Thanks to the Lutheran Reformation, the passage we heard just now from the epistle of St. James has been tied closely to a long debate about faith and works. Luther’s “faith alone” emphasis found James very difficult—he didn’t deny its canonicity, but he called it an “epistle of straw” and suggested that it take a back seat to St. Paul.
The problem is that the view of James is very much the view we see expressed by Jesus in the Gospels. Take, as a prime example, the repeated condemnations of hypocrisy among the scribes and Pharisees. And today, of course, in addition to Mark’s version of Peter’s confession, we get this reminder that following Jesus has a cost. I don’t think it can be any clearer: in the Gospel story, Peter attempts to separate the matter of faith in who Jesus is from its practical implications in the world. Jesus rebukes him in the strongest terms. If Jesus is who he says he is, if faith in him is important, this faith must have a concrete form in this world. As James says, faith without works is dead.
But what does James mean by “works”? Again, centuries of misunderstanding can easily get in the way here. I grew up as a Baptist hearing that Catholics believed in “salvation through works,” which, we were told, meant that Catholics thought they could save themselves apart from God. (I hope you know that’s not actually what Catholics believe.)
The Reformation legacy is, in part, an antisemitic legacy: in the sixteenth century, Luther and others read St. Paul’s critique of Jewish “works” in the light of late medieval corruptions in Catholic practice. And so for generations, first-century Judaism was interpreted in the light of sixteenth-century corrupt Catholicism, which is a distortion of both first-century Judaism and sixteenth-century Catholicism. Unless you’re going around saying that you have to be circumcised to be saved, you’re simply not guilty of what St. Paul worries about in the New Testament regarding “works.” For him, the problem isn’t “work” itself, as if human beings can exist without action. The problem is meaningless works, works of the law, like dietary restrictions or circumcision, whose meaning simply no longer applies in Christ’s new economy of grace. Even for him, those things aren’t bad in themselves; they were deeply important for the history of Israel, and they served to show God’s people as unique in the world. But now that Christ has been crucified and raised from the dead as God’s new Israel, the covenant has been transformed—the work that we have to do is to unite ourselves to Christ rather than uniting ourselves to a people defined solely by the Law of Moses.
So it is a serious mistake to pit James against Paul. Paul would agree: faith without works is dead. This is to say, we are not merely intellectual beings. If we do not act in accordance with our belief, our belief is not true belief. It’s not that God has some cosmic to-do list that will let us into heaven; rather, God wants his life to transform us fully. Heaven isn’t just for the part of us that believes in propositions; it is for our whole being.
The life of grace—the life of the sacraments and the growth in virtue commended to us by Holy Church—is, through and through, a gift. Yes, it is work. And it is a gift. It is both. Like all life.
This idea shows up all over the place in the liturgy. In our own post-communion thanksgiving at every Mass, we pray that we will do “all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” What are these works? They are the good actions that the Lord has prepared for us for the purpose of keeping us in fellowship with him and his Church.
Likewise, the orations in this season of the year repeatedly touch on the idea that we cannot accomplish anything significant without the help of God’s grace. Last week’s collect suggested that without aid, man’s “frailty” will cause him to slide backward into sin and darkness. Today, we pray for God’s help again because the Church “cannot continue in safety without thy succor.” Next week we’ll pray that “grace may always precede and follow us” and “make us continually to be given to all good works.”
The Catholic tradition does not believe that we save ourselves by our own work, or that we are capable of salvation without grace. But we do believe that God does not wish to save us without us—his is not a coercive, oppressive salvation, but a salvation that leads to true freedom. So the tradition speaks here of “things profitable for our salvation.”
That’s a funny term that may bring us back to Luther’s anxiety about works, suggesting that we’re doomed if we can’t get the cosmic balance sheet right. But what is “profit” if not getting more out of something than what you put in? It’s an encouraging concept, really, because, unlike in the modern economy, “profit” in spiritual terms is a guarantee. In one of my favorite lines from the great fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, the protagonist laments that he has wasted time and misspent time, but then he proclaims that if God will give him a “gobbet of his grace,” he shall “begin a time / that all times of my time to profit shall turn.”
We will get more out of it than we put in; it’s impossible not to, because what we put in is merely human, but what we get is divine. What we put in is human trust, faithfulness, and effort, but what we get is not what we deserve, but what God gives out of his abundant goodness: himself, and the life of eternity. In what job would you get a paycheck just for going and telling your boss what you did wrong? In what worldly context would you gain permanent security simply for eating a meal? And if these are the ordinary means of grace, shouldn’t we give that much more, hoping for an even greater return?
“Work” isn’t the same for everyone. Some of us are more drawn to spiritual work, some to corporal work, some to the works of personal discipline and penance, some to the plain daily work of changing diapers and feeding hungry children. But all of these things can be profitable for our salvation. They all matter. They are all chances for our human frailty to fall—but they are also chances for the Lord to meet us in our work and give us some small glimpse of his glory.