God Saves Families

Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household. (Acts 16:31, RSVCE)

We have all known extraordinarily devout Catholic families which exhibit marked sanctity and virtue. Consider one such family, the parents of which, Louis and Zélie Martin, are canonized saints, whose five daughters, their only surviving children of nine, all became nuns, and of whom one is recognized as one of the greatest saints of the modern era: Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Surely, there was more than good training here. For this household was, as a body, beneficiary of a primal grace commonly bestowed by God upon families through the faith of a particular member or members, typically the father and/or mother.

It is of course true that the piety of such families—led by parents who earnestly practice and deliberately teach the Catholic faith—is attributable at least in part to the strong influence of conditioning. In the realm of the spiritual, such communally lived holiness cannot be fully explained by the natural process of inculcation. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Grace perfects nature.” Grace is of a different, higher order. It is communicated by God supernaturally.

My purpose here is to bring attention to and exhort trust in a basic reality of our Catholic life: God saves families.

Let us first acknowledge the fundamental truth that Jesus saves us essentially as individuals, offering the gift of faith to each of us to be freely accepted or rejected: “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life” (John 6:40). No person or group can absolutely convey to an individual such salvific faith, with the virtues and good works that attend it, without that individual’s willful consent and cooperation.

However, God’s Spirit does manifestly impart the grace of salvation and sanctification in and through “households.” Not exclusively, but by predilection I would propose, He redeems us as families and other spiritually bound communities, such as religious orders, and specifically through the faith and devotion of particular members of such households, typically their heads.

Proceeding from this truth, I encourage us as Catholics earnestly to believe in and actively to depend on this ordinary, but truly efficacious, means through which we and our loved ones are reconciled to God, delivered from sin and its ruinous consequences, given to live fully in Christ, in His Church, and brought to eternal life in the Blessed Trinity—saved.

A primordial prefigurement of this cardinal mode by which God saves us is the story of how Noah by his fidelity to God at a time of rampant, inveterate sin is delivered, with his family, from a retributive flood that annihilates a remorseless humanity: “Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation’” (Genesis 7:1).

As the biblical history of salvation advances, the redemption of all humanity is wrought by the Eternal Father through one family: that of Abraham—“And by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves” (Genesis 12:3)—through his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob, called Israel, to the House of David, and through the direct line of twenty-eight more generations to “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ” (Matthew 1:16).

In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells three stories and alludes to one incident in which entire households are brought to salvation through the faith of one member, in each case the head of the household.

In the first of these significant narratives, in Acts 11:11-15, Peter has a vision which tells him that the Mosaic dietary laws are no longer in effect, that salvation is offered to the Gentiles as well as the Jews. Immediately following this revelation, Peter is summoned to Caesarea, to the house of “Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and God-fearing man”—a Gentile who has been told in a vision that Peter “will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household.” Of this Peter later testifies, “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning.” Thus, all the members of Cornelius’ household are redeemed with, and in, God’s plan because of him.

The second such episode occurs in Acts 16:12-15, when Paul and his companions go to a riverbank in Phillippi to pray. There they share the Gospel with several women, among whom is Lydia, “a worshiper of God.” About her Luke testifies, “The Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul. And when she was baptized, with her household, she besought us, saying, ‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.’” Here, too, the act of faith, the conversion of the mistress of a household brings about the salvation of all who live with her.

In Acts 16:28-34 is told another, even more dramatic story of communal conversion. When Paul and Silas are miraculously freed, by a midnight earthquake, from their shackles in prison, the jailor awakes and, thinking the prisoners entrusted to his custody have escaped, is about to kill himself. Paul, however, stops him, and the jailor, “trembling with fear,” falls “down before Paul and Silas” saying, “Men, what must I do to be saved?” “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household,” they respond. When the jailor then takes them to his home, Paul and Silas speak “the word of the Lord to him and to all that were in his house”; and the jailor is “baptized at once, with all his family.”

And there is yet another like incidence only mentioned in Acts 18:8: “Crispus, the official of the synagogue, became a believer in the Lord, together with all his household.”

Jesus, Himself, in Luke 19:1-9, sovereignly saves a whole household through one of its members: a dishonest tax collector, Zacchaeus, is perched in a tree to get a better look at Jesus passing by. Jesus calls to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” Zacchaeus instantly repents and pledges “half his possessions to the poor” and to restore fourfold any money he has bilked. At that, Jesus declares, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham.” Redemption, Jesus pointedly demonstrates, comes not only to the repentant Zacchaeus but to his house as well.

It is noteworthy that this incident is related only in the Gospel of Luke, the author also of the Book of Acts which contains the four similar incidences cited above. Might this suggest that the divinely inspired Evangelist wanted particularly to draw attention to the salvific impact upon a household of its head’s commitment to Christ?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks clearly of this grace of spiritual interdependence: “The communion of saints is the Church. Since all the faithful form one body, the good of each is communicated to the others…all the goods she [the Church] has received necessarily become a common fund” (946-947). The Catechism further acknowledges the corporate nature of our spiritual lives in the “domestic church”: “From the beginning, the core of the Church was often constituted by those who had become believers ‘together with all [their] household’” (1655-1656).

Considering, then, the Church’s established belief in the vital unity of our spiritual lives—in the reality of a body of Christians bound by consanguinity or by some other relationship so as to be especially blessed as a body—is not a household, a family, a domestic church in truth called by God to act and pray in a particularly hopeful way for each other’s salvation? Should not parents pray expectantly, confidently, for the salvation and sanctification of their wayward sons and daughters, spouses for their faithless mates, children for their spiritually apathetic mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters for their fallen-away siblings, and grandparents for the redemption of their entire “household”—unto two and three and more generations?

Have confidence. Pray expectantly. Remember that St. Ambrose once said to St. Monica in her anguish about her son Augustine’s refusal to give up his profligate life and be baptized, “The child of those tears shall never perish.”

Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash