sine qua non for the sin to be committed—that’s to say, a necessary condition for the sin to even be committed in the first place.
The last detail that we’re going to focus on in this episode comes from the Gospel reading, taken from Mark 13:33-37. The key line is Jesus’ statement, “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.”
This line is apologetically significant for two reasons. First, there have been Christians and there are currently some Christians who claim to know when the final coming will occur. Given our Lord’s teaching here, we know such preachers are false prophets.
Second, the verse right before this line, verse 32, Jesus says, “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
This is a go-to passage for some to try and show that Jesus was ignorant of the timing of his final coming. And if that’s the case, then he isn’t God.
How should we respond?
We don’t have time to give a full response here. So, I’ll just sketch a two-fold response.
First, given that Jesus had two natures—human and divine—he could still be God and not know the timing of the final coming if he lacked such knowledge only in his human intellect. Having a human nature Jesus experienced many limitations that go with being human, like confinement to a particular spatial location, pain, sorrow, etc.
Now, unlike the above response, a second possible response is that Jesus had the knowledge in his human intellect it’s just he didn’t have it there by way of normal human cognition. In other words, he had it in his human intellect but not from his human intellect. It would have been a knowledge that was infused within his human intellect by divine power.
On this view, Jesus could rightly attribute “ignorance” of the day and hour to himself because he wouldn’t have known it as man—that’s to say, he wouldn’t have known it in a way that humans normally know things, i.e., taking in information from our sensory experience, abstracting the essences/forms of things, formulating propositions, and then reasoning to conclusions based on those formed propositions.
So, there’s no need to doubt Jesus’ divinity based on his ascription of ignorance to himself concerning the timing of his final coming.
Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The content of the Gospel reading for this upcoming First Sunday of Advent, Year B, doesn’t sell us short when it comes to apologetical material. It gives us an opportunity to reflect on several topics:
- The problem of evil,
- God’s freedom in granting the grace of final perseverance, and
- Jesus’ knowledge concerning the timing of the day and hour of his final coming.
As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.
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I hope you have a blessed First Sunday of Advent. Enjoy the beginning of Year B for the Liturgical Year. Until next time, God Bless!