Grace and Division
Lent Day 20
“So a division occurred in the crowd because of him.”
— John 7:43—
Becoming Catholic was an incredible grace in my life. So much so, that I think I became more Calvinist in my understanding of grace than I did as a Protestant. That is not to say it was irresistible, but in the sense that it was unearned.
All of us have had these encounters at one point or another. We usually call them “luck.” Some, like myself, tend to use the theological carpet bomb of a phrase, “it was providential.” But it’s probably better that we call these fortuitous moments grace. Moments of grace are not chance, nor are they shrouded in the mystery of God’s will. Grace is actually God revealing his will for your life and calling you to cooperate with him (can’t be too Calvinist 😜).
As I read tonight’s passage I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I had already beaten the Protestant / Catholic divide to death in my writings in the Eucharist, and I didn’t feel like belaboring the point. Then low and behold, tonight’s passage read, “So a division occurred in the crowd because of him.”
I shut the book and thought, “I guess God doesn’t want me to write tonight.” But I felt the nudge to take another look at the passage and attempt to discuss division from a different perspective. The perspective of grace.
God and the Problem of Division
One of my favorite topics in seminary was “The Problem of Evil.” It manifests itself everywhere. From the “just not quite right” things of life to the “God, why?” moments of human existence, the problem raises its ugly head seemingly everywhere. The core answer to the problem is ultimately a reasonable faith.
The solution to the problem relies on us recognizing that in order to wield infinite power rightly, i.e., to achieve the maximal amount of good, we would also need to be infinitely knowledgeable. Otherwise, giving a flawed human being infinite power would, well, probably end up only exacerbating the Problem of Evil, not solving it.
So at its core, the solution recognizes that God is God, and we are not. In short, humility is a reasonable solution to the Problem of Evil that plagues our interior lives, even though we may prefer the more sterile and academic ones of the classroom or cocktail party.
A similar problem arises here with the problem of division and exclusive truth. Why would God, who desires all his people to be one, be so divisive? Even in his covenant with Abraham, God tells him to divide animal carcasses in half and walk through them. Jesus here is seen as the cause of the division — “…because of him” the text says. In another place, he says, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”
The answer to how division is used by God, at least based on my own experience, is the result of the relationship between grace and divine wisdom.
Grace & Wisdom
It is very difficult to become Catholic for a Protestant. There must be two things present: grace and love for the truth. Grace is God’s act in your life. He opens your eyes to something that you knew before, but now you realize it is actually true. But you’re afraid because you know that the implications of this truth are:
It requires your submission.
It will cost you.
Somewhere in the journey towards Catholicism, you realize that as a Protestant, you believe something that is not consistent with reality, that truth is exclusive, but Protestantism is relative. Christianity’s primary tenet, “the way, the truth, and the life”, cannot mean everyone is right. Christian Protestants who start to recognize this seem to fall into an accepted agnosticism or a hyper-rationalism that no Christian can follow. I waffled between the two myself, never really accepting one or the other.
This is a dark place in the life of a Christian. It’s especially clear how dark it is looking back from within the Church. The enemy would much rather you believe you need to “figure out” Christianity by your own intellectual perseverance and prowess rather than just accept the teachings of Christianity so that you can truly experience the depth of the Christian faith and its call on your life.
But it’s in these dark moments that grace comes. Maybe it’s one too many “coincidences”, a friend who says they had a weird dream about you that is extremely specific to a conversation you’re having right then; maybe it’s because you were cured of rare cancer after praying the rosary for the first time; maybe you start a podcast and decide you're gonna investigate Catholicism for your episodes, and you suddenly realize the godliest men on your bookshelf are Catholic. Whatever it is, there is an infinite chasm between researching or reading about facts to realizing that something is true and you’re being asked to make a decision.
God’s wisdom uses division, as crazy as it may sound, to simultaneously reveal that “not everyone can be right”, that you really do want the truth, and prove his grace by shining a little bit of light on the confusion from that City on the Hill, the Church. Grace is a necessary piece of any conversion, and it’s clear that those Catholics who prayed for us, in Heaven and on Earth, are a major reason for that. Those of us with a more intellectual bent of the faith need to remember it was not our intellects that brought us to the fullness of Christ, it was grace. A grace that can only come from divine wisdom that mysteriously orchestrates the prayers of the faithful, the despair of confusion, and the grace of heaven to bring us to the fullness of the truth.
God is good.
— DR