Fra Angelico, Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven (c. 1430)
The sharp learning curve of the university experience can be a bit harsh, but it also can be a good introduction into how our culture tends to operate. After all, self-reliance and self-motivation are virtues that we value very highly. Whether it’s sports or business or personal growth, most of us tend to believe that nothing is beyond our reach if only we are willing to put in the effort to get there. Even the hardest or highest goals, we tell ourselves, can be reached if you’re willing to put in the blood, sweat, and tears.
Today’s Solemnity of All Saints, at first glance, might indicate that this idea is even true in terms of our eternal salvation. After all, a saint is nothing other than a person who is in heaven, and surely those in heaven had to work hard to get there! Jesus gives us a kind of road map of how salvation can be worked out in today’s Gospel, and it certainly sounds like it must take a lot of effort. Being poor in spirit, merciful, clean of heart, peacemakers, even persecuted for the sake of righteousness – that all sounds like a lot of hard work.
But there’s something inherently wrong with believing that getting to heaven is mostly about our own efforts. In the last few months, Pope Francis has been writing and speaking about how often we operate out of the belief that we can be good and holy without God’s help. That view is actually an old heresy called Pelagianism that the Church condemned long ago but which still crops up all the time. As Pope Francis says, because we are formed in a culture that values self-reliance, individual autonomy, and hard work, we tend to think that our salvation is ultimately something that depends upon us and our own efforts, like making it to class, studying for a test, or eating something other than Ramen.
The problem with this view is that it doesn’t have any place for God. Holiness is not something ultimately about merely trying hard enough, or developing sufficient interior strength to make it happen on our own. Rather, holiness is about receiving what God wants to give us, and ultimately being conformed to Christ. There’s no doubt that holiness does require self-discipline and hard work, at times, to become the saint that God has created us to be. But everything starts with God and what he is doing, rather than with us. The saints are not super-humans who had capacities for self-discipline and moral excellence far beyond our own. They were ordinary men and women who became extraordinary because they got out of God’s way and received what he wanted to give them.
In the first reading today, John the Evangelist describes his vision of seeing “great multitude… from every nation, race, people, and tongue.” This is the apocalyptic vision of the men and women who are in heaven at the end of time. But as John describes, they didn’t get there through their own striving, but rather because they have been made clean through the blood of the Lamb. Blood would seem to be a strange thing to use to make something clean; unless you are talking about sins and washing them away through the blood of Jesus Christ. The saints are not those who tried hard enough but rather those who were washed clean from their sins by the grace of Jesus Christ and through that grace they became like him. They lived out those Beatitudes mentioned in the Gospel not through their own efforts alone but by cooperating with God’s gift and his power working within them.
Friends, we are called to be a part of that “great multitude” that St. John describes. To get to heaven is the highest goal – indeed, the only true goal – that any of us should have. But if we rely merely upon our own blood, sweat, and tears to reach it, we will fall short. Instead we must rely upon the blood of the Lamb – God’s grace given to us in Christ, which we receive especially through the sacraments. Having received it, we then can seek to follow Jesus’s road map of becoming “blessed” and joining that heavenly number.
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