The Magnificat, August 2020
Dear St. Mary's Church and friends,
Do Christians have to do good things? The place of good works in the life of a Christian has long been an interesting, pressing question for the Church. It’s a question that has divided Christians, so my interest in the unity of the Church draws me to it. But it’s also just important for those of us sitting in the pew trying to figure out what it means to follow Jesus. Do I have to go to Church? If I don’t, am I putting my relationship with Jesus at risk? What about prayer at home? Does it have to be every day? Do I have to give away my money? To whom? Is giving to the Church enough, or should I also give to the Red Cross and the food bank and the man on the corner asking for help? What about those times I fail?
On the one hand, there’s the deathbed conversion. Or there’s Jesus showing mercy to prostitutes, tax collectors, women caught in adultery, generically labeled “sinners,” and people folks didn’t even know what they did but they must have done something to be in such a mess. Jesus draws near to people, without waiting for them to put things in order. On the other hand, there is the problem of the hypocrite. It can be really disheartening when we struggle to see any real transformation in people who are called Christians. If having Jesus makes a difference in a person, then the sins of Christians are a standing testimony against their Lord. It’s not enough to say, “Well, we’re all sinners, and we’re always going to be sinners.” The Lord intends for us to be holy. Is the Lord not mighty to save? Is there in fact something too wonderful for him? If we aren’t clear that Jesus is capable of sanctifying a sinner, we end up proclaiming to the world a poor, little Jesus, sitting in heaven and wringing his hands, wishing he could do something about our big, bad sins, but they’re just too much for him to handle.
If sinful Christians are one of the best arguments against Christianity, then the Saints are the best argument in its favor. It’s happened time after time that Jesus steps into a broken person’s life and puts them back together. It’s true that if a person thinks that sin is, for them, a thing of the past, then that person is seriously confused. As the light of Christ shines ever more brightly in our lives and destroys the darkness of our sins, that same light exposes the sin that is still there all the more clearly. So as we grow in holiness, there may be less sin, but the sin we still have feels heavier, even while we also feel more confidently and clearly that Jesus is the One carrying it.
However, anything good that we do, if there is truly any goodness in it, is the Lord working in us. Remember, Jesus isn’t just really, really good. He doesn’t measure really high on some external standard of goodness. He is Goodness Himself. He is the standard. Anything can only be good insofar as it shares in his infinite Goodness. So if there’s any virtue in something I do, it can only ever be because the Lord pours his own goodness into my otherwise useless acts. If I help someone, if I serve my Church, if I give to a good cause—the worthwhile things I do can only come as a gift from the Lord to me. If he took his hands away, even for a moment, I would fall flat on my face. There is no room for pride in the Christian life. A life that is truly Christian can only be humbly received.
This is part of what makes things so complicated. For one, our efforts to be good might themselves be a way of avoiding letting Jesus make us good. But also it might just be our failures that finally crack us open and bring us to realize how desperately we need the Lord to step in. One of the dangers is that we will do well but think it’s something we put together out of our own resources, rather than something the Lord summoned from us by his gracious Word. We might imagine that someone out there is greatly indebted to us for all those selfless moments of ours. We might imagine that we were slighted if we didn’t get the recognition we thought we deserved. We might be tempted to think, Wow, Jesus is pretty lucky he found a swell person like me, otherwise this Church would be in real trouble.
To the extent those temptations are lurking in our hearts here at St. Mary’s Church, may they die on Jesus’s cross. May the humility of our offering be made abundantly clear to us by the perfect offering of Christ crucified. The Lord’s works infinitely exceed our own. Our efforts can only be worthwhile if Jesus has mercifully drawn us up into his mighty acts. Think about that. That’s true about his work on behalf of your spouse, your kids, your neighborhood, your Church, your workplace. He has loved and cared and sacrificed for the people and places around us beyond what we can even imagine. They are his, not ours. He bought them with his own blood. That should burn away every drop of pride from us. Then we might be ready to accept Jesus’s incredibly generous offer to let us join him and play even a part in the wonderful things he’s doing.
Yours in the Lord,
Stephen+
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