The true reward for holiness

In the book of Wisdom, we encounter a powerful passage that has evildoers wanting to test the righteous.

The evildoers say that the righteous one makes them uncomfortable by his holy living, so ‘We’ll test him with insult and torture, find out just how gentle he is and test that patience of his’ (2:19). In other words, let us see whether he really believes it. Let’s see if God will really take his side.

This insight into the nature of evil—that it is disturbed and fascinated by goodness, that it seeks to destroy what shines light on evil, what calls for repentance—is a profound one. Pope Benedict XVI pointed out how this insight of Hebraic wisdom was also found in Greek philosophy. In his Introduction to Christianity, he mentions how moving it is for a Christian to read in Plato that the good man will be crucified. (We might also think of how this passage in Wisdom makes a similar point to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.) For us, the passage points directly at the cross. It shines a light on that deepest of mysteries: God becoming human to bear our sins and die in atonement.

In his online reflection on Palm Sunday, Abbot Jeremy Driscoll OSB (of Mount Angel Abbey, Oregon) draws our attention to a specific feature of St Mark’s account of the passion of our Lord. He points to the taunts of the onlookers directed at Christ on the cross: how they keep telling him to come down.

Come down to save yourself. Come down if you really are the Christ. Come down to prove that God really is on your side.

This revealed the dynamic of evil coming to pass in the face of true holiness.

However, the final section of that Wisdom passage goes still further:

This is how they reasoned but they were misled, for their wickedness made them blind. They knew not the secrets of God, had no hope of the reward of holiness, nor belief in the prize for innocence (2:21–22).

Evil thinks that God shows power by saving himself, that God’s followers show themselves to be righteous by saving themselves. In fact, God shows God’s power by refusing to come down from the cross. God shows God’s power by remaining in solidarity with sinners, by suffering the consequences of our sins, by offering his innocence and holiness in atonement for the evil we have done.

This is the great blessing of sharing in the cross of Christ: we offer ourselves in Christ for our brothers and sisters. We offer what we have first received: God’s love made human in Jesus.

This is the reality that evil can never understand, never foresee: the ‘hope of the reward of holiness’ and ‘belief in the prize for innocence’.

What the blinding light of God’s love hides from their eyes is that the hope of holiness is precisely that sinners will be reconciled with God. Christ, a blameless soul, shares his reward with blameworthy souls, if we but repent and believe in the Good News—the Good News that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. God’s love is directed at those who seek to destroy God.

In our Third Eucharistic Prayer, we hear: ‘May he [Christ] make of us an eternal offering to you [the Father] so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect.’ The elect, as the Body of Christ, share in the inheritance of Christ—namely, souls redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice.

This is the great blessing of sharing in the cross of Christ: we offer ourselves in Christ for our brothers and sisters. We offer what we have first received: God’s love made human in Jesus.

Let’s pray this Holy Week that we can enter more deeply into these mysteries: of Christ’s ultimate act of love on the cross, the revelation that this is the face of God, and our graced invitation to participate in the work of God, giving ourselves for the life of the world.