Today’s readings highlight the tension between law and grace. Bringing it a bit more down-to-earth, our readings demonstrate the tension between faith and works. In our Gospel reading, Jesus tells his disciples that he has chosen them and not vice-versa. We make a mistake when we say faith is a choice. We also make a mistake when we reduce faith to mere belief. While faith cannot be compelled, it requires a certain openness and cooperation on our part.
A person of faith is impelled by the love of Christ.1 Faith, like hope and love, which together make-up the theological virtues, is a gift from God. While faith is our response to God’s initiative toward us, it can neither be imposed by God nor earned by us.
Jesus choosing his followers is an act of love. God’s initiative toward us can be summed up in one word: love. “God is love.”2 And because God is love, the divine initiative is nothing other than God’s offer of God’s very self through the person of the Son, Jesus Christ.
By offering himself to us, which he does in a deeply profound way in the Eucharist, Jesus is present in us so, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he can be present through us to others. Isn’t this the point of our reception of Holy Communion? If it is, then it becomes clear that communion is not an end-in-itself. In other words, communion is not a “Jesus n' me” moment. Rather, communion makes us, together, Christ's Body. As a result, it is the ultimate “Jesus and we” experience.
What is the result of being “chosen” by Jesus? We are chosen to “bear fruit that will remain.”3 If hope is the flower of faith, then love- the kind referred by the Greek word agape- is its fruit. Agape is self-sacrificing or selfless love. It is demonstrated by acts that show we put others before ourselves.
There are more ways to lay down your life than to die a martyr’s death. You lay down your life by performing acts of lovingkindness. I think it’s important to note that, while certainly more intimate, the word “friend” in this passage from Saint John’s Gospel refers to much the same thing as “neighbor” in the Synoptic Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke).
Love liberates, it does not enslave or seek to bind with all manner of rules. While faith without works is dead, works without love are also lifeless. Love makes faith fruitful through works.
Our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles comes from a section devoted to the so-called Council of Jerusalem. The reason for this council was to deal with the crisis precipitated by Paul bringing many Gentiles into the Church. What was to be decided was the relationship of non-Jewish converts to the Law.
While, in the end, this council of the primitive Church issued some rules, let's remember that at the core of Jesus’s teaching is the truth that keeping rules cannot save you. Let’s face it, we’re not very good at keeping rules. Sooner or later we chafe under their tyranny and often wind up rebelling. It's a good thing being a Christian has never been a matter of keeping rules.
More problematic than our tendency to push-back against rules is our disposition to forget the reason for the rule. In a healthy sense, rules are a means of achieving ends. During the pandemic, for example, the reason to follow government-issued restrictions and guidelines is to slow the spread of the virus, to “flatten the curve,” so-to-speak, and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with acute cases of COVID-19. An additional benefit of this is that we can perhaps prevent some people from contracting the virus until after there is a vaccine and/or there are better treatment options.
We can become so focused on the rule that we lose our senses and the end for which the rule was created in the first place. The end of the Law and the rules for living it is to love God with your entire being by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. What Jesus seemed to take issue with most of the time was mistaking the means for the end.
Regarding the rule not to eat meat sacrificed to idols, it becomes clear in Paul’s letters that this is not an absolute prohibition. Sure, a Christian would never sacrifice to an idol, but meat is meat. The apostle’s stipulation was that in eating meat sacrificed to idols you don’t scandalize someone whose faith is weak.4
The result of getting means and ends backward concerning the Law is to allow the Law to make you an enemy of God and a terror to other people. This is exactly what Jesus is getting at in this rebuke of the Pharisees in Matthew’s Gospel:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves5Truly good works are not done out some sense of obligation externally imposed. Rather, good works are motivated by love, by the kind of love Jesus has for us. Because love is the fruit of faith, if we love as Jesus loves, we will bear fruit that remains throughout eternity. Faith works by love.6
1 2 Corinthians 5:14.↩
2 1 John 4:8.16.↩
3 John 15:16.↩
4 1 Corinthians 8:7-13.↩
5 Matthew 23:15 RSV.↩
6 Galatians 5:6.↩
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