Faith Without Works and Works Without Faith

Last updated on: April 18, 2016 at 8:13 am by Anne Kennedy

Faith Without Works and Works Without Faith 2016-04-18T08:13:04-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I have a whole category on this blog called Work and the Christian. If you run out of meaningful activities and think, how might I throw away several hours, you can go in there and see that over the last many years I have thought a lot about work and what it’s for and how a person should do it and what is the use of it anyway. Most Christians do work, and many of them do work on being Christian. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, says the bible, and so I’ve hobbled along thinking about all those words.

It helps that we do Catechesis of the Good Shepherd and that when a child walks into the Sunday School room, he is greeted and asked, “What work would you like to do today?” Can you imagine the richness of this question? What work would you like to do? And then you can go and do that work? But of course, many times little children will flutter their eyelids and say, “I dunno. I don’t really want to do anything.” The child will flop, filled with the ennui of life, just wanting to cut little bits of paper into even smaller bits and sprinkle them all over the atrium floor.

The Catechist has to then coax and maneuver, enticing the child to consider the richness of the work before him. There are so many works, so many texts fleshed out in little wooden houses and people. Surely there are some words that you, dear child, would like to chew on a while longer. Rise up and work.

So it hasn’t been hard for me to sit in church, the last three or four Sunday’s, and think more deeply about James’ heartfelt anxiety that the Christian will wander around in the world saying, “I have faith, look at me and my faith” but under closer scrutiny appear to be very much like the pouting child, shredding paper and having ‘one of those days’. “Gah” mutters James, with complexity and elegance, “I can’t see your faith or your works.”

The thing is, we can’t really do work or have faith, not in a sustained preserving measure, when it’s up to each of us to get there. I know this because I’ve tried. ‘I have faith,’ I’ve said to myself, and, like James, gone on to say, ‘and I have works.’ But when it’s me having them, me driving them, me insisting on them one way or another, eventually I peter out and end up angry with God for not congratulating me about my work, angry with myself for wanting to be congratulated, and angry that the proverbial floor is covered with the remnants of lots of torn up paper–whatever I was doing was worthless, I might as well not have bothered. Because when James says “faith without works is dead” he doesn’t mean try harder and do a better job and then God will laud you for being you.

The work of faith is born out in the devastating weakness of human woe. If you, the Christian, show up to work in the church, or anywhere you happen to be, and you have it together, and are up to snuff, all that anyone has seen is work. The work was efficiently undertaken and you go home with a comfortable feeling of competence and delight. Moreover, your fellow Christians fear and envy you, wishing for the glory of a work well done.

Contrast that with the Christian who has nothing to give, and is not up to snuff, and is struggling to put one foot in front of the other, who flops down on the floor of God’s mercy and gives up. Passers by wag their heads and tsk, and think, ‘poor dumb Christian’. But that one, on the floor, has stopped doing something that needed stopped–the tantalizing undertaking of herself conjoining the quality and richness of her faith with the substance and beauty of her works. Um, says God, I’m not impressed. I’m not balancing your work and your faith and going to give you a special ribbon because you got the balance right. The Christian lying on the floor having given up, has stopped trying to balance, stopped trying at all. That person has stopped trying to gain God’s notice by the striving of each effort. And that person, then, God raises up, stands on her feet, and sets in to motion to do a lot more work than anyone, including herself, would have ever imagined.

I know this because for about two years I felt like I could barely put one foot in front of another, and could only pray the Jonah prayer, and did not have the inner resources demanded by myself and the world to “make it”. I didn’t have works, in the way that I had imagined I always needed to have them. I didn’t have anything of substance. But I did have faith. And so I kept on with the Jonah prayer which is the merest bleating cry, “Oh God, help me.” And I woke up one day to discover that I had written a book, and finished my school year, and filled a Sunday school room with a lot of painted and sanded and useful materials. “How on earth did that happen?” I wondered aloud to any and every passer by. The people that know me best know that it was the out working of God’s sustaining provision and that no credit at all could be given to me. Many days my weakness was so great, it was almost like I wasn’t there. When people tried to congratulate me on my awesomeness later, I had an almost vicious response. No. Don’t even say anything about me. God did it all. All of it.

Which should give hope to everyone who is faced either with work they don’t know how to cope with, or a child who only shreds paper, or a person in whom neither works nor faith nor anything is visible at all. God has both the power and will to come in and do the work himself. All we have to do, most strangely, is to ask–for the faith, for the work, for mercy, for hope, for all the richness of his glory. What work would you like to do? What faith would you like to have? He is there ready to give abundantly once you’ve stopped fussing and flinging all the paper everywhere.

Catechesis of the Good Shepherd

The Prayer of Jonah

Work and the Christian

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