What will become of sinners?
How, precisely, does God use Christians as instruments of salvation for the world? We’ve already acknowledged the primary way — we are called to preach the Gospel by words and the witness of life. As Our Lord taught, “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Knowing God, itself, IS SALVATION! So we strive zealously to make Him known!
Another way that God makes use of us as instruments of salvation is through our prayer, sacrifice, and holiness. This way is capable of reaching people not reached in the first way.
Let’s explain. First, prayer and sacrifice. By prayer, fasting, and other forms of self-denial, we can take upon our own shoulders something of the spiritual need of the world. The ignorance and stupidity, the arrogance and presumption, the weakness and mediocrity, the emptiness and despair, the sin, and even the obstinacy and rank wickedness where the devil’s influence is most evident. Taking these wounds up in our hearts, we offer them to the Lord for healing. This helps us recognize our own personal sin and spiritual need, and we offer these to the Lord as well.
By involving ourselves in the plight of sinners in this way, and counting ourselves in some way as one of them, we grow in compassion for them. This, in turn, may lead us to weep for them, and in solidarity with them.
All of this imitates our Lord Jesus who wept over the city of Jerusalem, and prayed on the Cross, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” Many of the saints are great examples of this. The great 13th century preacher Saint Dominic Guzman famously would keep vigil through the night, weeping, and praying again and again, “My God, my mercy, what will become of sinners?”
This is a powerful spiritual position to take up. “Standing in the breach,” like Moses, to avert the punishment of God from the people. By engaging in prayer and sacrifice, and by perhaps “weeping for sinners” like St Dominic, we call down grace upon the world — by the power and merits of Jesus.
Second — holiness. By living in intimate union with God, we sanctify the world from within. We become a hidden instrument of grace, by our mere presence in the world. This, together with prayer and sacrifice, makes up the special focus of cloistered religious — nuns and monks. Their vocation, as Saint Therese of Lisieux discovered, is to be the “love in the heart of the Church,” fruitful for the redemption of the Church and the whole world.
As lay Christians living in the world, we must commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the work of evangelization. Even so, we should not underestimate the power of our prayer, sacrifice, and pursuit of holiness. We shouldn’t neglect these spiritual means of furthering the salvation of the world. Cloistered religious are called to focus their energies intensely in this direction. Yet, in ways that fit with our state of life and vocation, all of us are called to it as well. It may simply be something like keeping a list of people, and regularly interceding for them.
I think that putting into practice this more spiritual aspect of our call as evangelists can give us great hope in our work. Hope in knowing that we can be fruitful for the salvation of others even when our outward evangelizing doesn’t seem to make any difference — when the seed appears to fall on bad soil. This “spiritual warfare,” as we might call it, can obtain from God the grace to invisibly till that soil.
Saint Paul carried on this spiritual warfare even as he preached the Gospel to the ends of the earth. He was constantly before the Lord, praying for the various communities of Christians, lamenting their sins, as he says, “even with tears.” He also prayed for the furtherance of the Gospel among the nations. And he “made up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the Church.”
Like our Lord Jesus and His evangelist Saints, we preach, teach, and spread the seed of the Gospel. And like them, we get “mixed results.” So also like them, we should take the next step, entering more deeply into the mystery of God’s redeeming love. We need to live the call to holiness. And through prayer, sacrifice, and perhaps even weeping for our sins and the sins of the Church and the world — we can spiritually take some of this darkness upon our own shoulders. We can do this, by the power of Jesus Christ dwelling within us.
In this way, too, we acknowledge, with Saint Paul, that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but … against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
When we look at this kind of spiritual activity, we see something important. It is not just meant to obtain the grace of salvation for the good person we’ve described in the last two lessons, who by their sincere desire for God are “already on the way of salvation.” It’s clearly meant also for great sinners, inside and outside the Church; that by the grace of God they might repent and become good.
Consider these words of Saint Faustina, apostle of Divine Mercy:
“God’s mercy sometimes touches the sinner at the last moment in a wondrous and mysterious way. Outwardly, it seems as if everything were lost, but it is not so. The soul, illumined by a ray of God’s powerful final grace, turns to God in the last moment with such a power of love that, in an instant, it receives from God forgiveness of sin and punishment, while outwardly it shows no sign either of repentance or of contrition, because souls [at that stage] no longer react to external things. Oh, how beyond comprehension is God’s mercy!”
Knowing that God calls some early, so that through them He might call others later, even up until “the eleventh hour,” we can have hope that a great many people might be saved from the power of sin and the devil. Like Dismas, the “penitent thief” who turned to Jesus as he hung upon a cross next to him, the doors of paradise can open up — even for great sinners in the last moments of life. Praised be Jesus Christ for His great mercy!
There was, however, another thief crucified with Jesus, who when encountering Jesus in the last moments of his life, acted quite differently than Dismas. After speaking of that “final grace” that converts the sinner to God in the last moments of life, Saint Faustina adds, “But – horror! – there are also souls who voluntarily and consciously reject and scorn this grace!”
In the next lesson, we will consider the mystery of evil, and the fate of those who obstinately reject grace, even until the end.