Standards of Salvation

Reflections on salvation, standards, and letting Christ decide based on today's readings: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062625.cfm

We often wonder about who is saved, but we rarely consult the words of the Lord to settle the matter. Typically, those we like and we deem good we consider saved and those of whom we disapprove (though we don’t explicitly say it) we consider damned.

For all we know, this randomized process of assigning holiness to those we like and sinfulness to our enemies may occasionally be correct. Sometimes someone we know and adore may truly be holy and, though we judge based on our personal affinity for the person and our subjectively determined standards rather than an objective measure, we still may have put them in the “right category.”

The point is that the tendency to determine salvation based upon our own standards is not wrong because we may be wrong about who is saved, but by doing this we seriously strain our own relationship to the Lord. Even if the standards we determine on our own are “close enough” to the standards of the Lord, the fact that we determined them according to our own ideas rather than consulting to the Lord, who is the True Judge, puts us in a precarious position.

It makes it even more difficult because many determine their own standards for salvation but attribute them to the Lord. They determine what they believe to be “good” and “bad”, decide that salvation is about being “good”, and then cherry pick Bible passages to suggest that Christ is “on their side.”

In other words, it is rare for someone to determine their own standards for salvation while remaining aware that they are doing so, it is much more common for them to believe that the standards they have created for themselves are the standards of the Lord. It is to these people that Christ opens His address today.

He says that “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.” He is acknowledging in very clear terms that those who profess the name of the Lord while continuing to live according to their own ways will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.

It is only those who do the Will of the Father that enter Heaven because it is the will of the Father to help us all get to Heaven and it is not possible for any of us to get to Heaven without this assistance. We can not enter the Kingdom of Heaven without following the Will of God because the path to Heaven is precisely the path of surrender to the Good Lord.

Of course, to do the Will of the Lord, one must know the Will of the Lord. And while there is a great variety in the way His Will is made known to us, there is a uniformity in that His Will is always leading His people to a greater love of Him and neighbor.

And not a merely sentimental love, but the love that gives up one’s life for the sake of the other. It is only by loving enough that one will give up their life that they gain eternal life and it is by clinging to our lives and our illusions of control (following our own will) that we become disconnected from the true source of life, the eternal exchange of self-sacrificial love that is the Trinity.

This is why Christ can say that at the hour when those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not enter the Kingdom of Heaven comes, He will not say that they have been “bad” but that He does not know them. By living according to their own ways, by trying to create their own worlds in which they are in control, it is not so much a moral failure as it is forfeiting one’s metaphysical status.

When we live as God intended us to live, according to His Will, He empowers us to become all that He created us to be. We become the creature that He has had in mind for all time. He knows us.

By trying to “do it our own way”, we become unrecognizable. This is not the creature He had in mind nor the product of His Creation, but what happens when one ceases to participate in the process of being eternally created anew by the Lord. He does not know us.

Being rooted in the Lord is to remain built on the rock that Christ describes today. Christ does not say that storms may come, but that they will come. And He promises that the one who remains rooted in the Lord will persist throughout because it is precisely through this storm that the Lord gives us our identity and it is precisely for the storm that He prepares us.

The call to follow the Will of the Lord is not because He wants us to cease to be, but it is the way by which we can sustain our being through the storm that is life. We ride the waves of life by becoming more and more one with the One Who made the waves.

On the other hand, those self-constructed plans and projects we make, the houses built on sand, are destroyed during the storm. They can not survive the storm because they were made by a mind that is weaker than the storm and they have no eternal purpose, but were made simply for the satisfaction of an individual ego.

It is then by following our own will, when we usually think we are asserting our autonomy, that we bring about our own demise. The plans we make for our own lives, often concerned only with plans for this life, are destined to be great failures because we were not created for this life alone.

It is only when our plans are all rooted in the Plan of God (Providence) and when they are all directed towards eternal life with Him, that there is any possibility for them to succeed. But because they are rooted in the Will of God and not directed towards this life, the idea of success and failure is itself transformed.

Success is not executing the particulars of the plan at any cost, but reaching the eternal destination, and not by any cost, but precisely by following the Will of the Lord (of course, not following the Will of the Lord would never lead you there anyway!). And failure becomes absolutizing one’s own plans while relativizing the Plan of God and disregarding His Will.

This means that success is getting to Heaven and failure is not doing so, but it also shows that God has chosen success for all of us, we can only fail by our own choosing. We only fail when we decide that the things we are particularly attached to in this world are more important than our eternal destination.

This transforms the conversation of salvation because it shows that our efforts to determine our own standards is dangerously close to veering off the path of the Lord and beginning to treat things of the Lord in a very worldly way.

The standard that Christ gives us leads us not to any sort of certainty about who is going where, least of which ourselves, but certainty about what our best course of action is right here and right now.

It is to pray ceaselessly for the salvation of ourselves and all souls, to pray that all may realize that the Lord is trustworthy and wants nothing but good things for us and we have great reason to surrender our will to Him and that we all may realize the folly in believing that any of our plans or ideas are more important than this.

This ceaseless prayer does indeed lead us to a great Hope, but Hope is not the same as presumption. We have great confidence, but we have great confidence because we believe the Lord to be great not because we know the way in which He judges with certainty nor do we know the souls of anyone, including ourselves, perfectly.

In other words, it is never a Hope that is detached from a deep realization of the need for Mercy. It is never a Hope that is not most fundamentally rooted in the conviction that Christ Loves us with a Love that we could never deserve.

May the Lord help us approach salvation with more humility and more Hope, and may He always remind us that at the center of Salvation is not us or any of our loved ones, but the Savior Himself, Jesus Christ, Our Lord.