In biblical scholarship there is the idea of the lectio difficilior, the more difficult reading. For those people who spend their time worrying about the most authentic manuscripts and textual traditions for the Bible, what this means is that when something is challenging, or scandalous, or somehow embarrassing, it is more likely to be authentic. In other words, if we’re imagining later editors removing things or changing them to fit the times, these are things that they would have changed, but in fact they remain, which suggests that they must be original after all.
Lectionaries have a similar dynamic at times. Sometimes Holy Church leaves us with challenging readings even when it might be easier to change them. Take, for example, the Gospel on Ash Wednesday, which talks about how we should wash our faces and not let anyone know that we are fasting. And there are other times, like today, when the readings seem to force us to deal with certain Protestant challenges.
Perhaps we in the ordinariate are more aware of these than some, but you’d be pretty far removed from mainstream culture to not recognize the prominence of John 3:16—FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD—in evangelical culture. In a similar way, our reading from Ephesians 2, seemingly pitting faith and grace against “works,” touches on the principal disagreement between Catholics and Protestants. A quick read does start to sound very Protestant.
But perhaps we should just remember that these readings are appointed in the Lectionary of the Catholic Church. They are not some Lutheran intervention. Perhaps, indeed, as St. Augustine often says, the challenge of Scripture is for our benefit. Because it poses difficult questions, it forces us to think more deeply about what we ought to think and say.
So let’s look a little more closely at Ephesians 2. What does St. Paul mean when he says we are saved through faith, not through works? The full phrase is “by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.” “Saved” here is in the past tense; it refers not to our final perfection in heaven, but to God’s act of incorporating us into the Son in baptism. We do not baptize ourselves. Yes, we come in faith—but as infant baptism demonstrates, even this is often not fully our own. Baptism is a gift of grace.
What does it mean that it is “through faith”? Of course, faith is the act of trusting God, of placing ourselves in his hand. But here, perhaps, is another meaning: the word pistis in Greek means not just faith in the sense of belief or trust, but faithfulness, integrity, fidelity. And many modern readers of Paul wonder if this is not in fact the primary meaning of his famous phrase “faith in Christ.” Could it not rather mean “the faithfulness of Christ”? We don’t need to settle that debate, but I think here it has real value, because the emphasis is on the graciousness of salvation—in the end, the primary thing is not our faith, but Christ’s own perfect faithfulness. That is the necessary ground for any faith that we have in him.
This salvation is “not because of works, lest anyone boast.” Paul says elsewhere that we can only boast in Christ. The Greek word for “works” here is ergon, which is any kind of work or duty or activity. But it does have that connotation of something dutiful or obligatory. Elsewhere, Paul speaks of the “works of the law,” using that same word ergon, and it seems pretty clear that what he means by that is the variety of ritual and ceremonial practices of Judaism—especially circumcision—that bound members of the Old Covenant. In the next verse, though, he uses a different word. In some translations we see the same word “work,” though in ours it is “workmanship.” “Works”—ergon—cannot save us, yet we are, apparently, God’s “work.” But the word here is different. We aren’t God’s ergon, his work in this sense of his duty or obligation or burden; we are God’s poiema—obviously the source of our words poem and poetry, which is to say God’s work of art—a work that’s done not out of duty or obligation, but out of love, out of delight, out of creative grace.
And all of sudden—for me at least—this supposed division between faith and works just kind of disappears. When Catholics speak about good works, it’s not that we think we can save ourselves on our own—it’s that we know that God always intended us to participate in our own salvation. We are his poems, after all, his workmanship. This is what we say, in our rite, at the end of every Mass, praying that we will do “all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” It’s not a matter of earning something; it’s a matter of growing into the full stature of God’s beautiful purpose for us.
This is, in a way, the message of John 3 as well. Jesus talks about being born again, of receiving a new life by grace. But he also speaks about light and dark. “Light has come into the world,” he says, “but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” The apparent simplicity of John 3:16, of believing in the Son of God, is qualified; Jesus says that, in effect, it is impossible to believe in him, impossible to follow the light, when we are evil. So the way to participate in the salvation he offers is not merely to believe, but to believe so that we can become good, or to become good so that we can believe, or both at the same time. These two aspects never go away in this life. We can do nothing without God’s grace, yet God’s grace never works against our will. That is ultimately the mystery of salvation. It is always both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world because it involves not an escape but God saving us and perfecting us now, in time.
That brings us to back to where we are in Lent. It’s Laetare Sunday, where the introit instructs us, “Rejoice ye with Jerusalem; and be glad for her, all ye that delight in her: exult and sing for joy with her.” How can we rejoice when we are supposed to lament our sins? How can we lament our wretchedness when we are conscious of so great a salvation?
At the start of Lent, we recalled the story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. If Jesus is who we believe he is, we have to say that, through hunger and thirst and temptation, he never stopped participating directly in the beatific vision. He never stopped his ecstatic joy in the communion of the Father and the Holy Spirit. What a strange thing to imagine. Surely that can be a comfort for us as we remember our own pain and darkness. There really is no place that Christ has not been, no place that he will not be, no place that he cannot save, no soul that he cannot redeem. But we do have to open that door, listen to that voice, follow that call. Knowing that God so loved the world—and us, in it—how will we respond?