Can we ever deserve the grace of God?

 In my education and moral education, I have been brought up to understand that we need to work for things that delight us in life.  So, we worked hard in school to get the grades that we wanted to attain, and morally, we would live the kind of life that merits us the blessings and graces that we need to be seen by God as lovable and humble.  But deep down inside, what I never realized is that I nurtured the wrong understanding about the graciousness of God and his love.

 

It only struck me as significant when I was ordained a priest, and started to minister to the people as someone who hears their confessions.  I have often wondered if I was being too liberal in administering God’s mercy and forgiveness when, no matter how heinous the sins were, at the end of the sacrament, I would confer on them the abstinence, restoring them to the grace of God.  Sometimes, the more serious the sin, the more the question would pass my consciousness – am I being too free with God’s mercy to this person?

 

Perhaps part of me had this questionable understanding – we need to be able to deserve the merits of God.  But in truth, grace is not something that we merit in life.  There is this well-known passage in the Gospel, where a rich young man turned down Jesus’ invitation to leave everything and follow him, but Peter, who watched this happening, asked Jesus what those who do give up everything to follow Jesus are going to get in return.  In response, Jesus conveys the parable of the generous land owner and the vineyard workers who were employed at different times of the day, and at the end of the day, all of them were remunerated the same pay regardless of the number of hours they spent laboring in the hot sun.  Those who worked the longer hours in the heat expressed bitterness and unfairness.  In the parable, the vineyard owner (who is God), states that there is no unfairness as everyone has in fact received an over-generous payment.

 

There is a deep lesson in this parable for all of us.  This protestation of unfairness demonstrates that in the end of the world, on judgement day, there will be people who have not been as faithful as we have, but will be still receiving the full mercy and grace of God.  In short, we could be much like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Father, who lived in the love and provision of the father, but was either unhappy or felt it unfair that his younger and petulant brother, who returned at the end of his cavorting and self-pleasure, was enjoying the provision of such splendor and comfort by the same father.

 

What if, in all the Catholic funeral Masses that had been celebrated for the deceased believers, there were many who, unbeknownst to the celebrant priest, had lived a life of complete selfishness and never went for Masses on Sundays?  Was the priest being too liberal in giving them the funeral that saw them off to either the crematorium or the grave?  Would a priest be punished for being too free in dispensing God’s mercy and forgiveness to sinners?  We will only know when we see our judge at the end of our lives.

 

I don’t want to imagine the effect would have on believers if a priest refused a funeral, perhaps for a person who hadn’t been interested in the church all their lives.  And I wonder how many Catholics, reading this blog reflection, would find this story comforting rather than discomforting and disturbing, especially in the light of the strong ethos of the church today where many are nursing the fear that we may be handing out God’s grace and mercy in a haphazard way. 

 

The painful truth is this – grace and mercy, like love in the truest sense, are never given out cheaply.  And like love, it is never truly merited by the receiver.