The Primacy of Grace: Homily for the 19th Sunday OT 2024

19^th Sunday of Ordinary Time, B                                                                   August 11, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville

N.B. This is the third homily in a series. The second is here.

Mission trips, podcasts, retreats, books and articles, hard conversations, clever marketing, good music – all these strategies and more can be found in the Church’s efforts to evangelize non-believers and strengthen those who already believe. None of them are the most important tool, however. None of them are the most effective.

Not to say that we can bypass these things. Last week, as we continued our journey through John, Chapter 6’s “Bread of Life” discourse, we zeroed in on the “work” of believing, the labor of authentic faith. With practical examples of how to show reverence and receptivity to the Eucharist, Fr. Nick and I exhorted you to certain practical things to strengthen your faith, to move from mere ideas and opinions to living, effective faith in Jesus Christ, sent by God.

This week, however, Jesus seems to take a step back from our labors and into the sovereign role of God. Rather, I should say he takes a step deeper. This often happens in teaching. You present some topic, some idea to your students by starting with the surface level. Later on, however, you have to go deeper. It usually works out that what you talk about first is actually what happens last. That what is less important gets talked about before what is more important, more fundamental. An example: computers. To teach someone about you computers, you start with basics like keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, and how to navigate the software on the device. More advanced studies, though, require delving into topics like firmware, motherboards, processors, and so on. Those things are actually more important and come before the interface.

God is doing the same thing here. We’re told to work at avoiding sin and doing good first. But the reality is that the more fundamental step – the one that comes first – is the grace of God. Jesus tells the crowd to work at believing in him. So they do; they try to understand, they ask for a sign, and Jesus gives them a sign by telling them he is the bread of life. This is where their work runs out: “how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

Now Jesus pulls back the curtain a bit and show them what they need even before they can “work” at believing him. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” Sort of like saying “I actually asked you to do the impossible because you can’t believe in me unless my Father gives you the grace first.” Again, this is why there is no real conflict between salvation by faith and salvation by works – they’re the same thing: both fully dependent on the grace of God.

This is why all those things I listed at the beginning aren’t the most important thing the Church does. I love the ACTS program. It’s obviously quite fruitful and powerful. But it isn’t fruitful because of the program and the talks. It is fruitful because of the grace of God, because of the prayer that is involved, the sacraments that support it. God acts first.

This is why the patron saint of missionaries is a cloistered nun who died at age 24 without ever giving a single sermon in a foreign country. St. Therese of Lisieux is the patron saint of missionaries because she was a channel of grace, constantly imploring God for grace and offering her little way of being “a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma” to help make missionary efforts successful.

I call this the primacy of grace and it is often what’s missing in our efforts to evangelize loved ones or in our efforts to be better Catholics ourselves. There are many good programs to reach people, to break this bad habit, to grow in that virtue, or to deepen your faith. But, none of them accomplish anything without God’s grace. Before you even think of the idea of evangelizing, before you even feel the desire to pray or serve the poor, God is already pouring out grace to make that desire, that idea, that effort possible. God acts first, we respond.

That’s what Jesus is saying: “God has to give you the grace to believe what I’m saying and who I am.” To people who are very focused on their own abilities, this is hard to hear. So, God often lets us fail on purpose until we learn to more genuinely rely on his grace. That’s what he’s doing here – and we’ll see in the next two weeks just how hard these crowds do fail… for a little while at least.

Don’t misunderstand me! The effort is necessary! We can’t just sit back and wait for God to zap us with instant holiness. The point isn’t to try less, it’s to try with greater humility, to work at it with greater awareness of our dependence on grace, and to consciously seek out grace for what we need. This is why we often say that prayer is more important than work; why I tell people that when you’re busy you should pray more, not less!

It’s also, by the way, why Mass is a bit different from most other denominations’ Sunday services. The Mass, like God’s grace, does not come from us or depend on us. Rather, it is given by God for us to cooperate with, to receive with grateful humility. Jesus reminds us of the prophecy “they shall all be taught by God.” What does he mean? That we can stop going to school because we’ll magically just know stuff?

No! He means that God will teach people in and through the Church He establishes. The bible is not just a collection of ancient literature, but the word of God. The official teachings of the Church – like the catechism – aren’t just good ideas, but are the Holy Spirit working through his Church.

So it is with the Church’s rules about the Mass and other sacraments. ¿Why can’t we do certain things, play certain kinds of music, or change out the symbols to stuff we like? Because God, through the Church, has told us “this is how you are to worship me.” By humbly cooperating with that instead of fighting to make it what I want, we grow in the practice of putting God and his grace first. That way, when it does come to our work, our creativity, our programs, we already have the foundation of his grace.

Sometimes accepting this can be hard. We’ll see more of that next week. But with the difficulty also comes the possibility of grace. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” The Father is drawing you because he desires all to be saved. And if you’re willing to put grace first, to accept dependence on him and humble submission to a design greater than yourself, you’ll see just how great that is. It means you aren’t alone! It doesn’t just depend on you to make yourself a saint or evangelize others! To work with grace means you can rest in the fact that we do not have to raise ourselves to heaven. No, Jesus promises to those who rely on his grace: “I will raise him on the last day.” With a promise like that, what do we have to fear?

The homily series continues here.