Justification

Homily for Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

The reading from the Letter to the Romans that we proclaim today includes a foundational statement of St. Paul’s understanding of the Gospels. He writes: “For there is no distinction; all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God. They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus, …” I hope that we all understand that none of us can escape the guilt that is part of our sin. There is nothing that we can do to erase the effects of sin on our souls.

However, the second part of his statement is that all of us are justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption won for us by Jesus Christ. This too is a very important fact for us to remember. We may think that we can purge ourselves of guilt by acts of charity, time in prayer, or by fasting and abstaining from meat. To be sure, these are all good works, and are esteemed by the Church. However, they do not justify us in the sight of God.

This statement goes against everything that the Pharisees taught and believed. They were of the opinion that they were saved by the Law of the Sinai covenant. They thought that by performing the ritual ablutions before eating, by building memorials to the prophets, and by submitting themselves to circumcision, they would be saved. This was so upsetting to the Pharisees that Saint Luke tells us that this was the point at which the Pharisees and the scholars of the Law began plotting against Jesus.

The Eucharist is our sacrament of reconciliation. By putting our faith in the Eucharist and in the presence of Jesus, our sins are forgiven. There are also two other sacraments by which we can avail ourselves of God’s mercy: the Sacrament of Penance and the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. God freely bestows grace upon us when we received these sacraments with faith in God’s mercy and in God’s only begotten Son.