WORKING WITH GRACE

SUNDAY, TWENTY EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

2 Kings 5:14-17; Ps 98:1-4; 2 Tim 2:8-13; Lk 17:11-19

Abiding in Good Works

The Church prays in the opening prayer for God to anticipate us with His grace, and for the same grace to follow us thereafter. The ordinary course of things or divine action with us is that God anticipates us with his grace, for nothing moves without God moving it. Since God moves us in all things, he sends his grace to anticipate us. To respond to the anticipatory grace requires that we be in the state of grace and have a life that is commensurable or connatural with God. The Holy Spirit remains with us for this purpose: that we may develop a divine sensibility, enabling us to respond to God’s inspiration supernaturally and easily. The commensurability or spiritual sensibility is what our new spirit stands for, and defines when we develop it. Just as a natural baby grows and develops with constant nourishment and exercise of its faculties, our spirit grows and develops by constant feeding on the word of God, the heavenly food, and exercise of prayer and other spiritual works. Without these, it suffers hunger and dies. For one who is not spiritually alive, the grace of anticipation comes from without and from within as a serious sense of guilt and longing to confess one’s sins and reconcile with God. God can use anyone or anything he created to accomplish any good work he intends, but when he uses a spiritually dead person, he uses him from without, as we use a physical object, through the disordered desires of the sinner. Thus, we read in the scriptures how God used the king of Assyria as a rod to punish Israel for her sins.

The proper usage of a human person by God to accomplish a good is from within and in a cooperative manner. Such usage from within is proper to our nature that God fashioned in his image and to be like himself. We become more like God when the same good that pleases God also attracts us. When this is the case, then the revelation of God’s will, which is always good, attracts our interest and will. Hence, God can easily cooperate with us to achieve any good he plans. When we cooperate with God to achieve a particular good end, we serve in his plan as his disinterested servants, whose joy and pleasure lie in doing the will of God and nothing else. Such was the prophet Elisha in the first reading. God anticipated the healing of Naaman, the Assyrian, and arranged everything. Elisha just cooperated with the grace of God without any interest whatsoever, other than to reveal the glory of the God of Israel. “Returning to Elisha with his whole escort, he went in and stood before him, ‘Now I know’ he said, ‘that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel. Now, please, accept a present from your servant.’ But Elisha replied, ‘As the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will accept nothing.’ Naaman pressed him to accept, but he refused.” The manner Elisha, the prophet, went about the healing, and his refusal of a gift of any form from Naaman, demonstrated that he is not interested in anything but the glory of God and to accomplish his divine will.

To grow in spiritual life is to become more and more like the Son of Man in this regard. Our Lord Jesus Christ expressed the doing of his Father’s will to be his only desire and food. He lived to fulfil the will of the Father for our salvation. We see the same attitude in Saint Paul. He sacrificed everything in order to preach the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. “Remember the Good News that I carry, ‘Jesus Christ risen from the dead, sprung from the race of David’; it is on account of this that I have my own hardship to bear, even to being chained like a criminal—but they cannot chain up God’s news.” He was not deterred by the many hardships he had to endure on the mission of preaching the Good News. His only joy is to know that he is accomplishing the will of God. To cooperate with the graces God sends our way is to make God present in our lives, our situations, and our environment.

The anticipatory grace is to prepare our minds, hearts, and wills to accept the will of God. The actual grace is to cooperate with God through these spiritual faculties in the proposed work or good. The grace that comes after the work helps us to detach our minds, hearts, and wills from any other good attached to the work done, and to rejoice in the glory and praise of God alone. The encounter of our Lord Jesus Christ with the ten lepers on his way to Jerusalem is an illustration for us. “As he entered one of the villages, ten lepers came to meet him. They stood some way off and called to him, ‘Jesus! Master! Take pity on us.’ When he saw them he said, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ Now as they were going away they were cleansed. Finding himself cured, one of them turned back praising God at the top of his voice and threw himself at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. The man was a Samaritan. This made Jesus say, ‘Were not all ten made clean? The other nine, where are they?” The ten lepers received the anticipatory grace; they worked with the actual grace of God to receive healing, but only one received the grace that followed after to come and render praise and thanksgiving to God. The more work we accomplish with God, the more our lives are transformed into Jesus Christ, and the better our communion with God. This is why He revealed his salvation to the nations, that all may enter the divine communion and live only to fulfil the will of God.

Let us pray: May your grace, O Lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after and make us always determined to carry out good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.