Seventh Sunday After Pentecost

“Not everyone who saith “Lord, Lord” shall en-ter into the kingdom of heaven; rather he that do-eth the will of my Father, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Beloved, in contrast with the popular religious sentiment of our time, today’s Gospel reading offers to one who truly listens a startling contrast. Is it not more than a little surprising so many people name themselves Christian without actu-ally listening or submitting to the words or teach-ings of Christ? It ought to amaze, and yet does not! The Lord said to His disciples, “Beware of false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing, but in-wardly are as ravening wolves! It is by their fruit that you shall know them: a good tree bears good fruit; an evil tree bears evil fruit.” Not a difficult observation to accept as true! The Church proposes for our acceptance and belief the full content of Christ’s divine revelation. Constituted as we are with a human and there-fore reasoning nature, we may assuredly examine those teachings, but we may also, and with per-fect confidence, accept every thing the Church teaches as true. It has been by a long and slow process – under the inerrant guidance of the Holy Spirit – that the Church has in time come to un-fold the greatest part of the deposit of faith left to her by Jesus Christ. It does not, however, take a well-trained philosopher to understand that the basic criterion of our believing is not that the Chris-tian religion is reasonable and therefore believable – even though it assuredly is both reasonable and believable! Rather, we should know that our belief in what the Church teaches rests on the credibil-ity of God Who has revealed His eternal mysteries to us by means of Jesus Christ, the eternal Word come down from on high, clothed in our flesh, born of the Virgin Mary, once dwelling among us. Since the fundamental criterion of faith is the divinity of Him who has revealed to us, why then are there Christians who say “Lord, Lord,” that is, who lay public claim to being believers in Jesus Christ, yet refuse to believe His teaching, refuse to submit to its moral authority, who even work publicly and privately to overturning even the last vestiges of Christian and Natural law in the civil order? The sobering fact of this manifestly contradict-tory behavior is that Jesus Himself already fore-warned of its very reality: “Beware of false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing!” Thus Jesus Him-self bids us to turn our faces from the lies of this world and be truly converted unto that true free-dom which comes from God alone. Beloved, it is by the interior weakness of our fallen nature that we are drawn, markedly, to-wards the forbidden appeal of sin and that acting upon this weakness in us the Devil will lay his snares all along our path towards salvation. We must know this and we must know ourselves, and thus stand guard against Satan’s pitfalls. In today’s Epistle St. Paul admonishes us that the wages of sin are death. It was through the sin of Adam and Eve that death entered into this world. Constituted in grace, endowed with physical and spiritual immortality, by their deliberate trans-gression of God’s command they lost the life of grace in their souls and were condemned to suffer the pains of hard labor, sickness, and physical death. But because each and everyone of us are descended from the first parents of our common humanity, their personal loss of grace and preter-natural gifts (integrity, immortality, impassibility and knowledge) was also lost to human nature itself and become the common inheritance to everyone born to it: you and me. But in the eternal mercy of God, just as by one man – Adam – sin and death entered this world, so too, by one man – Jesus Christ, the new Adam – life and redemption have been given anew, and that in greater measure than at the first crea-tion. If we are dead to eternal life by sin, it is by the grace of God – that is, by the truth and salva-tion given unto us through the suffering and mer-its of Jesus Christ – that we may be reborn and made alive, anew, unto God. The power of this new life through Christ is, however, not our own doing. We are not Pelagian heretics who believe that by sheer force of personal conviction – grit-ting our teeth in a willed determination – that we can save ourselves by physically avoiding sin. The first grace of conversion is, indeed, sufficient unto the working of our salvation. But it arises from God already dwelling within us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and Who makes of us His holy and living temple, enabling us to do good and avoid evil. Without compromising the very free-dom of will by which He allows us to choose Him, He nonetheless forms us to Himself in a loving and self-dying submission to His will. Born in the waters of baptism and nurtured by the life-giving grace of the other sacraments, we are made, as St. Paul says, “free from sin and become ser-vants unto God, having fruit unto sanctification, and in the end, life everlasting.”
Beloved, it is only by submission to Christ, whole and without reservation, by submission to His commandments, to His Church, to its authen-tic deposit of faith and moral teaching, that we are truly made “Christian.” That is to say, if we heed the commandments of Christ in their pleni-tude, then we will be justified and heard when we cry out in prayer, “Lord, Lord.” To be a Christian is not simply to check that box on some form we might fill out; it is not a cultural nametag worn from birth like a nice shirt to which we give little thought, or the genetic endowment of brown hair or blue eyes. Even less so is it that self-deceived and arrogant claim coupled incongruously to an attitude of mind and will which rewrites all that the Church teaches. (Let us all beware of that wolf coming in sheep’s clothing - for even devout people in our social climate can subtly deceive themselves into justifying their deviating from full Catholic teaching.)
In a word, Beloved, to be a follower of Christ is to be a child of God in true humility: it is to adhere to the Catholic confession of faith without which there is no salvation; to kneel in humble submis-sion to His divine will, to think with the Church – sentire cum Ecclesia – submissive to its authentic teaching with an interior assent of the will, docile to its wisdom and without the least trace of seek-ing to alter it for any reason whatever. And for those who will not submit to Jesus as He is, it is His own warning which rings out sharp and clear across these 20 centuries: “every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire; and it is by their fruits that you shall know them.” Beloved, we must not deceive ourselves, for God knows exactly what is in a man’s heart. Let us remember, in all humility that the wages of sin are eternal death – that is, damnation. God Himself has told us. And de- spite the discomfort this causes to modern man, there is no changing anything which has been given from the mouth of God - for He neither deceives nor can be deceived. Even if the greater part of men whose lives are characterized by immorality or emptiness are so more from weakness than malice, it has no bear-ing on the eternal and penetrating truth of Christ’s saving message: Come, follow me. I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; he who has seen me has seen the Father; the Father and I are one. And to those dead in sin He will also say: Lazarus, come forth; I will set you free. Life – eternal life – arises in us from our pro-found attachment to its source: God. And so Be-loved, as St John says, let us all “be doers of the Word and not hearers only.” Let us turn our hearts to God in love, repentance and prayer. Let us be regular with the Sacraments, love our neighbor and do him good for the love of God. Then when we will say, “Lord, Lord,” the Lord of mercy and tenderness will hear us and bless us, and will give us all that He has ordained unto our salvation. O Virgin Queen of Heaven, whose life was one continuous, willing surrender to the sovereignty of God, be thou our model and guide, our intercessor and mother in this lost world through which we are now passing. Lead us along the path of true repentance, so that we may come, in time, to that true and eternal freedom which you now share with the angels and the saints: to the never-ending possession of God in the glory of the world to come.