In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul declares that “everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” But Jesus Christ himself offers an important caveat to that declaration.
For St. Paul, the core of our Christian faith is our proclamation of the Risen Christ as our Lord and Savior. He is the source of our salvation. St. Paul emphasized this point as strongly as he did because of his own experience as a devout Jew. As a devout Jew, St. Paul followed the Jewish law very strictly and saw in that Law the path to righteousness – to be in right in right standing with God. It was in conformity to all the rites, rituals, and prescriptions of the Jewish Law that a devout Jew found the way to salvation. With his conversion to Christianity, St. Paul recognized that Jesus alone was the source of salvation. St. Paul felt it was necessary to remind his Jewish-Christian contemporaries that the Jewish law was not the source of their salvation. The source of their salvation now was their profession of faith in the Risen Christ. Thus St. Paul proclaims, “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” While St. Paul is correct in that statement, Jesus, himself, offers a cautionary corrective to his proclamation.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus declares, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” We begin with our proclamation of faith in the Risen Christ as our Lord and Savior. We then demonstrate that faith in the way we conform our lives to his. If we don’t manifest in our lives the same compassion, mercy, generosity and inclusivity of Christ in our lives, then we make a mockery of our profession of faith in him as our Lord and Savior. This is the challenge that we all face as Christians. We must live in a way that supports rather than contradicts our profession of faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior – the source of our salvation.
Lent gives us a good opportunity to examine our lives. Do our lives genuinely reflect an authentic proclamation of faith in the Risen Christ as our Lord and Savior?
Fr. Mark Hallinan, S.J.