Word to the Wise
Friday, October 9, 2020 - Friday in the 27th Week in Ordinary Time
[Gal 3:7-14 and Luke 11:15-26]And that no one is justified before God by the law is clear, for the one who is righteous by faith will live. But the law does not depend on faith; rather, the one who does these things will live by them. Christ ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us......[Galatians]
OCTOBER 9 ST. LOUIS BERTRAND, OP
In recent public dialogue, one often hears the expression: "Words matter!" In a faith where the words of scripture "matter" in a very significant way, one phrase can be the cause of considerable challenge. The line, for the one who is righteous by faith will live, comes from a post-exilic prophet named Habakkuk (2:4), but it found its way into St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans and then into the mind of a spiritually tortured Augustinian friar in the 16th century named Martin Luther!!! St. Paul repeats it in his Epistle to the Galatians as we see above.
In the case of St. Paul, he was bluntly telling the Galatians that mere performance of the observances of the Mosaic Law would not be sufficient to save them. It would be faith in Christ that would save them. There were Christian preachers who were converts from Judaism but who also insisted that Christian faith was simply a Jewish recognition of Jesus as the messiah, which meant that Jewish identity (and observance of the Mosaic Law) was essential to Christian faith. St. Paul had been a zealous Pharisee and his conversion led him to reject the Mosaic Law as an instrument of salvation.
In the case of Martin Luther, his scrupulous nature made him despair of observing all that Catholicism required and when he heard that an "indulgence" could "save" someone, he rebelled because he found solace only in the fact that he had faith and that this alone would save him. This led to the rejection of much of the sacramental and devotional expression of Catholicism by various elements of the Protestant Reformation. Faith alone, as found in the Bible, without any human traditions added, would save.
The sacraments and devotional life of Catholicism are intended to be expressions of our faith, not substitutes for it. Mere performance of a rite on a person who is not properly disposed to receive it is ineffective. St. Paul made the same point about the Mosaic Law. Performance without faith is empty. We Catholics with so many customs and rituals can develop our own kind of Pharisaism and we need to be careful about insisting on certain non-sacramental observances as essential to our faith. Faith comes first. Devotion is how we express it. AMEN