Usually I like to focus on the Gospel, but I want to focus mostly on that second reading today. We are right in the middle of five weeks of reading the letter of St. James. It is a really great letter, and I encourage you to read it if you have some time later today. It is only five chapters, but it is five power packed chapters.
I don’t believe I should ever ask you to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself, so I read it this morning again and it took me ten minutes to read… so it can easily be done during halftime of today's football game. I don’t advocate speed reading it, but it would be worth any amount of time you could spare. Some of the themes are perseverance, temptation, the power of the tongue, true wisdom, patience, and it is also where we get the core of our teaching on the sacrament of anointing of the sick.
So you can see those are good themes and I believe are highly worth your time. Today’s reading focuses on Faith and Works. It is somewhat of a controversial theme, surprisingly, and not everyone loves the book of James because of this teaching, or maybe their misunderstanding of this teaching.
This letter from James became a point of emphasis during the Protestant Reformations nearly 500 years ago. The beginning of the Reformations started with Martin Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Church on October 31, 1517.
As it was a Thesis, he originally just wanted an academic type debate on some issues he had with the Catholic Church, he was a priest after all, but it quickly became a political battle over power and control across all of Europe. There were some things that needed to be changed in the Church, for sure, but it didn’t have to go as far as it did into a schizm where we now have about 30,000 different Christian denominations.
One of Martin Luther’s big issues in the years that followed was the relationship between Faith and Works which we have highlighted today in this letter from James. In fact, Luther hated that letter, he called it a “letter of straw” and he made an argument to get rid of it and six other New Testament letters, as well as 7 books of the Old Testament.
Thankfully, the other big reformers (such as Calvin and Zwingle), talked Luther into keeping those seven New Testament letters. And I’ll refrain for today from getting into a deeper history of how the other seven books were unjustly removed...
So the idea of Faith and Works was the main idea that Martin Luther did not like. James says in today’s reading, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? ...faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
Luther didn’t like that because he felt that there was no way to know how many works we needed to do to be saved, and he wanted to be absolutely sure of His salvation. He was scrupulous and had extreme anxiety over whether He would be saved or not. In order to give himself assurance, he focused only on the faith aspect and said the works were worthless.
He even went so far as to add a word in Paul’s Letter to the Romans in his new German translation of the Bible; he added the word “alone,” so the verse in Luther’s translation said essentially, “We are saved (justified) by faith alone.”
I don’t know if Protestant bibles retain that added word still to this day, but their theology does and that notion goes completely against the book of James here, a few verses after our reading from today says “See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” (James 2:24)
So this was part of the cause of the Reformations and seven million Catholics separating themselves from the Church, into many other denominations. It was a complicated time, and this wasn’t the only cause -- like I said, it got political. But Luther’s desire to be sure of his salvation causes a lot of problems.
And Protestants will still try to get Catholics like that today, they’ll say, “Are you saved? Do you have confidence in your salvation?” If that is asked to us, how are we to respond? They are looking for a clear answer which sounds like this, “Yes, I am saved, I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Saviour on December 27, 1981.”
In other words, this is the date when they came to faith, they declared their faith before a church congregation somewhere, and most believe that they are saved from that moment forward, they can have complete confidence in their salvation.
But we should know that it is not that easy, and it’s not about how many good works we do either. See, we have been saved at our baptism, the date I gave you was the date of my baptism, so that is fair to say if they push for a date. But we are also being saved, because we have free will, we can choose to separate ourselves from God at any point, either by declaring it or by how we live, the anti-good works also known as sin, we can choose to walk away from God.
See, our relationship with God is a relationship of love, and it’s kinda like a dating relationship. When we are dating, we can’t force our girlfriend to love us, right? That has to be their choice, otherwise it’s like slavery or something worse. And in a dating relationship, we are free to walk away at any point, even if we have said we love them previously, we could walk away in the future, right?
So our relationship with God is like that, except that God is really, really committed to us, loving us unconditionally, so even if we do walk away, He still loves us and will be waiting for us to return to Him.
No analogy for God is perfect, especially when expressing His love for us, but I hope you get the idea, this is a relationship of love that we can walk from, through our actions, our works. So there is no way we can say with absolute certainty that we are saved because we don’t know what we will do in the future.
Each time we turn away from God through sin, we also have to take action and turn back to God for forgiveness, again and again, which as Catholics we do through Reconciliation. Every choice, every action, is a work that demonstrates our faith.
Our response, then, to the question of “Are you saved?” is yes, I have been saved (at baptism), I am being saved (in my faith and good works), and I hope to be saved (at the final Judgment when we meet our loving and merciful God). I have been saved, I am being saved, and I hope to be saved… the simplest answer I’ve found.
So our belief, our faith is good and necessary, but it’s not the only thing. Our reading from James Chapter 2 stops at verse 18, but verse 19 says essentially, “you believe in God, that’s great. But even the demons believe that and tremble.”
Faith, a simple belief, goes a long way, but it is not the end all be all. It matters how we live our life, it matters how we treat others, how we serve others. I truly believe the essential part of this life is learning how to love like God loves, unconditionally, dying to our own desires and loving God and our neighbors even more than we love ourselves. That is done through good works and demonstrations of love.
Could you imagine a marriage in which the spouses told each other they loved one another when they got married but they never did anything to show they loved each other? That would be weird. We are tangible people. We need to hear the words “I love you” and we also need to see that in action. Faith and works.
This is why God gave us Jesus, to show us a new way to live, relate, and love, all the way to the ultimate sacrifice of death on the Cross for us.
I also believe this is why God gives us the sacraments, and each other for that matter, so we can give and receive the love of God in a tangible way. And we have the examples of many saints who have gone before us, Christians who were able to deny themselves and demonstrate heroic acts of love as Jesus did.
Jesus says to the crowd with his disciples in today’s Gospel, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
The great Catholic author Flannery O’Connor said, “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”
When we believe and understand the love of Jesus, we cannot help but do the good work of showing this love to others.