Homily for 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the

21st Sunday of Ordinary Time

Aug. 23, 2020

Rom 11: 33-36

Christian Brothers, Iona College, New Rochelle

“From him and thru him and for him are all things.  To him be glory forever.  Amen” (Rom 11: 36).

The Holy Trinity with Saints in Heaven, the Garden of Eden below

(Compagni Compagno)

For 9 weeks we read from Paul’s Letter to the Romans as he pondered and commented upon the mysteries of our salvation:  our incorporation into the death and resurrection of Christ, the workings of the Holy Spirit within us, and God’s love for the Jewish people who have rejected Christ.

In these last 4 weeks of our reading from Romans, we come to a summing up and some practical conclusions for our lives as Jesus’ followers.

This evening’s 4-verse reading sounds like a grand conclusion to the letter, and perhaps that was Paul’s intent before he appended ch. 12-16.  It’s a mini-hymn to the mysterious ways of God considered in the letter.

The divine wisdom and knowledge that have worked and are working all that Paul has spoken of in the preceding passages are deep, deep mysteries (11:33).  They only begin to reveal the riches of God, who is rich in mercy, in goodness, in power, in understanding, far more than we can possibly know, probably more than we’ll be able to grasp even when we meet him in eternity, when we shall know him even as we are known, as Paul tells the Corinthians (I, 13:12).  When we know him in eternity, I doubt we’ll know him fully.  Who can comprehend God?  But certainly our knowledge of him will far surpass what we can attain here.

Here his judgments and his ways are inscrutable, Paul exclaims (11:33).  The entire book of Job is a meditation on that theme.  Isaiah proclaims that God’s ways aren’t our ways (55:8-9).  Paul quotes the prophets regarding our feeble knowledge—“who has known the mind of God?”—and the inadequacy of how we could advise him—“who has been his counselor?” (11:34).  We can only trust that God knows what he’s about, that he ardently desires our salvation, that he judges all people and all affairs justly yet mercifully because of his surpassing wisdom and knowledge.  Even when we think we could do a better job than God—like the character in the movie comedy Bruce Almighty—a moment’s serious pause disillusions us.  We can barely manage our own lives and our own affairs.

Then Paul concludes—it would’ve been an apt end for the whole letter—all things come from God, all things continue and operate thru him, and all things exist for him.  “All things,” of course, includes us.  He made us, he sustains us, and he desires us as the 1st of the creatures who come from him and are for him.  “To him be glory forever.”

St. Irenaeus stated that the glory of God is a fully alive human being.  That we might be fully alive, Jesus has given us the Eucharist.  Receiving his blessed sacrament and being made one with Christ, living in, thru, and for Christ, is the greatest gift we can give to God our Creator, and it is our glory as well as his.