From: Romans 3:21-30
Righteousness, a Free Gift through Faith in Christ
[27] Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On
the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith. [28] For we hold that a
man is justified by faith apart from works of law. [29] Or is God the God of Jews
only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, [30] since God
is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the un-
circumcised through their faith.
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Commentary:
21-22. The doctrinal richness of this text and of the whole passage (vv. 21-26) is
here condensed in a way very typical of St Paul’s style. He explains how justifi-
cation operates: God the Father, the source of all good, by his redemptive de-
cree is the “efficient cause” of our salvation; Jesus Christ, by shedding his blood
on the Cross, merits this salvation for us; faith is the instrument by which the Re-
demption becomes effective in the individual person.
The righteousness of God is the action by which God makes people righteous,
or just (cf. St Augustine, “De Spiritu Et Littera”, IX, 15). This righteousness was
originally proclaimed in the books of the Old Testament—the Law and the Pro-
phets — but it has now been made manifest in Christ and in the Gospel. Salva-
tion does not depend on fulfillment of the Mosaic Law, for that Law is not suffi-
cient to justify anyone: only faith in Jesus Christ can work salvation.
“If anyone says that, without divine grace through Jesus Christ, man can be jus-
tified before God by his own works, whether they were done by his natural po-
wers or by the light of the teaching of the Law: let him be anathema” (Council
of Trent, “De Iustificatione”, can. 1).
It is not the law, then, which saves, but “faith in Jesus Christ”. This expression
should be interpreted in line with the unanimous and constant teaching of the
Church, which is that “faith is the beginning of human salvation”, and a person’s
will must cooperate with faith to prepare the ground for the grace of justification
(cf. ibid., chap. 8 and can. 9).
23-26. The Apostle first describes the elements that go to make up the mystery
of faith (vv. 23-25): all men need to be liberated from sin; God the Father has a re-
demptive plan, which is carried out by the atoning and bloody sacrifice of Christ’s
death; faith is a necessary condition for sharing in the Redemption wrought by
Christ; the sacrifice of the Cross is part and parcel of the History of Salvation: be-
fore the Incarnation of the Word, God patiently put up with men’s sins; in the full-
ness of time he chose—through Christ’s sacrifice—to require full satisfaction for
those sins so that men might be enabled to become truly righteous in God’s
eyes and God’s perfections become more manifest.
“The Cross of Christ, on which the Son, consubstantial with the Father, renders
full justice to God, is also a radical revelation of mercy, that is, of the love that
goes against what constitutes the very root of evil in the history of man—against
sin and death” (Bl. John Paul II, “Dives In Misericordia”, 8).
23. “Fall short of the glory of God”: this shows the position man is in when he is
in a state of sin. Because he has not the life of grace in him, he is not properly
orientated towards his supernatural end, is deprived of the right to heaven that
sanctifying grace confers, and consequently does not have these divine perfec-
tions which supernatural life gives him.
24. All have been justified, that is, all have been made “righteous” (cf. 1 :17).
This justification is the result of a gratuitous gift of God which St Paul describes
in a way which reinforces his point (”grace”; “as a gift”): this identifies the source
of the gift as God’s loving-kindness and it also shows the new state in which
justification places a person so important is this statement—that grace is a gift
which God gives without merit on our part—that the Council of Trent, when using
this text from St Paul, made a point of explaining what it meant: that is, that no-
thing which precedes justification (whether it be faith, or morals) merits the grace
by which man is justified (cf. Rom 11:16; Council of Trent, “De Iustificatione”,
chap. 8).
This new kind of life, whose motor is grace, requires free and active cooperation
on man’s part; by that cooperation a person in the state of grace obtains merit
through his actions: “For such is God’s goodness to men that he wills that his
gifts be our merits, and that he will grant us an eternal reward for what he has gi-
ven us” (”Indiculus”, chap. 9). The fact that grace is a gratuitous gift of God does
not mean that man does not have an obligation to respond to it: we are not justi-
fied by keeping the Law or by a decision of our free will; however, justification
does not happen without our cooperation; grace strengthens our will and helps
it freely to keep the Law (cf. St Augustine, “De Spiritu Et Littera”, IX, 15).
Justification by grace is attained “through the redemption which is in Jesus
Christ”. The Council of Trent teaches that when a sinner is justified there is “a
passing from the state in which man is born a son of the first Adam, to the state
of grace and adoption as sons of God through the second Adam, Jesus Christ
our Savior” (”De Iustificatione”, chap. 4). This has been made possible because
our Lord saved us by giving himself up as our ransom. The Greek word transla-
ted as “redemption” refers to the ransom money paid to free a person from sla-
very. Christ has freed us from the slavery of sin, paying the necessary ransom
(cf. Rom 6:23). By sacrificing himself for us, Christ has become our master or
owner, who mediates between the Father and the whole human race: “Let us
all take refuge in Christ; let us have recourse to God to free us from sin: let us
put ourselves up for sale in order to be redeemed by his blood. For the Lord says,
‘You were sold for nothing, and you shall be redeemed without money’ (Is 52:3);
without spending a penny of your inheritance, for I have paid on your behalf. This
is what the Lord says: He paid the price, not with silver but with his blood” (St
Augustine, “In Ioann. Evang.”, 41, 4).
Our very creation means that we belong totally to God the Father and therefore
also to Christ, insofar as he is God, but “as man, he is also for many reasons
appropriately called ‘Lord’. First, because he is our Redeemer, who delivered us
from sin, he deservedly acquired the power by which he truly is and is called our
Lord” (”St Pius V Catechism”, I, 3, 11).
And so, through the Incarnation, whose climax was Christ’s redemptive sacrifice,
“God gave human life the dimension that he intended man to have from his first
beginning; he has granted that dimension definitively [...] and he has granted it
also with the bounty that enables us, in considering the original sin and the
whole history of the sins of humanity, and in considering the errors of the human
intellect, will and heart, to repeat with amazement the words of the sacred Litur-
gy: ‘O happy fault...which gained us so great a Redeemer!’” (Bl. John Paul II,
“Redemptor Hominis”, 1).
25. The “expiation” was the cover or mercy seat of the Ark, which stood in the
center of the Holy of Holies in the Temple (cf. Exod 25:17-22). It was made of
beaten gold and had a cherub at either end, each facing the other. It had two func-
tions: one was to act as God’s throne (cf. Ps 80:2; 99:1), from which he spoke to
Moses during the time of the exodus from Egypt (cf. Num 7:89; Exod 37:6); the
other was to entreat God to pardon sin through a rite of expiatory sacrifice on the
feast of the Day of Atonement (cf. Lev 16): on that day the High Priest sprinkled
the mercy seat with the blood of animals sacrificed as victims, to obtain forgive-
ness of sins for priest and people.
St Paul asserts that God has established Jesus as the true expiation, of which
the mercy seat in the Old Testament was merely a figure.
No angel or man could ever atone for the immense evil that sin is — an offense to
the infinite majesty of God. The Blessed Trinity decided “that the Son of God,
whose power is infinite, clothed in the weakness of our flesh, should remove the
infinite weight of sin and reconcile us to God in his Blood” (”St Pius V Catechism”,
I, 3, 3).
This expiatory sacrifice, prefigured in the bloody sacrificial rites of the Old Testa-
ment (cf. Lev 16:1 ff), was announced by John the Baptist when he pointed to Je-
sus as the Lamb of God (cf. Jn 1:29 and note); and Jesus himself referred to the
sacrifice of the Cross when he said that the Son of man had come “to give his
life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20:28).
This sacrifice is renewed daily in the Holy Mass, one of the purposes of which is
atonement, as the Liturgy itself states: “Lord, may this sacrifice once offered on
the cross to take away the sins of the world now free us from our sins” (”Roman
Missal”, Feast of the Triumph of the Cross, prayer over the gifts).
26. In the time prior to Christ’s coming the sins of mankind remained unatoned
for: neither the rites designed by man to placate God’s anger, nor those estab-
lished by God himself in the Old Law, were in any way equal to atoning for the
offense offered to God by sin. Therefore, the just of the Old Testament were real-
ly justified by virtue of their faith in the future Messiah, a faith which expressed
itself in observance of the rites established by God.
During all this period the Lord kept deferring punishment (”passing over former
sins”). This time of “God’s forbearance” lasted until the messianic era “the pre-
sent time”, that is, the period between the first and second comings of Christ.
On the righteousness of God and God as the Justifier of man, see note on Rom
1:17.
27-31. These words are addressed to the same imaginary interlocutor as ap-
peared at the beginning of the chapter. Although he is Lord of all nations, God
showed special preference for the people of Israel. Relying on this, the Jews
wrongly thought that only they could attain blessedness because only they en-
joyed God’s favor. This led them to look down on other peoples. After the co-
ming of Christ, they no longer have any basis for this pride: St John Chrysostom
explains that it had simply become outdated, superseded (cf. “Hom. On Rom”,
7), for God had set up a single way of salvation for all men—the “principle of faith”
which the Apostle refers to. This new way means that Jews must forget their an-
cient pride and become humble, for God has opened the gates of salvation to all
mankind.
Consequently, no one—not even the Jew—is justified by works of the Law. What
justifies a person is faith: not faith alone, as Luther wrongly argued, but the faith
which works through charity (cf. Gal 5:6); faith which is not presumptuous self-
confidence in one’s own merits, but a firm and ready acceptance of all that God
has revealed, faith which moves one to place one’s hope in Christ’s merits and to
repent of one’s sins. Therefore it will be “by faith”—not by circumcision—that the
Jews will be justified, and it will be “through their faith” that the uncircumcised
will attain salvation. From this it might appear as though the Law had been re-
voked; ut that is not the case: faith ratifies the Law gives it its true meaning and
raises it to perfection. For, through being a preparation for the Gospel, the Mo-
saic Law receives from Christ the fullness it was lacking: the precept of charity
reveals the meaning which God gave the law but which lay hidden until Christ
made it manifest, for “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom 13:10). St Paul in a
way summarizes all this teaching in v. 28, which is the key statement in the
passage.
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.
From: Luke 11:47-54:
The Hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees (Continuation)
[53] As He went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press
Him hard, and to provoke Him to speak of many things, [54] lying in wait for Him,
to catch at something He might say.
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Commentary:
51. Zechariah was a prophet who died by being stoned in the temple of Jerusa-
lem around the year 800 B.C. because he accused the people of Israel of being
unfaithful to God’s law (cf. 2 Chronicles 24:20-22). The murder of Abel (Genesis
4:8) and that of Zechariah were, respectively, the first and last murders reported
in these books which the Jews regarded as Sacred Scripture. Jesus refers to a
Jewish tradition which, in His own time and even later, pointed out the stain of
the blood of Zechariah.
The altar referred to here was the altar of holocausts, located outside, in the
courtyard of the priests, in front of the temple proper.
52. Jesus severely reproaches these doctors of the Law who, given their study
and meditation on Scripture, were the very ones who should have recognized
Jesus as the Messiah, since His coming had been foretold in the sacred books.
However, as we learn from the Gospel, the exact opposite happened. Not only
did they not accept Jesus: they obstinately opposed Him. As teachers of the
Law they should have taught the people to follow Jesus; instead, they blocked
the way.
53-54. St. Luke frequently records this attitude of our Lord’s enemies (cf. 6:11;
19:47-48; 20:19-20; 22:2). The people followed Jesus and were enthusiastic
about His preaching and miracles, whereas the Pharisees and scribes would
not accept Him and would not allow the people to follow Him; they tried in every
way to discredit Him in the eyes of the people (cf. John 11:48).
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.