Do you want to know the key to salvation?
Here it is: trying very, very hard to be very, very good.
Now hold on! Before our Protestant or formerly Protestant readers rightly grab their torches and pitchforks, let me assure you that I do not at all mean that you can “work” or “earn” your way to heaven. As St. Paul repeatedly exhorts in his various letters, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9) The Church affirms and has always held that salvation is an undeserved gift of grace that we can receive only through faith in Jesus Christ (CCC 161).
Nevertheless, trying very hard to be good is necessary for salvation, not because the efforts themselves (apart from grace and faith) can bring salvation about—something finite cannot produce something infinite—but rather, because it is only in trying very hard to be good—and failing—that we discover our need for a savior. To quote C.S. Lewis: “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” It is in trying (very) hard to be good and failing, that we discover not only our sinfulness but our inherent powerlessness to overcome sin—apart from grace. It is in this realization, if we embrace it humbly, that our hearts can be opened to the truth of the Gospel and to saving faith in Jesus Christ.
This pattern is the story of salvation history but it is also the key to our own continual Christian conversion. In the Old Testament, God calls His people to “be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” and He begins to reveal through the Ten Commandments and His various laws and ordinances what this holiness might look like and how his people can approach it. But of course the people of God fail, miserably and repeatedly, to follow even the most basic tenets of the law (as evidenced by the episode with the Golden Calf). In his various discourses on faith and the works of the law, St. Paul helps his readers to come to understand that it was part of the function of the “Old Law” precisely to convict the people of God of their sinfulness and to gently guide them to the realization of their need to for faith. The Catechism summarizes thus:
According to Christian tradition, the [Old] Law is holy, spiritual, and good, yet still imperfect. Like a tutor it shows what must be done, but does not of itself give the strength, the grace of the Spirit, to fulfill it. Because of sin, which it cannot remove, it remains a law of bondage…the Law remains the first stage on the way to the kingdom. It prepares and disposes the chosen people and each Christian for conversion and faith in the Savior God. (CCC 1963)
The old law—the commandments and prescriptions—were given by God to gently shepherd his people back to him and to prepare them for the Messiah. But in a fundamental sense, the law was incomplete. It was there to call them to righteousness, convict them of their sins, and bring them to an understanding of how desperately they needed God’s help. In response to the infidelity of His people, God continually calls them to repentance, renews His covenant, and promises a messiah—the one who will save God’s people from their sins. More than simply the forgiveness of transgressions against the law, God promises a new relationship to the law itself: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people… For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31-34).
As He Himself attests, Christ did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, not by adding more rules and prescriptions, but by reiterating the seemingly impossible call to holiness—“be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48)— and then providing Himself as “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14). Jesus is the answer to the question in the hearts of the people of God who strive after God’s righteousness and yet find themselves weak. Again from the Catechism:
The [New] Law of the Gospel “fulfills,” refines, surpasses, and leads the Old Law to its perfection. In the Beatitudes, the New Law fulfills the divine promises by elevating and orienting them toward the “kingdom of heaven.” It is addressed to those open to accepting this new hope with faith—the poor, the humble, the afflicted, the pure of heart, those persecuted on account of Christ and so marks out the surprising ways of the Kingdom. (CCC 1967)
The good news of the Gospel is addressed to—indeed, it is only received as “good” news by—those who are humble, those who have already come to recognize their sinfulness and their need for a savior. It is these hearts that are ready for the message of the Gospel and the invitation to place their faith in Jesus. And it is to these hearts, in the context of this new faith that Jesus renews and heightens the call to holiness and indeed to “bear fruit befitting repentance” (Matthew 3:8). As St. Paul goes on to say in Ephesians 2: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
Every one of us has been called by God not just to be “good” but to aspire to the heights of holiness, to be perfect as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are perfect, in short, to be saints. To aspire to something less than perfection is just another subtle form of pride, for it is to resist and disobey “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). Paradoxically, it is in trying to be merely “good” (“lukewarm” if you will) that we continue laboring under the conscious or subconscious delusion of our self-sufficiency. If we are only somewhat sinful, and thus we only need to get somewhat better, then perhaps with just a little more effort or discipline we can succeed! This illusion bursts the moment we say “yes Lord!” and try to obey when he asks us to do that which seems impossible—like loving our enemies, giving from our poverty, or walking to meet him on the stormy sea. Like St. Peter, we may only be able to manage to leap out of the boat and take a few steps on the water before, seeing the wind and waves, we take our eyes off of Jesus and begin to sink! However, the Lord is always at our side the moment we cry for help and like St. Peter, it is in this obedient trying, falling, and humbly repenting that faith grows.
Salvation is a free gift of grace that we receive by putting our faith in Jesus, but as St. James, reminds us, “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26). This is so, certainly, because a faith that does not act in obedience to Christ is not faith but a farce, but also because a faith that is not tested and tried in action is a faith that remains half- hearted, not fully convinced of just how much it needs God’s grace and mercy. Do you want your faith in Jesus to grow? Try very hard to be good today—nay, to be perfect, to be a saint! Why? Because Jesus has bidden you to do so, and it is in trying (and failing) that you’ll discover how much in need of His grace you truly are.
