A Homily for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

+ The Apostle Paul never fails to speak clearly. Not only does he speak clearly, he uses rhetoric with great force and strength. Each of his letters are filled with rich theology punched through powerful pastoral language. The epistle of this Holy Mass is a classic example. Vernacular translations, however, cannot capture the full force of his proclamation. The Apostle’s strength, nonetheless, is always delivered knowing the full reality of the situation he is addressing. His epistles fell upon attentive ears because his target was carefully chosen.

Everything within the epistle’s first sentence is enclosed within the repeated concept of the Gospel which he has preached. And it all redounds back to the necessity of the Gospel being preached. All his missionary journeys are undertaken within this fundamental realisation: there can be no salvation without Jesus Christ.

Yet he can’t finish his mission with the baptism of a region alone. The people there need reminding of the Gospel, of its divine origin. This is what he proclaims to us in this epistle. It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which I have preached, which you have accepted, in which you live, which will save you, unlike anything else. Unless, he adds, you have believed in vain. That is to say that unless that we live our faith in charity, it is vain. Faith must always bear fruit and continue to be lived for life according to the strength God gives us.

If the apostle is not clear enough concerning the exclusivity of salvation, how much more so is Our Lord? His own words are stark: “Wide is the gate to destruction, and there are many who go through it, the gate to life is narrow and the path straight, there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13-4) These words suggesting more are damned than saved are not isolated. History, however, is filled with those who deny these clear and revealed truths. Be it from a misguided philosophy about the nature of eternity, or a misunderstanding of God’s mercy. Any denial that hell is substantially populated is to call God a liar.

Stark though such a picture may seem, we have great reason for hope. We have the Church as the arc of our salvation - a role she plays as the body of Christ spread throughout the world. We must live in Christ as a coheir and adoptive son of God. Each one of us, rather than living off ourselves, must allow Christ to live in us (cf. Galatians 2:20). This is the effect of the sacraments. This is what is undermined by each of our personal sins; and which is regained through sacramental confession. As Christ lives in us, our hope for salvation must be complete. To hope merely to scrape through to purgatory is to deny the work of Christ in oneself, claiming in contrast one’s own self-sufficiency.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or even Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, could not live in Him through the sacraments. Does this not cut them off from salvation? No. Even these pagan philosophers who, although having no access to revelation and thereby objective means of grace, appear to have been given an extraordinary grace within the search for the truth. For the truth is Christ. It is thus that they, or rather God, prepared for the Gospel to be preached among the Greeks and thus to the whole world.
That extraordinary grace which was probably granted to these pre-Christian figures is by no means impossible to God today, but without the formative and restorative grace of the sacraments, it can never be presumed.

In a world which does not seek truth, truth is nearly impossible to find unless we are guided to it. There is no substitute, then, for apostolic clarity. +