The readings today bring us to one of the deepest mysteries of our faith, which is the mystery of divine grace. In the gospel reading, we read that "the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed" (Jn 3, 19).
It is true that there are people in this world who prefer to live in darkness rather than to live in the light that Christ is, and it is important that we acknowledge this, otherwise we may become naive about evil. Dr. Murray McGovern was a psychiatrist who tested candidates for the priesthood in the Hamilton diocese, and he tested my good friend who is now a retired priest of that diocese. One of them involved looking at pictures and making up stories that would give meaning to what appears to be happening in the picture. My friend was given a picture of a group of men sitting around a fire by the railway tracks, the other of a woman looking out a window, etc. He made up some story that the men were unemployed because of the great depression, lost their jobs, couldn't find work, and the woman in the other picture was sad because her husband left her for another woman, and so on and so forth. Dr. McGovern afterwards warned my friend, telling him that "there are too many victims in your world. Maybe these men sitting around the fire are in the predicament they are in because of bad choices they made, choices that landed them in their situation. How come you didn't throw that in?" he asked. He said: "Keep in mind that people are very often in the situations they are in because of choices they made; they are not always victims. If you forget that, you are likely going to be deceived and taken advantage of. Evil is real."
However, it is too easy to go from that point to the idea that since I am a person who prefers the light to the darkness, that this was my doing, and I am not like them. And this is a mistake. St. Paul says in the second reading: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. This is not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life" (Eph 2, 8-10).
This is the mystery of divine grace. Father Clair Girodat, C.R., once said to me: "If you don't make it to heaven, it is your fault; if you make it to heaven, it is God's fault". Grace is the indwelling of the Trinity. It is the infused and supernatural presence of God within. Through grace we are deified. We can't earn grace; we are not born in a state of grace; we are born sons of Adam, deprived of interior grace, and so we are born in need of a savior. There is nothing we can do to procure it for ourselves. It is sheer gift.
But we have to cooperate with divine grace: "If today you should hear God's voice, harden not your hearts" (Ps 95, 7-11; Heb 3, 15). Sufficient grace is available to everyone, making it possible for a person to move towards God who is Light from Light, and to achieve the state of sanctifying grace, which is a habitual and an indwelling of the Trinity. But we can refuse to cooperate with sufficient grace, and if we do so, that is our doing. But the mysterious side of this is that if we do cooperate with divine grace, that is itself a grace. Our cooperation is a grace, and the credit goes to God, not us.
Moreover, the sacraments are themselves channels of divine grace. And this is what continues to amaze me about baptism. The parents bring a child to be baptized, the child has no idea what's going on, but what's going is that the child is washed clean of Original Sin, the child receives the grace of regeneration, which means the child is born again as an adopted son or daughter of God, filled with the new life of grace; the child receives the seven personal gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, piety, fortitude, and fear of God, as seeds planted in the soul that have the potential to flower; and the child receives as sheer gift the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, virtues which we cannot give to ourselves-they have to be given by God, and so if you have faith in the Person of Christ, that he is who he says he is, that he died for our sins and rose from the dead, etc., that's the gift of faith, and without that gift, you and I would simply not believe what we in fact believe about Christ. And, the child is anointed priest, prophet and king, which is our new identity in the Person of Christ. We are made to share in Christ's priesthood. And all of that is given in baptism, and the child is oblivious to it, and more to the point, the child did nothing to deserve it.
And it is the same for us in the adult world. If we find ourselves immersed in the light of Christ's kingdom, it is all gift. We can't take any credit for it. It's not because of something we did on our own that earned us a place in his kingdom: all glory and honor are his, none of it ours. We can never pray that prayer of the Pharisee, who said: 'O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity - greedy, dishonest, adulterous - or even like this tax collector." It was the tax collector who had the right idea when he said: 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.' Our situation is more like Zacchaeus who climbed the sycamore tree to see Jesus passing by, and was then approached by Jesus, who said to Zacchaeus, today I must stay at your house. Christ approached him first and invited himself to his house; Zacchaeus let it happen, and the result of this meeting with Jesus was a profound conversion: "Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over" (Lk 19, 8). Christ did not command this; it was the result of the proximity of Christ.
And so we cannot divide the world into us and them. Christ died for us while we were sinners (Rom 5, 8). We didn't earn anything other than condemnation, but Jesus came not to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
So the most effective prayer is to pray for those in the world who prefer darkness, to pray that the Lord may approach them, draw near to them, and give them the grace and the freedom to prefer light over darkness, to save them, as he saved us without doing anything to deserve it. And we can pray with confidence, because although some people prefer darkness to light, the light is more powerful than darkness; light chases the darkness, not vice versa. Christ has defeated the kingdom of darkness; he defeated sin and death; he rose from the dead. So it is light and love that will have the final word over humanity. As St. Paul said in his letter to the Phillipians, "God the Father highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess, to the glory of God the Father, that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil 2, 9-11).