One of the most unpleasant words in the English language is ‘sanctimonious’. It’s a word we use to describe someone who makes a show of being morally superior to other people. Expressions meaning much the same are ‘self-righteous’, ‘holier-than-thou’, ‘goody-goody’ and ‘Pharisaical’ — all equally unpleasant, and terms we’d not like to be described by.
Sanctimonious’ is one of various English words derived from the Latin word ‘sanctus’, meaning ‘holy’, which also gives us the word ‘saint’ — a very holy person. Other words from the same source are ‘sanctify’ and ‘sanctification’, which are words we’ll explore further.
‘Sanctify’ is the verb formed from ‘sanctus’. It literally means ‘to make something holy or sacred’. Words meaning much the same include ‘bless’, ‘consecrate’ and ‘sanction’. For example, we say that during a Communion service the Minister sanctifies or consecrates the bread and the wine, by which we mean that he or she sets them apart as holy, separate from their common everyday use, because they represent the body and blood of Jesus sacrificed on the cross. Similarly, the Catholic Church sanctifies people who are being declared saints. For example, in 2010 Sister Mary McKillop was canonised, or sanctified, by Pope Benedict XVI as Saint Mary MacKillop, thus becoming Australia’s first official saint.
A closely related word is ‘sanctity’, which is a quality all saints share. It means possessing the quality of holiness or sacredness in super-abundance.
And now for ‘sanctification’, which means the process of acquiring sanctity, i.e. of being or becoming holy or sacred. Sanctification isn’t a word we commonly use in everyday speech, but it’s one much discussed by theologians. Most of the major Christian denominations — Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Wesleyan, Salvation Army and Pentecostalist — have all developed teachings on sanctification.
To a greater or lesser extent, they all teach that humans may achieve sanctification, but only as a gift from God. It’s not a condition we achieve through our own effort but is a state of holiness and moral perfection into which we are elevated by God’s grace through our faith in Christ and through living Christlike lives.
Interestingly, our own Uniting Church is one that doesn’t have a specific pronouncement on sanctification, though we could argue that the idea of being sanctified is implicit in our foundation document, The Basis of Union. For example, The Basis of Union points out that ‘Christ’s people may again and again be reminded of the grace which justifies them through faith [and] of the centrality of the person and work of Christ the justifier’. It also declares that ‘the Uniting Church will seek ways in which the baptized may have confirmed to them the promises of God, and be led to deeper commitment to the faith’. But that’s about as close as it gets to sanctification. I might be wrong, but ‘sanctify’, ‘sanctification’ and ‘sanctified’ are words which I can’t find anywhere in The Basis of Union.
Contrast that situation with the Salvation Army’s 11-point declaration of faith, point 10 of which proclaims that ‘it is the privilege of all believers to be wholly sanctified, and that their whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ’.
Strangely, ‘sanctify’, ‘sanctification’ and ‘sanctified’ are notions not much discussed in Scripture. Do a ‘word-count’ and you’ll find they’re mentioned only 55 times in the Bible, 39 of these — 71% — in the Old Testament. They’re mentioned only 16 times in the New Testament, all but two of those in either Acts or the Epistles of Paul and Peter. The two exceptions are in the Gospel of John, both in Chapter 17, when Jesus speaks them in a prayer during the Last Supper.
This is the setting: Jesus has already washed his disciples’ feet; they have had their meal together; he has explained to them that he will be betrayed and killed. Before leaving the room and leading them to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he will soon be arrested, he offers a long prayer, part of which we heard in this morning’s Gospel reading. He uses ‘sanctify’ and ‘sanctified’ three times in the space of three short verses. Referring to his disciples, he prays, saying, “[Father], sanctify them [the disciples] by your truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have also sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they may also be sanctified by the truth.”
Those three utterances of ‘sanctify’–‘sanctified’ are the only times Jesus is reported as using the words. Nowhere else in the Gospels are these words mentioned. They’re accordingly rare, special words in Jesus’s vocabulary. They’re also somewhat enigmatic because he uses them each time in association in association with ‘the truth’ — God’s truth. “Sanctify them by your truth,” he says; and again, “May they also be sanctified by the truth.”
What exactly was he saying here? What was he asking God his Father to do?
The way I read it, Jesus was asking God to set his disciples apart as dedicated holy men who will live out the truth of God’s word. He wants them to be purified, freed of their human faults so they can be like him — pure and sinless in thought, word and deed. He wants them to be transformed, raised above the common herd to become wholly obedient to God’s will. He is asking for them to be so inspired by God’s love that they will devote their lives to spreading the truth of the message that Jesus came to proclaim, carrying on the work of evangelism where Jesus left off. They will go out into the world, dedicating their lives to proclaiming by word and deed that God is love, that he offers sinful humans new life through faith in Jesus, and that the blameless Christlike life which Jesus lived is the gold standard for human behaviour.
Putting it another way, they need to understand the truth about God. The truth is that God loves them and all humanity, and that he sent Jesus among them to demonstrate God’s love. This is all that really matters. If they are ‘sanctified by the truth’, they will be purified from their sins, set aside for the sacred task of preaching Christ crucified and risen, and so fired up with enthusiasm for spreading God’s word that that’s what they’ll henceforth dedicate their lives to.
Sanctification is an idea taken up later by both Peter and Paul. In 1 Peter 1:2, Peter announces his credentials in the letter he wrote to Christians scattered through Asia Minor. He says he is ‘elect’ and ‘sanctified of the Spirit’. That is, he has been set apart and purified for the purpose of proclaiming to them the resurrection of Jesus and the mercy of God which the resurrection represents.
Paul makes more of sanctification than Peter does. It’s a theme he returns to in Acts and in his Epistles to the Corinthians and Thessalonians. As Paul is being examined by King Agrippa, after being rescued from Jews who had sworn an oath to kill him, in Acts 26:18, he tells Agrippa that he was preaching “to open their eyes in order to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in [Christ]”. We don’t know what Agrippa made of the idea of sanctification, but we do know he decided Paul was innocent.
Paul also wrote about sanctification in his letters to the Corinthians and Thessalonians. He starts 1 Corinthians by saying he is addressing his letter “to the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Jesus Christ, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours”.
Later in 1 Corinthians, 6:11, Paul compliments the people of the church there for having turned their lives around after accepting Jesus. “Before you turned to Christ,” he wrote, “you were cheats, fornicators, idolators, adulterers, drunkards, extortioners; but in turning to Jesus and being converted to Christianity you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”
In 1 Thessalonians 5:23 Paul gives a blessing to his audience, saying “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In 2 Thessalonians 2:13 he tells his audience they must give thanks to God because they have been “beloved by God” and “from the beginning [God] chose [them] for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in truth.”
Sadly, that’s just about it for ‘sanctified’ and ‘sanctification’ in the New Testament. It’s not really a great deal, is it? Only 16 references to it, as I said earlier. Despite that, most Christian denominations have developed doctrines about it, as I also pointed out.
Let’s now look at what one of those denominations says about sanctification — the Methodists. I’ll concentrate on them because I grew up Methodist; and so that’s the one I’m most familiar with. The Methodists, who here in Australia were subsumed within the Uniting Church 41 years ago, follow the teaching of John Wesley. Wesley’s goal for his followers was ‘Christian perfection’ — the imitation of Jesus Christ in thought, word and deed. Wesley taught them that if they tried to live Christlike lives, modelling their own on Jesus Christ’s, eventually they would be sanctified. They would achieve the perfect state of holiness of Jesus.
The Methodist teaching on sanctification was written into the ‘Articles of Religion’, which is the Methodists’ statement of faith — their equivalent of our Basis of Union. Here’s the ‘Article’ or clause dealing with sanctification:
“Sanctification is that renewal of our fallen nature by the Holy Ghost, received through faith in Jesus Christ, whose blood of atonement cleanseth from all sin; whereby we are not only delivered from the guilt of sin, but are washed from its pollution, saved from its power, and are enabled, through grace, to love God with all our hearts and to walk in his holy commandments blameless.”
What is this long sentence trying to tell us? First, we’re all sinners — fallen from the state of innocence and sinlessness that was ours at birth. Second, we can be restored to that condition by the Holy Spirit if we trust Jesus. Third the blood of Jesus shed in his death on the cross has the effect of cleansing us of all our sin. Fourth, Jesus’s death on the cross releases us from the grip of sin, so that we are no longer dominated by the evil of our continual wrong-doing. Fifth, all this happens through God’s grace; it is God’s free gift to those who have faith in Jesus. Sixth, freed from the captivity of our sinful natures, we may give ourselves over to loving God. And, finally, seventh, that enables us to be wholly obedient to God’s will; and by that stage we will have reached the state of holiness — sanctification — in which Jesus lived his life.
I guess we could debate particular points here. I, for example, have always had difficulty with the idea of Jesus’s blood washing away human sinfulness. I understand that that’s a metaphor for bringing humans into a right relationship with God. That is, it’s a symbolic figure of speech which endeavours to describe how our human hearts are transformed after we’ve decided to accept Jesus into our lives, so that he becomes the chief reference point in everything we do. I am nevertheless theologically and aesthetically averse to the notion of the blood sacrifice evoked by the Wesleyan imagery.
Anyway, that’s how one denomination expresses its doctrine on sanctification; and I guess if we examined the teachings of the other denominations we’d find a fair degree of commonality between them.
And that leads me to wonder who among us believes he or she has been sanctified. How many of you would put your hands up if I asked that question? I’m not going to because I don’t wish to embarrass anyone; but I suspect that if I did ask the question I’d see very few raised hands. If we did raise our hands we’d fear that other people would regard as sanctimonious — too ‘goody-goody’, far too self-righteous to be taken seriously.
Yet that is what happens when someone decides to become a Christian, beginning the difficult pilgrimage of following Jesus which being a Christian entails. The true Christian is a transformed soul. In being born again into a new life with Christ, he or she acquires holiness, leaving behind the behaviours, attitudes, thoughts and preoccupations of the old life as he/she focusses on the new and right relationship with God and, accompanied by Jesus, tries to live as Christlike a life as possible.
This doesn’t mean that as a Christian you can’t have fun, that you must become a dour, humourless soul entirely lacking in joy. You can still laugh, enjoy a joke, watch film and TV comedies, read entertaining books, engage with the world, relish socialising with other people and chuckle together over a meal and a glass of wine — as Jesus himself did. The difference is that all this is now done in the light of your relationship with God.
I will illustrate this point by referring to perhaps the most saintly person I have ever had the pleasure and privilege of knowing. I can’t identify him to you because he’d be fearfully embarrassed if he ever found out I’d made him an object lesson in one of my sermons. He would also think it highly improper for his name to be raised in a service of worship in which the focus should be on God, who is present among us, rather than on this particular individual’s personality.
The chap I have in mind was a Protestant Minister of the Word with whom I used to have intermittent dealings. For purposes of this discussion, I’ll call him ‘the Rev. YZ’. As most professionally trained Pastors usually are, Rev. YZ was a competent practitioner of his trade. He dutifully visited the sick, the dying and the bereaved, bringing comfort to them and their dear ones. He conducted dignified, worshipful liturgical ceremonies, be they baptisms, weddings, funerals, services of remembrance or the regular weekly services of worship at his church. He delivered entertaining, instructive, carefully thought-out and well-illustrated children’s addresses. His sermons were similarly well-crafted, thoughtful and thought-provoking, helping his congregation understand Scripture more fully and see its relevance in their daily lives.
I don’t know what Rev. YZ was like on the business side of his duties, for example presiding over church council meetings, keeping a watchful eye on the finances, managing the corporate life of his church and dealing with the hierarchy of his denomination in head office. But I do know that Rev. YZ had a special talent for encouraging new Christians. He taught them the essentials of Christian belief in the classes he regularly conducted for aspiring church members. He supported them as they took their first steps along the pilgrim path in following Jesus. And he became the personal friend of all of them. He accepted them in all the variety of their personal foibles and idiosyncrasies. He never judged or condemned, but extended the welcoming hand of Christian compassion to all. Not surprisingly, his congregation loved him greatly and grieved deeply when he retired.
What impressed me most about the Rev. YZ was the aura of saintliness that radiated from him wherever he went. You could see the ‘Christ light’ shining from him in the twinkle of his eye as he shook your hand warmly and exchanged pleasantries with you as you departed any of his services. You sensed immediately that here was someone sanctified, made holy and set apart for evangelism, a pastor who was living out the truth of the Gospel message of love and redemption ‘24/7’, continually refreshed by his lively vital relationship with God.
Let us pray, Gracious God, may we, like your disciples and the Rev. YZ, be ‘sanctified by your truth’! Through imitating your Son, may we, too strive to attain the holiness that was theirs! Amen.