What a wonderful message we receive from St Paul today from his letter to the Ephesians in the midst of our Lenten journey. Paul asserts that it is by God’s grace that we are saved, from a freely given gift from God, not by our own efforts. As we accompany Jesus on his 40 days in the desert, in his passion and journey of the cross, we realize that if we had been able to achieve salvation by our own efforts, Jesus would not have endured his passion and the death on the cross to die for our sins.
However, we are called to have an active role in our lives of faith, right? So how does this interact with Paul’s assertions about God’s grace? Indeed, we are to believe that we are saved by Christ through God’s grace, but also, we are to believe what Paul states in the last verse of this passage, that by God’s handiwork, we are created in Christ to perform good works. But performing good works is more than the sum of our individual actions. Our good works must be a way of life for us; it must be a part life of discipleship. Being saved by grace, we are asked to respond to God’s generous gift. We respond through our attitude, our lifestyle, our way of life, and our works of love and charity toward others. Paul asserts that these good works are prepared in advance by God, meaning that they don’t entirely come from our own minds and our own initiative, but rather by cooperating with the Holy Spirit that is working within us. Sometimes, however, we can get wrapped up in our our lives, our work, our family, our little corner of reality. We might believe that we are too busy to do the work God is calling us. Or that it will not make a difference. We are still in the middle of Lent, so we can look at the way we can live out our Lenten disciplines. In addition to the time we devote to prayer and sacrifices during Lent, we are called to action in reaching out to the poor, in visiting the sick and the house bound, in reaching out to those who are hurting or broken or in need.
As a part of our Gospel today, we hear the famous verse John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” I thought of this message in the context of the sacrament of reconciliation, which we have been studying during Lent through the Forgiven series on the Formed website. The session we are looking at this week is entitled: “Answering Common Questions about Confession.” One common question about the sacrament of reconciliation concerns the underlying reason why we have this sacrament, why we cannot just go directly to God himself. We also might ask why God sent his son Jesus to earth in human form as well. Why do we need to receive our salvation through him? Why couldn’t have God performed an act himself, without coming to earth in human form? Couldn’t it have been just a voice coming down from the heavens? Throughout history, God works through human beings. Nicodemus mentions Moses at the beginning of the Gospel. God worked through Moses to lead the people of Israel to the promised land. Jesus himself collaborated with his apostles in his ministry. In fact, many of those Jesus chose to collaborate with were the weak, the fallen, and the vulnerable - those were his apostles - not the rich and the powerful. The apostles went out sent by Jesus, preaching and healing in his name. Any way we look at it, Jesus wasn’t just a one man operation. With Jesus’ model for ministry, collaborating with others, God works through the priests of the Church through the sacrament of reconciliation. The sacrament of reconciliation allows for the penitent to go to the ritual of this sacrament and to speak his words out loud to God’s representative: what a profound experience. So, yes, going to God to confess our sins individual is important. Many people do a nightly examen, looking at our day and at the ways we have sinned and strayed from the faith. However, going to confession with the priest is equally important.
This session of Forgiven opened up with the description of pilgrims arriving at the Basilica in Rome, how at the right of the main altar confessions are heard in languages from all over the world. Whenever I have been on pilgrimage, one of the things I really look forward to is going to confession. When I go on pilgrimage to the Camino of St James in Spain, upon arriving at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, I always go to confession as a part of the rituals of ending my pilgrimage journey. It really would not seem like pilgrimage to me without confession. And I hope that is how all of us approach our journey of faith: to see ourselves as collaborating with God on our faith journey, to see ourselves as disciples of Christ and part of the Body of Christ interacting with the rest of the faithful, to be fully engaged with grace of God that reaches out to us in our daily lives.
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