A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION

Fr Jim Cogley

To depend on one’s own goodness and moral stature as the way to salvation sounds perfectly okay. But is this not reliance on self-righteousness? Scripture refutes all forms of self-righteousness as being utterly inadequate. Let’s take a few relevant quotations from the Scriptures like ‘All people have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’. The implication is that even our best efforts fall infinitely short of the mark. Another verse says that ‘all our good deeds are as filthy rags in the sight of God.’ This has to be placed alongside the truth that good deeds are essential and go with us. However, if we are reliant on them to qualify us for entry they are just ‘filthy’ rags. In the Gospels we have the ongoing conflict between Christ and the Pharisees who were the paragons of virtue and the exemplars of what it meant to lead a moral and religious life. Clearly as Saul, later St Paul, the one one-time zealous Pharisee found out, this was not the way either.

As difficult as it may be to hear, holding onto the above beliefs is to have missed out on a core fundamental truth of Christianity. It is to have unconsciously slipped into the widespread belief that Christianity is simply about teachings that encourage us to live good and moral lives. This belief has become so widespread that the true Gospel message is not being heard. Most church going Catholics have been indoctrinated with the belief that to be a good Christian you kept the rules and the rules not only kept you but guaranteed you a place in the next life. Here the question must be asked where does Christ fit into this belief, except as a historical figure who had some nice things to say. Form this standpoint is Christianity anything more than a humanist religion that encourages us to lead good lives and be kind to our fellow creatures.

Throughout Paul’s letters is his contrast between living by the Law and living the life of Grace. This was his great conversion experience, the most astounding revelation of his life. On the road to Damascus, he had to fall from his horse that symbolized his former beliefs; he had to recognize his blindness to the truth, and he had to understand what it meant to be baptized into Christ. Words that characterized his former life as a pharisee would have been effort, struggle, merit, obedience, will-power, self-righteousness. All of these had to go and be replaced by a new spiritual vocabulary with words like surrender, yielding, letting go, grace and Christ-righteousness. The question is which set of words do we find in our own spiritual vocabulary?

Particularly in his letter to the Romans Paul alludes to people being utterly sincere in their religious beliefs and yet being sincerely wrong. He could easily be talking about us today in relation to our Christian belief where a core element seems to be missing to the point of no longer being able to enthuse people in their faith and so they are falling away in vast multitudes. Have we not been espousing more the religion of the Pharisees than the true message of the Gospels? What Paul experienced, does it not need to happen to us, that we fall from the horse of our own making and finally discover in the humility of the earth what the life of grace is all about. There was something radically new and explosive about early Christianity that turned the then known world on its head, and it was not just a group of Christians leading a life of moral virtue and going to mass every Sunday!