Book I, Homily 3 Remixed: Jesus Saves (Thomas Cranmer)

(1)

We are all sinners, offenders against God, and breakers of the law and commandments. All of our acts, works, and deeds, no matter how good they seem, are powerless to justify and make us righteous before God. So each of us needs help. We need some other source of righteousness and justification to obtain the forgiveness of the many sins we have committed. And the only One with such righteousness is God. Happily, when faith is embraced, God’s mercy and Christ’s merits give us this necessary justification or righteousness, and God then accepts this righteousness as our full and perfect justification.

            Let us break down these ideas in greater detail. It is our position and duty to recollect the mercy of God. And the mercy of God is this: when the breaking of the law had wrapped the world in sin, God sent his only son our Savior Jesus Christ into this world to fulfill the law for us. The shedding of His most precious blood was a sacrifice, satisfaction, or amends (as it may be called) to His Father to calm his wrath and indignation toward our sins to the extent I outline.

This sacrifice washes away the sins of infants who are baptized and die in infancy, making them children of God and heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. This sacrifice also washes away the sins of those who sin by word or deed after baptism, but honestly turn again to God, and there is nothing left of those sins that would make them worthy of damnation. St. Paul speaks of this justification or righteousness in this way, “No one is justified by works of the law, but freely by faith in Jesus Christ” (Rom. 3:20,24) And he also says, “We have believed in Jesus Christ so that we can be justified freely by faith in Christ Jesus, and not by the works of the law, because no one can be justified by the works of the law” (Gal. 2:16).

            And while this justification is free to us, yet it did not come so free that no one paid a price for it.

            But this point sounds rather illogical. If a price was paid for our redemption, then our redemption was not freely given.

[In the time of Jesus, law or custom almost everywhere permitted slavery. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, argued that some people were naturally free and naturally slaves. And one even could be sold into slavery involuntarily. There are, of course, still slaves today, but we cannot imagine that such an institution is legal or natural, even if it is common.]

Now consider someone in ancient times who was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and is then released upon payment of a ransom. They certainly are not released freely. For if this person could go freely, why pay a ransom? What does it mean to be able to go freely than not to have to do, pay, or suffer anything in order to be free?

            This logic is unraveled by the great wisdom of God in the mystery of our redemption. God has struck a balance between justice and mercy. He did not want His justice to condemn us to eternal imprisonment by the Devil in Hell without mercy or remedy, nor allow His mercy to gain our release contrary to justice and without price or penalty. [For we are slaves to sin and the devil by our very nature (John 8:34; Rom. 6:16)].  

Instead, He married His endless mercy with His most upstanding and fair justice. He showed great mercy to us in delivering us from sin and Hell without demanding us to pay the impossible price to do so. And since we could not pay the price for our sins, he provided us with the most precious body and blood of His own well-beloved Son Jesus Christ, who besides paying the price for our transgressions and our liberation also fulfilled the law perfectly on our behalf. And so God’s justice and mercy were united and thus completed the mystery of our redemption.

St. Paul describes how justice and mercy were knit together in this way, “All have sinned and are in need of the glory of God, but are justified freely by the grace of redemption by Jesus Christ, whom God has sent to us as a reconciler and peacemaker through faith in his blood, [the shedding of which] demonstrates God’s justice” (Rom. 3:23-25: V). And in another place, St. Paul says, “Christ is the end of the law and brings righteousness to every one who believes” (Rom. 10:4). And once more, St. Paul says, “What the law could not do, because human weakness robbed it of all potency, God has done: by sending His own Son in the likeness of our sinful nature and to deal with sin, he has passed judgment against sin within that very nature, so that the commandment of God may find fulfillment in us, whose conduct is no longer controlled by the old nature, but by the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4).

In these three passages, Paul specifically mentions three things that are necessary for our justification: (1) the great mercy and grace of God; (2) justice, specifically the satisfaction of God’s justice and payment of the price of our redemption by the offering of Christ of His body and the shedding of His Blood and, at the same time, the fulfilling of the Law perfectly and thoroughly; (3) true and lively faith in us concerning the merits of Jesus Christ, a faith which does not come from us but is from God working in us.

So that our justification does not come from God’s grace and mercy alone but also His justice, just as St. Paul says in Romans 3:23-25 when he talks of God’s justice. And this justice consists of paying our ransom and fulfilling the law. And so the grace of God does not exclude the justice of God from a role in our justification, it only excludes “human justice” as a means of our justification. Human justice, as I define it here, is based on the accounting of the good and bad things we think, say, or do.

And therefore St. Paul declares here no role for human beings in justification except a truly and lively faith, which is God’s gift to us (Eph. 2:8) and is not something we create independently of God. And yet that faith does not exclude repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God from the heart of a justified person, in union with faith. All of these qualities, however, are not allowed to play any part in justification. They all may be present in the same heart, but they all together cannot justify the one in whom they are present. And faith does not remove justice from those things we do in dutiful obedience to God, for we are very much obligated to perform what God has commanded in the Scriptures all the days of our lives. But faith excludes the possibility of obeying God in order to be transformed into a good person by means of our own obedience.

For all the good works we can do are imperfect and therefore cannot obtain our justification. Instead, our justification comes freely by the unasked-for and undeserved mercy of God. Indeed, this mercy is so great and so free that no one in the world was able to pay any sum toward the price of our redemption. Therefore, it pleased Our Heavenly Father, because of his infinite mercy (and not because we deserved anything good) to prepare for us the most precious gems of Christ’s Body and Blood to pay our ransom in full, fulfill the law in full, and satisfy his justice in full.

Christ is now the righteousness of all who truly believe in Him. He paid their ransom by His death. He fulfilled the Law for them by his life. So that in Him and by Him, every true Christian may be called a fulfiller of the Law, for what they could not do for themselves, Christ’s justice has supplied.            

(2)

I have told you that we all should seek our justification and righteousness from Jesus. I have told you how this righteousness comes to us by Christ’s death and merits. I then told you that there were three things necessary for obtaining righteousness: God’s mercy, Christ’s justice, and a true and lively faith, the only source of good works. I also declared to you that no one is justified by his or her own good deeds, because no one fulfills the law to the extent it demands.

St. Paul spoke of this to the Galatians, saying, “If a law had been given which had power to bestow life, then righteousness indeed would have come from the keeping of the law” (Gal. 3:21). Indeed, he also says, “if righteousness comes by law, then Christ died for nothing” (Gal. 2:21). And in another place still, he says to us, “When you seek to be justified by way of law, you are cut off from Christ, you have put yourselves outside God’s grace” (Gal. 5:4). And he tells the Ephesians very much the same thing, “For it is by grace, you are saved through faith. It is not your own doing. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work done, so that no one should be able to boast of anything” (Gal. 2:8-9).

And the summary of all of Paul’s arguments is this: if justice comes from what we do, it does not come from grace; and if it comes from grace, it does not come from what we do. And the Prophets all point to this idea, as St. Peter proclaimed before the household of Cornelius, “All of the prophets testify about Christ that everyone who trusts in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name” (Acts 10:43).

The early Greek and Latin theologians, the ones we call the Fathers of the Church more than 1500 years ago, speak in the same vein about this principle: that we are justified by true and lively faith alone. I will discuss particularly three among them: Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers in France; Basil, Bishop of Caesarea in Turkey; and Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in Italy. St. Hilary says quite clearly in the Ninth Canon on the Gospel of Matthew, “Faith alone justifies.” St. Basil writes this, “There is a perfect and whole rejoicing in God, when a man does not count upon himself for his righteousness but acknowledges that he lacks true justice and righteousness, and is justified by faith in Christ alone.” And referring to St. Paul, St. Basil says, “he rejoices in the contempt of his own righteousness and seeks the righteousness of God by faith” (Phil. 3:9). These are St. Basil’s very words! And St. Ambrose says, “This is the ordinance of God, that he who believes in Christ should be saved without works, by faith alone, freely receiving remission of his sins.”

Closely consider these words. Without works, by faith alone, we receive remission of our sins. What can be said more clearly than to say: that freely, without works, by faith alone, we obtain remission of our sins.

And there is no need to stop here with the citations. You will find the same thing in every good ancient writer, Origen, St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, Prosper, Oecumenius, Photius, St. Bernard, and St. Anselm. Nevertheless, these writers never meant to say that justifying faith exists within the human heart in complete isolation, independently, and exclusively from true repentance, hope, love, and the fear and dread of God in any time or season. [Where those are absent, justifying faith is also absent.]

Nor do they mean when they say we are freely justified that we can live as spiritual slackers, from whom nothing is required thereafter; nor do they mean that because we are not justified by good deeds, we should not do good deeds at all. We will discuss this point later. But this saying, “that we are justified by faith alone, freely, and without works” is proclaimed to deny all merit to our works. Our virtues and good conduct are unable to earn us justification at God’s hands. Therefore, our free justification underlines human weakness and the goodness of God, our great weakness as well as God’s great strength, the imperfection of everything we do, and the abundance of grace given to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ. We therefore must attribute the earning of our justification to Christ and the shedding of His blood.

   The Holy Scriptures teach this faith; this is the strong rock and foundation of Christian religion; all old and ancient writers of the Church approve this teaching; this teaching advances and sets forth the true glory of Christ and whacks the false and fleeting glory of human beings on the head; whoever denies this faith should not be counted as truly Christian, nor a promoter of Christ’s glory, but as an enemy of Christ and His Gospel and a promoter of the false and fleeting glory of humanity.

This teaching is true and approved by the testimony of St. Paul and the Fathers, that we are justified freely, not on the basis of what we do, but only on the basis only of lively and true faith in Christ. Yet this true teaching must be quite carefully and clearly declared, so that no one uses it as an excuse to yield equally freely to the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. And because no one must make this mistake, I shall clearly declare the right way of understanding justification, so that no one will think it is a good idea to indulge the pleasures of the flesh, or commit sin, or live in any way contrary to the will of God.

First, you must understand that what God does for us in justification by Christ is not anything like what we do for God. Justification is not our job. It is God’s. We cannot do anything to make ourselves righteous, either totally or partly. The most arrogant and presumptuous thing I can imagine any enemy of Christ doing is creating frameworks within which we could take away and purge our own sins and so justify ourselves. But it is God’s prerogative to justify. We do not offer it as a gift to Him, we receive it as a gift from Him. We do not pay it to Him, we receive from Him out of his free mercy and by the unique merits of his most dearly beloved Son, Our Redeemer, Savior, and Justifier, Jesus Christ.

Therefore, the principle that “we are justified freely by faith without works” or that “we are justified by faith alone in Christ” does not mean that our belief in Christ is our own doing. It does not mean that our faith in Christ, which is within us, justifies us or earns our justification. For if this idea were true, we would be justified by some deed of our mind or good quality within us. But the true meaning of these principles is that although we hear God’s Word and believe it, although we have faith, hope, love, repentance, dread, and fear of God within us, and never stop doing good deeds, yet we must count all of these things as absolutely useless for the remission of our sins and our justification. We instead must put our trust in God’s mercy and the sacrifice of Our High Priest and Savior Jesus Christ, the Son of God, once offered for us upon the cross to obtain God’s grace and remission. Christ has obtained for us remission of our original sin, through baptism as well as of all sin committed by us after baptism, if we truly repent and honestly return to Him.

We know that John the Baptist was a more godly and virtuous man than anyone who had ever lived, but he pointed the people toward Jesus for the forgiving of their sins, saying, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). Similarly, lively faith turns us away from its own virtues and points us toward Christ as the source of the remission of our sins and justification. So our faith in Christ tells us, “It is not I that takes away your sins, but it is Christ alone. I send you for that purpose to Him alone. I help you to abandon any trust in your good virtues, thoughts, words, and deeds, and teach you instead to set your hope on Christ alone.      

(3)

I have told you plainly that no one can fulfill the law of God, and therefore the law condemns all. It follows that there must be some other means of our salvation besides the law, and that means is a true and lively faith in Christ, which results in good works and a life according to God’s commandments. And I also told you of the Fathers’ reading of this saying, “Faith alone in Christ justifies,” which is so clear as to provide the true interpretation of this saying. The Fathers tell us that we are justified by faith alone in Christ in this way: We put our faith in Christ, so that we are justified by Him alone, that we are justified by God’s free mercy and the merits of Our Savior Christ alone, and that no virtue or good deed of ours, or which we can cultivate or do, is able to earn what Christ Himself alone deserves.

            Throughout this homily, you may have observed my frequent repetition of the same sentences about justification and careful use of language. I wish to avoid arguments with those that delight to debate about semantics as well as to show the true meaning of what I preach and to avoid evil talk and misunderstanding. And yet nothing I say will satisfy critics, for critics will find reasons to criticize, even when there are none. Nevertheless, my concern is for the rest of humanity, who desire to know the truth (when it is clear enough) than to obscure it with all manner of controversy.

Here is the truth. Our deeds do not justify us. They do not earn the forgiveness of our sins or make our unjust selves just before God. God, out of his one-way love and mercy, and because of what Christ did, earned, and deserved, justifies us. Nevertheless, faith sends us to Christ for forgiveness, and faith is given to us by God so that we may embrace the promise of God’s mercy and of the remission of our sins. None of our other virtues or deeds does this. Therefore, Scripture says that faith without works justifies.

Indeed, it is equivalent to say, “Faith without works justifies us” and “Only faith justifies us.” Therefore the Fathers of the ancient Church from time and time described our justification with these words, “Faith alone justifies us,” which means nothing different than St. Paul meant when he said, “Faith without works justifies us.”

Notice that all of this is brought to pass through the unique merits and earnings of our Savior Christ, and not through our merits, or through the merit of any virtue that we have within is, or of any deed we do. Therefore, our trust in the significance of the merits of Christ should overwhelm any trust in the significance of our faith, deeds, and all other virtues. The corruption of original sin touches every fiber of our being, so that all is imperfect within us: faith, love, hope, dread, thoughts, words, and deeds. Our own imperfection is so great, through original sin, that we are not fit to deserve any part of our justification. And we say these things in this way in order to humble ourselves to God, and to give all the glory to our Savior Christ, who is most worthy of it. [Our faith, love, hope are worthy for us to cultivate and are not to be disdained in everyday life but pale in importance to what Jesus Christ did for us on the Cross.]

            I have told you of how God has justified us without us doing or deserving anything from Him and how his mercy is freely showered upon us through the true and lively faith He has given to us. Now you will hear of our Christian duty to God, what we should return to God for his great mercy and goodness. Our duty is not to spend our lives as spiritual slackers after our baptism or justification, not caring how few good deeds we do to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors. And it certainly is not our duty, once we are part of the Body of Christ, to live like anything unlike or contrary to a limb of Jesus Christ. For instance, we are not to incorporate ourselves into the mystical body of the devil, running toward every temptation placed before us by the world, the flesh, and the devil. That would be the service of the world and the devil, not God.

            Come on! The faith that unrepentantly produces evil deeds or at least no good deeds is not a right, pure, and lively faith, but a dead, devilish, counterfeit, and pretend faith, as SS. Paul and James call it (2 Tim. 3:5; Tit. 1:16; James 2:17-20, 26). For if you take St. James at his word, the devils believe every article of the Creed from the virgin birth to the judgment of the living and the dead. [And if you read the Gospels, you may conclude that they well remember] that Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights, worked miracles to demonstrate His divinity, was crucified, died, was buried, and rose again on the third day.

            [They believe the Creeds and that the Holy Scriptures are inerrant in their autographs (or what have you]) and yet for all this faith, they are devils still, remaining eternally damned without a true Christian faith. For the right and true Christian faith is not only to believe the Holy Scriptures and the Creeds are true, but also to have a sure confidence in trust in God’s merciful promises to be saved from eternal damnation by Christ, from which comes a loving heart to obey his commandments.

            And this true Christian faith no devil possesses, let alone any one who outwardly professes the faith, receives the Sacrament, attends worship, and in all other ways appears to be Christian, yet whose life and deeds is very much to the contrary. For how can one have this true faith, this sure trust and confidence in God, that by the merits of Christ, his or her sins are forgiven and he or she is reconciled to the favor of God and is a partaker of the kingdom of God, when he or she lives ungodly and denies Christ in deed? Surely, no such person can have this faith and trust in God. For if they know Christ is the only Savior of the world, they should also know that the wicked shall not enjoy the kingdom of God. They know that God hates unrighteousness (Ps. 5:5-6), that He will destroy all who lie. They know that those who have done good deeds, which cannot be done without a lively faith, shall enter into the resurrection of life. They know that those have done evil shall come into the resurrection of judgment (John 5:29). And they should know also very well that to those who are not willing to be persuaded and will not be obedient to the truth, but will obey unrighteousness, will come indignation, wrath, and affliction (Rom. 2:8-9).

            Therefore in conclusion, I contemplate the infinite benefits of God showed and given to us mercifully beyond and without our earning them. God has created us out of nothing, in fact from a piece of vile clay. Yet out of his unending goodness, he has exalted us by giving us a soul after his own image and likeness. And when we managed to get ourselves condemned to hell and eternal death, He gave us His own natural Son (who is God, eternal, immortal, and equal to Himself in power and glory) to become flesh, and to take our mortality upon him with all of its weakness. And this Son in the form of a mortal consented to suffer and did suffer a most shameful and painful death for our sins in order to justify and restore us to eternal life. And therefore we are made Christ’s brothers and sisters and heirs with Our Savior of His eternal kingdom of heaven.

            These great and merciful benefits of God, if they are considered properly, do not provide us with any excuse to be slackers and live without doing good deeds, nor do they stir us by any means to do evil. On the contrary, unless we are desperate people with hearts harder than stones, they stir us to commit ourselves to God completely with all our will, hearts, might, and power; to serve Him in all good deeds, obeying his commandments during our lives; to seek in all things his glory and honor, not our sensual pleasures and our own fame; evermore dreading to offend voluntarily such a merciful God and loving Redeemer in word, thought, and deed. And the benefits of God, deeply considered, do encourage us also to be ever ready to give ourselves to our neighbors for God’s sake, and as much as we can, to be eager in all our all endeavors to do good to everyone. These are the fruits of the true faith, to do good, to the best of our ability, to every person; and above all things and in all things, to promote the glory of God, from whom alone we have our sanctification, justification, salvation, and redemption. To whom should be glory, praise, and honor, forever and ever. Amen.