“The Tension Between Faith and
Works”
The Reverend Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
The Third Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 6, Year C
2 Samuel
Galatians
2:15-21
Luke 7:
36-8:3
Psalm 32
One of the perennial tensions in the Christian
life is that between faith and works. It was an attempt to resolve that tension
that led Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers in the 16th
century to challenge the prevailing theology of the Roman Catholic Church and,
in the process, to create an unintended schism between Catholicism and
Protestantism that lasts until today.
What is this tension between faith and
works and why should we care about it today?
The tension begins with the fact that we
were created in God’s image and thus are grounded in a special relationship
with God that is not shared by any other part of the created order. As the Psalmist says of the human being, God
made us but a little lower than the angels and we were adorned with glory and
honor. As Eucharistic Prayer C puts it: “You made us the rulers of creation.” With that as our fundamental created nature,
we were expected to act in such a way as to conform our lives to God’s
intention for the fulfillment of the whole creation. Our works were to be a contribution to the
works of God by which God was bringing the created order to completion. But, as the prayer goes on to remind us, “we
turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one
another.” Even after repeated attempts by
God to get us to return to God, we used our God-given powers to continue our
rebellion against the divine purposes by putting our own interests above those
of God and other persons. The moral Law
which was intended to be God’s gift to us by which we could live in conformity
with God’s will turned instead into an instrument by which we oppressed others
and sought to glorify ourselves. We had
become so mired in our own sinful and selfish concerns that we lost the ability
to redeem ourselves. This was the fact
about the human condition on which Luther and the reformers built their
theology of faith. They said, in effect,
we cannot work our own way out of our corrupt condition. The gap between ourselves and God can only be
closed from the other side, by God himself. And the agency of that closure was divine
grace alone: the grace that would
forgive our sins despite the fact that we
had not earned, or merited, the right to demand that God forgive and redeem us.
Our part in this transaction was to
accept God’s grace by faith to appropriate the divine act of grace, that is,
through a willingness to trust that this had happened. What looked like an impossibility: that God
had not held our sins against us but had loved us into salvation regardless of them, had become not only
a possibility but a reality. The only
proviso was that we gratefully accept this act of divine grace as the new
reality of our lives. This is what Paul means
when he says in this morning’s epistle that “a person is justified not by works
of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, because no one will be justified
by the works of the law.” In attempting
to justify ourselves through obedience to the moral law we reveal how
impossible it is for us to do so given our sinfulness. And so Paul can say, somewhat paradoxically,
“through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is
no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” What Paul is saying here is that only if we
become new selves, dead to our old sinful selves, can we live appropriately to and
through God. And this has profound
implications for our works or deeds now.
The dilemma that arises from our new life
in Christ is that, once saved by grace through faith, what do we do with our
capacity for doing good works, the very things that cannot save us? Are works therefore dead? The answer is clearly “no”. Good works are our only or at least most
effective means of helping others in the concrete situations of their lives. We cannot simply passively wish that others
receive justice and liberation from oppression: we have to expend our energies
in doing those actions that will actually relieve injustice and bring an end to
oppression. We do good works not in order to achieve
salvation but rather to show forth our gratitude for the salvation God has already given us through his
unmerited grace.
This then becomes the challenge of the
Christian life today: how to act in such
a way as not to build up merit or fame for ourselves but instead to show forth
the glory and greatness of God in saving us despite ourselves. We are clearly not supposed to sit back in
sublime spiritual satisfaction and luxuriate in the glory of God’s grace while
the travails of the world float by outside our private cocoon. There is still work to be done to fully
manifest the reality of God’s love and justice for the whole created order. All our works, therefore, should point beyond
themselves to the realization of God’s intentions rather than our own. And this fact forces us to seek out what those
divine intentions are which should call forth our works, and the Biblical
witness is quite clear on this point: God’s
intentions for the world and its peoples are justice, liberation from
oppression, peace, reconciliation, compassion, care for the most vulnerable,
and the overcoming of false divisions among people. And these are for people now, in the fullness
of their concrete worldly lives, not simply for their spiritual lives.
There will inevitably be many times when
doing what will further God’s intentions may frustrate our own more narrow
selfish purposes and certainly may offend other people with narrow agendas of
their own. It has not been easy for
people who have been warning us for years about global warming or the crisis in
access to decent health care, a tendency to rush to war, or the genocide in
AMEN
© Copyright 2007 by the Reverend Dr.
Frank G. Kirkpatrick