Ordinary things bring extraordinary graces

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C 
First Reading: 2 Kgs 5:14-17 
Second Reading: 2 Tim 2:8-13 
Gospel Reading: Lk 17:11-19

This Sunday, we hear how God healed lepers. In the first reading, Naaman had to wash in the Jordan River. In the Gospel reading, the lepers had to show themselves to the priests.

Of course, it is always God who cures – not Elisha, the water, or the obedience to Moses’ law. However, the washing in the Jordan and the willingness to report to the priests seem to be essential.

The same can be said of the sacraments of the New Testament. It is God who accomplishes what they bring about, but words and physical signs are essential: in baptism, washing with water; in confirmation, anointing with chrism; in the Eucharist, bread and wine; in penance, the words of absolution; in the sacrament of the sick, anointing with oil; in holy orders, the “laying on of hands”; and in matrimony, the consent followed by sexual intercourse.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the sacraments “signs of grace” instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church to dispense divine life to us. Just as our economy, by which we share the results of our labour, is capitalistic, so the Church’s economy, by which she dispenses God’s grace, is sacramental.

Humans, who are body and soul, perceive and express spiritual things through physical signs and symbols like words and gestures. We should not be surprised, for God made and loves both the physical and the spiritual. His own son became nan, “a descendant of David,” with a body like ours.

We call sacramental signs efficacious because they actually bring about the realities they signify.

The airplane you see on signs near the airport signifies flight, but it does not make you fly. Contrast this sign, from a church billboard: “If you’re waiting for a sign from God to come back to church, this is it.” This sign does (at least partly) accomplish what it signifies.

In everyday life, we often do something by saying something. We contract legal marriages by saying “I take you to be my wife” or husband. In the navy, a man becomes a ship’s captain by reading the admiralty commands aloud in front of the ship’s company. Linguists call such acts speech acts, for the words actually effect the realities of which they are the signs.

Still, we may well ask how the spiritual realities signified by the sacraments can be brought about by words or physical signs. Only “the power of the Holy Spirit” and “the action of Christ” make it possible, says the Catechism.

The Latin sacramentum meant “oath.” The word was used for the most solemn oath of allegiance made by a soldier and for the pledge deposited by the parties in a civil suit.

Now it is by oaths that covenants are made, and it is by covenant that God adopts us and gives us his divine life. In the Bible, oath and covenant are virtually interchangeable.

The sacraments, then, are God’s pledges or oaths: solemn promises he has sworn to grant us his grace, or favour, in response to our performance of certain words or actions.

To make inanimate objects do things, all we need is force. To make animals do things, we must supply the right stimulus. When it comes to humans, we must ask them; it is wrong to force them, control them, or manipulate them.

Our minds, then, boggle at the claim that human words or actions can make God, our Creator, grant us his favour. Yet that is the truth. In the sacraments, God has bound himself by the most solemn oaths to dispense his favour in response to our signals.

Let us never despise sacramental symbols, then. If God asked us to do something extraordinary in order to live forever, would we not do it? All the more, then, should we do as he says: confess our sins to a priest, eat his body, and drink his blood.