We cannot make ourselves clean enough to stand before the Holy God. We cannot undo our sins, conquer death, or free ourselves from the power of sin by sufficient discipline, sincerity, religious activity, or moral improvement. But the Lord has come to his Temple.
That is why the Beatitudes are Gospel before they become application. Christ has come. His kingdom has drawn near. He blesses people who have nothing with which to impress God, and he gives himself as their righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.
We should not hear any of that as though the sermon were saying, “Try harder.” That would miss the Gospel and the Collect entirely. We pray, “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily.” The One who calls us is the One from whom the grace to answer comes.
The grace that reached Paul was not the reward of spiritual searching. It was the interruption of spiritual hostility. That is one reason the Conversion of Saint Paul is such an important feast for the Church. It gives us a picture of grace in unusually vivid form.
This is the heartbeat of Epiphany discipleship: hear the testimony, behold the Lamb, come and see, remain with him, confess what we have found, and bring others to Jesus. The movement begins with revelation and ends in witness because grace received becomes grace proclaimed.
The confession is a gift before it is anything else. The Church does not invent Christ and then confess the Christ she has designed. She receives the apostolic faith. We did not generate it, and therefore we are not free to revise it whenever the surrounding culture finds it inconvenient.