Coming Home to God in Christ

Justification, sanctification, salvation, reconciliation
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But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved--and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. [Ephesians 2:4-6]

This cluster of words which have similar meanings, are not easy for even mature Christians to understand. Let's take justification first.

When a little girl, let's call her Mary, has been caught taking a dollar out of her mother's purse, she might offer a "justification" for the wrong-doing. "Well, I didn't think you would mind!" The justification, as weak as it might be, is an attempt to do two things. By offering this justification, Mary attempts to justify the act itself and She also is trying to bring herself back into right relationship with her mom who is upset with her.

Mary should probably worry about justifying her behavior, but she shouldn't have to worry about the relationship between her and her mother. If mom and Mary have a healthy relationship, Mary will always be most loved by her mother. That's not what she should have to worry about. Mom might say something like, "I don't approve of what you did, but I will always love you. You know that right? "

That's precisely what Paul means by justification by faith. We should take it on faith that God will love us no matter what. We still have to worry about justifying bad behavior and refrain from doing such things again. But the relationship between God and us never needs justification because it has been proven through God's gift of Jesus Christ. We are justified. We are accepted. And by faith, we are able to accept our acceptance.

Justification is an especially difficult word to understand because it is a word borrowed from the courts of law and it is not used with this sense in common conversation in our time. It is a legal word. Likewise, a word with similar meaning--"reconciliation"--is borrowed from the world of accounting. In the letter of Romans, Paul seems to like this word when discussing the process by which God calls creation back to the purposes for which God created all things. "God is at work in Christ reconciling the world to himself."

When you "reconcile" your bank book you make the bank and you "One." This is Christ's good work for us. Christ reconciles the world to God, the creator of the world.

Justification means in the simplest terms, being made right. As Paul says to the Church at Ephesus, because God is always and everywhere merciful, even while were sinners, God was at work in Christ to make us right with God, or as he puts it "saved" us.

Salvation, which comes from the Latin word for "healing" (salvus from which we get the English word salve) is yet another word used to describe this process of coming home to God. It's a medical word. And it has the sense of healing the laceration (or what C.S. Lewis called the "Great Divorce") between God and humanity. Christ is a salve for our wounded hearts which feel at times so utterly distant from God. Christ brings us home. A "glad heavenly reunion" for which we have a foretaste in this life.

All these words place the emphasis on God's work on our behalf. The sense we have in scripture is that God desparately desires for us to come home. There is little we can do to improve on God's rich desire. It's better for us to pay attention to our own sins and keep ourselves holy and ready for God's coming toward us by regular attendance in Church, receiving the Sacrament of Holy Communion, prayer, fasting, penance. That last sense is what is meant, in part, by Sanctification.