Can We Be Saved Without Repentance? Series

John 8: 10-11

Luke 6: 45-48

Psalm 50

Romans 6: 1-19

One of the greatest scandals afflicting our decadent society, one that has even bled over into the Church, is the phenomenon of public figures claiming to be Christian, or Catholic, attending worship and taking communion, and then going out on Monday through Friday and working to make taxpayers fund the murder of unborn children. They claim to be faithful Christians but flout the moral code that we take on ourselves just by being human, let alone followers of Jesus Christ. In other words, they say on Sunday “Thy will be done,” but work hard so that their own will would be done on earth, not God’s.

Now we know something about anti-Christian crimes such as abortion, the murder of the disabled and elderly, the refusal to recognize that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, and the reality that there are only two human sexes, male and female. We know that those who do them or want to make us accept them have a nominalist mindset. That’s very dangerous. It means that they believe every individual is radically independent, that to be free they must be able to do anything they want to do, and force everyone else to allow them to do that. There are no laws that bind everyone. It’s ludicrous, it’s self-contradictory, but it’s very common in our misguided society.

St. Paul faced that two-faced way of life when he wrote to the Romans, helping them to understand that there is indeed a moral law for everyone, Christian or pagan. He asked if the freedom Christ has won for us enables us to continue in sin. He asked if that was God’s intent, since it gives Our Lord more opportunity to come with saving grace? And he is very clear: me ginomai: “it’s not happening, people.” The Romans, and we, were baptized into Christ’s death, which for us means our death to sin so that we could walk in the new life of Christ. Christ never sinned, and that is what He wants for us. Christ liberated us from sin, not from the moral law that guides us in our understanding of the evil of sin. The only Law that Christ freed us from was the six-hundred plus observances of the priestly code of the Jews. So we are free to have bacon and eggs, but not to murder little children or anyone else.

This was not a new teaching, either to Jesus or to Paul. In psalm 50, we sing that God is coming to judge his people–us! We have made a covenant with God by sacrifice. As Christians, our sacrifice is not of pigeons or goats. The one sacrifice is that of Jesus Christ on the cross. But in the first century, before that one all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ, the Temple was like a butcher shop or barbecue joint with all the animals being offered up by the priests. But the psalmist imagines God telling us that such oblations were worthless if in one moment we recite the covenant and statutes and the next one we hate discipline and ignore the word of God. Stealing, lying under oath, slandering our kin all prove to God that our sacrifices are meaningless. All God wants is for us to love Him and our neighbor. The only sacrifice that really pleases Him is a contrite heart, as the next psalm pleads, and the todah sacrifice, or sacrifice of thanksgiving, simple bread and wine.

In the Gospel, Jesus reminds us that the deeds of our hands and the words of our mouth result from the attitudes of our minds and hearts. He particularly loathes those who piously pray to him with words like “Lord, Lord,” and then act in ways that reject His law of love. Those who call themselves “devout Catholic” or Christian and then flout the law of Christ are, then, like people who build their homes on unstable soil or sand. When the floods come against such a house, it washes out down the river along with everyone in it. When the final moment of life comes, does such a person appear before Our Lord as judge with the blood of millions of innocent humans on upraised hands and dare to say, “Well, I sent all my kids to Catholic school and always carried my Rosary”?

Am I saying that such people are damned, condemned by their actions to an eternity of misery, separated from God? Yes, with one exception. That exception is forgiveness by God after repenting of the habit of sin. God always forgives when He is asked, asked by a person who repents of the sin and has what theologians call a “firm purpose of amendment.” That means a real and practical intention to never do that horrible injustice again.