Faith and Works

 A reflection given at Morning Worship for the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 17th November 2020

If you are accused before a judge of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

In today’s reading (James 2:14-26), James tells us we cannot claim to have faith if we cannot show works. ‘Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’, he says. The works he is talking about here are good works, works of charity to help fellow human beings in distress, such as clothing the naked or feeding the hungry. This is the same message that Jesus taught in the ‘Sermon on the Mount’. He told his followers, ‘You are the light of the world … let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven’.  

Disciples of Jesus ought to be able to their good works as evidence that they are Christians. But are good works enough to prove the case?

On judgement day a brutal tyrant may try to persuade a judge that his good works outweigh the oppression and suffering he has caused. Are you and I so different? All of us have fallen short of God’s standards, we all have probably contrived to keep our shameful acts secret. We may try to claim that our good works, done for all to see, are sufficient to prove that we are good Christians. But no one can bargain with God. God sees right through our pitiful excuses for the bad things we have done.

St Paul understands very well that good works are not sufficient to justify the bad. In his Epistle to the Romans (Romans 3:21-30), he argues that we are justified through faith, not through works. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, he says. But God is righteous, God is good. By God’s grace freely given, those who believe in Jesus Christ can be redeemed through Jesus’s self-sacrifice. God will forgive our bad deeds if we change our lives, and we can be reconciled to God.

So for Paul, it is faith that comes first, not good works. People have sometimes seen this as contradicting James view. ‘Sola fide’, faith alone, was the catch phrase of the Lutheran reformation. But this is a false opposition. Luther himself, in his ‘Introduction to Romans’, said ‘A living, creative, active and powerful thing, (is) this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever...Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire!’

The fact is, evidence of good works is not enough to convict anyone of being Christian, but an absence of good works – and bad deeds - is evidence someone is not. After all, speaking of false prophets, Jesus tells us, ‘You will know them by their fruits’.

And what of those who do not claim to be Christian, but who we can see do good works? We should give thanks to God for them, I think, and consider them people of good will with whom we are happy to work. And we should leave judgement to God.

 

Wesley Day

Reflection given at a Community of Brendan the Navigator evening service to commemorate Wesley Day on Tuesday 26 May 2020

This evening we join with our Methodist brothers and sisters in Christ in commemorating John Wesley’s heart-warming and life-changing experience in Aldersgate, London on 24^th May 1738. So, what exactly did John Wesley experience?

John wrote this in his diary that very night:

“In the afternoon I was asked to go to St. Paul’s. The anthem was, ‘out of the depths have I called unto Thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice.’ - words from Psalm 130, which we have just heard - John continues:

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans.”

He would have heard these words of Luther.

“To fulfil the law is to do with willingness and love for the works which the law requires.

Such willingness is bestowed upon us by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ.

But the Spirit is not given except through the word of God which preaches Christ.

As Paul said: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine

heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

So faith makes righteous for it brings the spirit through the merits of Christ.

And the Spirit makes the heart free and willing as the law requires; and then good works proceed of themselves from faith.

Grace is the good will or favour of God toward us which moved him to share Christ and the Holy Spirit with us.

Therefore, when we believe in Christ, we have the beginning of the Spirit in us.

Faith is a divine work in us, which transforms us, begets us anew from God, bringing with it the Holy Spirit.

O this faith is a living, busy, active, powerful thing!

Such confidence and personal knowledge of divine grace makes its possessor joyful, bold, and full of warm affection toward God and all created things;

All of which the Holy Spirit works in us through faith. Pray God that he may work this faith in you.”

These words had a profound effect on John, as they may also have on us - his diary entry continues:

“About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death… I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart.”

As well as John’s experience, we also commemorate this evening his brother Charles Wesley’s own conversion experience, just three days before, which inspired him to write over 6,000 hymns, many of which we still love to sing today.

What does the experience and life’s work of these two brothers mean for us today in 2020?

We see in them examples of the Holy Spirit at work in the lives of human beings very much like you and me, if gifted in ways that almost all of us are not. Their smouldering faith was kindled into a fire that led them, with others, to evangelise Britain, Ireland, and America. They brought multitudes of men and women, who felt alienated from the established church, to follow Jesus and consciously seek holiness of life. They themselves remained Anglicans, but after their deaths the hardness of other hearts led to the sad separation of the Anglican and Methodist traditions.

So it is wonderful today to be able to celebrate the Covenant relationship between the Methodist Church in Ireland and the Church of Ireland. Through this Covenant both churches mutually acknowledge a common faith and each other’s ordained ministries. And both churches commit themselves to share a common life and mission, and grow together so that unity may be visibly realised.

The Banquet and the Naughty Step

1. We all love a good wedding, don’t we!

It’s lovely to be able to join the bride and groom, and their families, to rejoice in their love for each other and to wish them joy in their new life together. It’s so much fun to join in their celebration feast and raise a glass to toast them. And it’s so rewarding to meet and get to know the other half of their family. I never turn down a wedding invitation if I can help it!

In today’s gospel reading Matthew (22:1-14) records Jesus comparing the kingdom of heaven to a sumptuous wedding reception prepared by a king for his son. But the guests the king planned to invite would not come! They were asked twice, but they ignored the invitation: some went on working on their farms and in their businesses; others went so far as to mistreat and even kill the king’s messengers. The king, quite reasonably, was enraged. He sent his army to destroy the murderers and their city. He declared those who had been invited unworthy of the celebration, and sent his servants out into the streets to gather all the people they could find, good and bad, to fill the wedding hall and feast in their place.

This is a parable, and parables used by Jesus always have multiple meanings: one will be the meaning understood by the people who first heard it; and there will also be at least one, probably many, deeper spiritual meanings, revealed by reflection to Christians over the ages and ourselves. Let us tease out some of these meanings.

2. This is one of several parables that Jesus addresses to the chief priests and the elders of the people – in other words the Jewish elite of the time.

They understood his meaning very well: he was talking about them, they were the rude and unworthy guests. He was saying that they had ignored God’s invitation to the wedding banquet made first through the prophets, and later by John the Baptist and himself. Jesus was promising the people that they, not the elite, would enjoy the kingdom of heaven. The elite wanted to arrest him to shut him up, but they were afraid of the crowds who followed him, we are told.

The early Christians interpreted it this way too, including Matthew who was writing probably half a century later between AD80 and 90. For them of course the king’s son was Jesus, God’s own Son. And they saw themselves, by now primarily a gentile church, as the people chosen by God to replace the bad Jewish elite at the banquet, in the kingdom of heaven. By this time Jerusalem and the 2nd temple had been destroyed by the Romans following the Jewish revolt around AD70. Did Matthew, with hind-sight, add the passage about the king’s troops destroying the murderers and burning their city, in order to turn Jesus’s parable into a prophecy? Perhaps, or perhaps not; for Jesus elsewhere is recorded using strong violent images in his teaching to ram his point home.

But what is certain, shamefully certain, is that later on Christians identified not the Jewish elite but all Jews, as a race and as a religious community, as the unworthy, the Christ-killers. In a sermon on this parable, the great reformer Luther could say that this is why ‘there is not now a poorer, a more miserable and forsaken people on the earth than the Jews. Such is the end of the despisers of God’s Word.’ Mainstream churches no longer preach this, but some fundamentalists do. It is one of the roots of the anti-Semitism that led to the horror of the Holocaust. It is a false and wicked doctrine I believe – we must always test our interpretation of scripture against the fruits it yields. This one has yielded very bad fruit.

Rather, I think, we should see the parable as good news, good news for each and every one of us. The OT prophets had imagined God as a stern judge loving only the righteous, with a special relationship with the children of Israel. Here Jesus reveals a different image of God to us, a king like a loving Father who invites every passer by on the street to join him in a heavenly kingdom as joyful as any wedding feast - Jew and gentile, Irish and immigrant, settled and traveller, black and white, banker and labourer. We do not even have to be particularly righteous, for both good and bad are invited to fill the wedding hall. We are all invited to rejoice with him: as Christians we are to be joyful, not gloomy and depressed! All we must do is to respond to the invitation, not behave like rude, unworthy guests!

3. But I have missed out the second half of the parable. What are we to make of the man without a wedding robe thrown into the outer darkness?

The first half of the parable teaches us that by God’s grace the door to the kingdom is open to all of us. Christians have traditionally seen the second half as teaching us that with that grace comes a responsibility to amend our lives. We all know that we are by nature sinful creatures. To share in the banquet the stains of our sins must be washed from our garments through our true repentance and God’s forgiveness. The man without a wedding robe could make no answer when God challenged him: he could not repent, so he was bound hand and foot, removed from the banquet, and cast into the outer darkness.

Some people have seen the outer darkness as a terrible thing, nothing less than eternal damnation, forever cut off from the joyful kingdom. But I can’t agree. That would not be the act of a loving Father. And the king starts by calling the man ‘Friend’, after all. I prefer to see the outer darkness as the ‘naughty step’.

Do you know about the naughty step? All parents do! When our children behave badly we tell them they must go and sit on the naughty step, or go to their room, until they are ready to say sorry and really mean it. It can be very difficult for a parent to bear the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but this is the way a loving parent teaches children how to behave. When the children feel properly sorry we give them a kiss and let them rejoin the family.

In just this way, I think, God uses the outer darkness to teach us the self-discipline to recognise when we have done wrong and to repent. When we have finished wailing and gnashing our teeth, when we are truly contrite, he will forgive us, and he will allow us to return to the joy of the banquet.

4. So to conclude

• Let us give thanks for the grace of God revealed by Jesus in this parable.
• Let us joyfully accept God’s invitation to the wedding banquet of the kingdom of heaven.
• And let us trust in God’s Fatherly goodness as he teaches us how we are to behave there!