Homily for 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Aug. 10, 2025
Ps 33
Collect
Wis 18: 6-9
Heb 12: 1-2, 8-12
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx                

The First Passover (Bible Hub)

“Blessed the nation whose God is the Lord, the people he has chosen for his own inheritance” (Ps 33: 12).

Israel praises God in Psalm 33 in gratitude for his kindness in choosing them to be his very own people, his chosen people.  Ps 33 speaks of Israel as the Lord’s inheritance.  That same word is used in today’s collect, not of God’s people but of what he has planned for his people—not only Israel but all whom he has adopted as his children and thus as his heirs.

God has given us his Holy Spirit, who teaches us that God is our Father, our Father who has adopted us.  Because we possess the Holy Spirit as God’s gift—those are the words used in the sacrament of Confirmation when the bishop anoints you:  “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit”—because of that we’re joined to Jesus, Son of God, as his sisters and brothers.

As God’s children in Christ, we hope to share in his inheritance; in the words of the 2d Eucharistic Prayer, we hope “to be coheirs to eternal life,” the life of Jesus risen from the dead.  We hope to be given a place in God’s household forever.  God promises this to us (collect), not because we deserve it or have earned it but simply because he loves us when the Holy Spirit makes us resemble Jesus.  In Ps 33 we prayed, “May your kindness, O Lord, be upon us who have put our hope in you” (v. 22).

The reading from the Book of Wisdom recalled the formative history of Israel as God’s chosen people.  God “summoned” (18:8) Israel on “the nite of passover” (18:6).  He called them and saved them when the angel of death passed over Egypt and slew all the firstborn except in the Hebrew houses marked with the blood of the passover lamb.  These were “the holy children of the good” (18:9)—children of the good and faithful patriarchs like Abraham (cf. Heb) and ultimately of God himself.

In the New Testament, God chooses new children and makes them holy by their belonging to Christ.  So has he chosen and adopted us, chosen us for eternal life as he chose the Hebrews in Egypt to live and to march out into the freedom of the Promised Land.

If God has chosen us to be his adopted children; if God has made us members of his household; if God desires that we share Jesus Christ’s risen eternal life—then how are we to respond?  The readings give us the clue of “faith.”  We respond with faith.  The Book of Wisdom tells us that God’s people put their faith in “the oaths” (18:6), i.e., the pact or covenant that God made with Abraham to make him the father of a numberless nation; so they “awaited the salvation of the just and the destruction of their foes” (18:7).  The Letter to the Hebrews tells us, “By faith Abraham obeyed” (12:8) and believed in God’s promise.

So, by faith we look to Jesus Christ, risen from the dead to save us from our demonic enemies and from our sins.  By faith we obey what Jesus teaches us and what the Church of Jesus teaches us regarding what we are to believe and how we are to act.  So Jesus proclaims blessed “those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival” (Luke 12:37); blessed are we, his sisters and brothers, who look for his return in glory and, looking for it, live as he and his Church teach us.