During the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin, a French theologian, used this passage, in large part, to develop the doctrine of predestination, according to which God has determined from all eternity who will go to Heaven and who will go to Hell. Calvin's view of predestination became a core tenet of Calvinism, which came to be known as Presbyterianism. Today, the various branches of Presbyterianism still affirm the concept of predestination, but most have moved away from the strict Calvinist interpretation, and many would agree with the Catholic position on the question.
Catholic teaching has always rejected the idea of double predestination, the view that all people's eternal state has been decided by God, even before they are born. If God has already determined who will be saved and who will be damned, then human history has no existential meaning. In that case, our actions, good or bad, wouldn't matter at all. Choosing God's grace would not cause us to live eternally with him, nor would rejecting his grace separate us from him. Instead, we would just be playing out a prewritten script.
The Catholic Church has always taught that our moral actions are meaningful. Whether or not we choose God's grace in any given situation makes a difference. In fact, it would be unjust of God if our eternal state were determined without any reference to the choices we make in this life. In that case, what would be the point of seeking to lead a good life in this world? Also, if God had already determined our eternal state from all eternity, then what would be the point of Jesus coming among us as God Incarnate and dying for us on the Cross to offer us salvation? Why would Jesus suffer such torment to offer up his life as a sacrifice for humanity if our eternal fate had already been prewritten, regardless of whether or not we accept Christ's offer of salvation? The love that Christ shows us would then be meaningless.
In fact, true love requires free will. One of the key premises of Catholic theology is the tenet that God is love and he created the world in order to share his love with us. For us to be able to experience his love meaningfully, we have to be able to accept or reject God's love. If we choose God's love, embracing his grace fully through Christ, we will experience eternal blessedness, the complete fulfillment of the human heart. If we reject God's love, we will separate ourselves from our only source of true happiness and will plunge ourselves into a state of eternal darkness and suffering. God wants only our happiness. But he will not force his love upon us, forcing us to love him back. That would not be true love. It is for us to choose his love and to love him back.
By creating free will so that we could experience his love meaningfully, God takes a risks. He takes the risk that some of the beings he has created will not accept his love and thereby will choose self-destruction and eternal separation from him. God takes this risks because he loves us enough to let us experience his love meaningfully, which means that we are free to choose. Thus, we might say that Hell, paradoxically, is a byproduct of love, of the meaningful offer of love.
Catholic theology also teaches that God always gives us the grace to make good choices. Not just here and there, but all the time, in every moment, in every situation. We need God's grace to choose well, and he always gives us his grace. However, if we lead a sinful life, then over time our sins can harden our hearts and we become less and less able to recognize God's grace. Also, the way we treat others can have a profound impact on their ability to choose God's grace. If we are channels or God's love to others, they can more easily embrace God's love. But if we act with hate toward others, we can push them to harden their hearts and to become closed to God's love. In a tragic scene in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, the evil creature Gollum comes very close to choosing the path of goodness, but the meanness of the otherwise good character Sam pushes him to choose the path of evil after all. In the scene, Gollum still has free will. But Sam makes it much harder for him to choose good, and the little flicker of love within him is extinguished.
But one objection that one might raise to the foregoing line of thought has to do with God's foreknowledge of things. If God already knows what is going to happen, does that not take away our ability to decide? The answer is no. Time is a created reality that God made for our human experience, but God is above time, not bound by time in any way. Instead, for God everything is in the eternal now. There is no past and future, but only now. To go back to The Lord of the Rings, if I have the books in front of me, the whole story is before me right now. I can look at the story at any point. To read a scene towards the end, I would not need to begin at the start and read through all the chapters leading to it. In an analogous way, God sees all of creation history right now, in the eternal now. To say that God foreknows is simply a metaphor. God knows. God sees all, our past, present, and future, right now, all at once.
But, another object that might be raised is, why then does the passage from the Second Reading speak of predestination at all? The way that the Church has interpreted that passage historically is not that God predestines whether or not we will choose or reject him, but that he has predetermined what he has in store for those who do choose him. And what is that?
As discussed in prior reflections, the Holy Trinity is an eternal love dynamic. The Father pours out his infinite love to the Son infinitely, eternally, who reciprocates his love infinitely, eternally, and the love that is between the Father and the Son is the infinite, eternal love that is the Holy Spirit. Christ, who is God incarnate, came among us to save us from our sins, but not just to cleanse us. He also came to offer us participation in that eternal love dynamic that is the Holy Trinity.
If we are baptized into Christ and live the life he established for us through the Church, we will dwell eternally in the heart of the Holy Trinity, forever partaking of the infinite love that flows among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God offers us the greatest gift that human beings can receive. No wonder then that in the Gospel Reading for this Sunday, Christ compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a great treasure or a pearl of great price for which a person would give up everything. The gift that Christ offers us is beyond anything and everything else. Let us, therefore, focus our whole lives on Christ, the treasure, the pearl beyond all other value. Let us be fully, completely, 100% Christocentric in our lives.
||
The readings for Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A are:
1 Kings 3:5, 7-12
Psalm 119:57, 72, 76-77, 127-128, 129-130
Romans 8:28-30
Matthew 13:44-52
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Image Credit: Christ on the Cross, Anonymous, from Wikimedia Commons.
