As [Jesus] came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Luke 19:41-42
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
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.”[1] 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.
Prayer, Sacrifice, and Holiness
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 sinners, 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.”[2] 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?”[3]
This is a powerful spiritual position to take up. “Standing in the breach,” like Moses, to avert the punishment of God from the people.[4] 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 Christ.[5]
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 Thérèse of Lisieux discovered, is to be the “love in the heart of the Church,”[6] fruitful in Christ 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.
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.
Prepare for Battle!
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.”[7] 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 upon our own shoulders some of this darkness. 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.”[8]
I think that when we look at this kind of spiritual activity, we’re able to see that this 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 become good.
God’s Great Mercy
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!”[9]
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![10]
There was another thief crucified with Jesus, however, 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!”[11]
In the next lesson, we will consider the mystery of evil, and the fate of those who obstinately reject grace, even until the end.
[1] Jn 17:3.
[2] Luke 23:34.
[3] Bl. Jordan of Saxony wrote of him, “Whilst he thus labored to make his own soul pleasing to God, the fire of divine love was daily more and more enkindled in his breast, and he was consumed with an ardent zeal for the salvation of infidels and sinners. To move the divine mercy to regard them with pity, he spent often whole nights in the church at prayer, watering the steps of the altar with abundance of tears, in which he was heard to sigh and groan before the Father of mercy, in the earnestness and deep affliction of his heart; never ceasing to beg with the greatest ardor, the grace to gain some of those unhappy souls to Christ.” – From the Chronicle of the Origin of this Order, compiled by Bl. Jordan of Saxony. For reflections on this, see, https://www.opcentral.org/node/3223, https://www.dominicanajournal.org/the-tears-of-saint-dominic/.
[4] See also our TE6.6 and IE5 lessons that talk more about “standing in the breach.”
[5] Another form of this can be manifest when we ourselves are presented with great suffering. Enduring these like Jesus, who “in the days of his flesh … offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death,” we, like Him, will be heard because of our “reverent submission,” and “become [a] source of eternal salvation for all who obey” Jesus (see Heb 5:7, 9).
[6] Liturgy of the Hours, Feast of St. Thérèse (October 1), Office of Readings.
[7] Phil 3:18.
[8] Eph 6:12.
[9] Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy In My Soul, Par. 1698. Likewise, St. Francis de Sales is reported to have related favorably a sermon of a fellow missionary priest who argued “that we should never condemn any one as lost after death,” and said of the deceased Protestant Reformer John Calvin, “Who knows but that God may have touched his heart at the last moment and converted him? … Is the arm of God shortened?” Jean Pierre Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales (p. 105). Kindle Edition.
[10] Some Christians see these kinds of ideas as bringing the danger of being indifferent to the necessity of faith in Christ in the Church. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger once remarked, “We cannot start to set limits on God’s behalf; the very heart of the faith has been lost to anyone who supposes that it is only worthwhile, if it is, so to say, made worthwhile by the damnation of others. Such a way of thinking, which finds the punishment of other people necessary, springs from not having inwardly accepted the faith; from loving only oneself and not God the Creator, to whom his creatures belong. That way of thinking would be like the attitude of those people who could not bear the workers who came last being paid a denarius like the rest; like the attitude of people who feel properly rewarded only if others have received less. This would be the attitude of the son who stayed at home, who could not bear the reconciling kindness of his father. It would be a hardening of our hearts, in which it would become clear that we were only looking out for ourselves and not looking for God; in which it would be clear that we did not love our faith, but merely bore it like a burden…. It is a basic element of the biblical message that the Lord died for all–being jealous of salvation is not Christian (Joseph Ratzinger, God is Near Us [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003], 35-36).
[11] Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy In My Soul, Par. 1698.