Today is Ash
Wednesday. We are reminded of our mortality as the ashes are placed on our
foreheads. We are asked by Mother Church to spend 40 days in the desert,
replacing our obsession with comfort and profit with sacrifice and charity. In
part three of Pope Benedict XVI’s Lenten Message, we learn that faith and
charity balance one another and go hand in hand. Charity without Faith is not
Catholic. It is giving bread to feed the hungry without giving them the bread
of Eternal Life, or building homes for the homeless without teaching them about
the heavenly home which awaits them with God. As Catholics, we always bring our
faith into our charity, as the greatest charity we can give anyone, the Pope
points out, is to bring him into the love of God. That is true evangelization.
The Pope reminds us that it is so wonderful to pray and read scripture and
meditate: indeed, it is critical to our spiritual life. But as he so fabulously
points out, if we scale the mountain to meet God, we cannot forget to come back
down!! As Pope Benedict states at the conclusion of section three: Lent invites
us, through the traditional practices of the Christian life, to nourish our
faith by careful and extended listening to the word of God and by receiving the
sacraments, and at the same time to grow in charity and in love for God and neighbor,
not least through the specific practices of fasting, penance and almsgiving.
Ephesians 2:8-10: 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 anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in
them.
3. The
indissoluble interrelation of faith and charity
In light of the above, it is clear that we can never
separate, let alone oppose, faith and charity. These two theological virtues
are intimately linked, and it is misleading to posit a contrast or “dialectic”
between them. On the one hand, it would be too one-sided to place a strong
emphasis on the priority and decisiveness of faith and to undervalue and almost
despise concrete works of charity, reducing them to a vague humanitarianism. On
the other hand, though, it is equally unhelpful to overstate the primacy of
charity and the activity it generates, as if works could take the place of
faith. For a healthy spiritual life, it is necessary to avoid both fideism and
moral activism.
The Christian life consists in continuously scaling the
mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength
drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love. In
sacred Scripture, we see how the zeal of the Apostles to proclaim the Gospel
and awaken people’s faith is closely related to their charitable concern to be
of service to the poor (cf. Acts
6:1-4). In the Church, contemplation and action, symbolized in some way by the
Gospel figures of Mary and Martha, have to coexist and complement each other
(cf. Lk 10:38-42). The
relationship with God must always be the priority, and any true sharing of
goods, in the spirit of the Gospel, must be rooted in faith (cf. General Audience, 25 April 2012).
Sometimes we tend, in fact, to reduce the term “charity “to solidarity or
simply humanitarian aid. It is important, however, to remember that the
greatest work of charity is evangelization, which is the “ministry of the
word”. There is no action more beneficial – and therefore more charitable –
towards one’s neighbor than to break the bread of the word of God, to share
with him the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with
God:
evangelization is
the highest and the most integral promotion of the human person. As the Servant
of God Pope Paul VI wrote in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio, the proclamation of Christ is the first
and principal contributor to development (cf. n. 16). It is the primordial
truth of the love of God for us, lived and proclaimed, that opens our lives to
receive this love and makes possible the integral development of humanity and
of every man (cf. Caritas in Veritate,
8).
Essentially, everything proceeds from Love and tends
towards Love. God’s gratuitous love is made known to us through the proclamation
of the Gospel. If we welcome it with faith, we receive the first and
indispensable contact with the Divine, capable of making us “fall in love with
Love”, and then we dwell within this Love, we grow in it and we joyfully
communicate it to others.
Concerning the relationship between faith and works of
charity, there is a passage in the Letter
to the Ephesians which provides perhaps the best account of the link
between the two: “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 anyone
should boast. For we are his
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand, that we should walk in them” (2:8-10). It can be seen here that the
entire redemptive initiative comes from God, from his grace, from his
forgiveness received in faith; but this initiative, far from limiting our
freedom and our responsibility, is actually what makes them authentic and
directs them towards works of charity. These are not primarily the result of
human effort, in which to take pride, but they are born of faith and they flow
from the grace that God gives in abundance. Faith without works is like a tree
without fruit: the two virtues imply one another. Lent invites us, through the
traditional practices of the Christian life, to nourish our faith by careful
and extended listening to the word of God and by receiving the sacraments, and
at the same time to grow in charity and in love for God and neighbor, not least
through the specific practices of fasting, penance and almsgiving.
Prayer for the New Evangelization
Heavenly
Father,
Pour forth your Holy Spirit to inspire me with these words from Holy Scripture.
Stir in my
soul the desire to renew my faith and deepen my relationship with your Son, our
Lord Jesus Christ so that I might truly believe in and live the Good News.
Open my heart
to hear the Gospel and grant me the confidence to proclaim the Good News to
others.
Pour out your
Spirit, so that I might be strengthened to go forth and witness to the Gospel
in my everyday life through my words and actions.
In moments of
hesitation, remind me:
If not me,
then who will proclaim the Gospel?
If not now,
then when will the Gospel be proclaimed?
If not the
truth of the Gospel, then what shall I proclaim?
God, our
Father, I pray that through the Holy Spirit I might hear the call of the New
Evangelization to deepen my faith, grow in confidence to proclaim the Gospel
and boldly witness to the saving grace of your Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and
reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
