Homily for 17th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
17th Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 26, 2026
Rom 8: 28-30
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

“Those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom 8: 29).

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One of the Greek myths concerns a sculptor named Pygmalion, who created a statue so like-like that he fell in love with it.  George Bernard Shaw picked up the Greek myth and turned it into a stage play called Pygmalion in 1912.  In turn, in the 1950s Lerner and Loewe very creatively turned Shaw’s play into a musical set in 20th-century London—My Fair Lady.  In that story, a language professor transforms a Cockney street girl (a flower seller) into a high society lady, and then falls in love with his own creation.

The 2d Person of the Holy Trinity is a perfect image of the 1st Person:  God the Son and God the Father, respectively.  Their mutual love proceeding between them is so perfect that it’s a 3d Person, the Holy Spirit.  I have to be careful not to speak of the 2d and 3d Persons being created because they’re not.  The Father begets the Son eternally:  God from God, true God from true, we profess in the Creed.  There’s no “becoming” between them.  Likewise, the eternal Holy Spirit.  There’s no “falling in love” within the Trinity.  God’s very nature is love.

But we may be able to say that God falls in love.  Certainly, he creates in love.  Like Pygmalion or Prof. Henry Higgins, he makes something new and marvelous, or more precisely, he makes someone.  “God created man in his own image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).

God created us out of love, knowing each human being in advance of our coming to be, and he has predestined us to become like Jesus Christ, his perfect Son, so like Jesus that we become his brothers and sisters, children of God.  We are imperfect people, sinners—sin is the only thing that can scratch or even shatter the image of Jesus Christ in us—but thru Christ God justifies us, makes us new and innocent.  The more that God’s grace touches us—in prayer, in the sacraments, in our efforts to imitate Jesus our Lord—the more we are transformed into images of Jesus.  And God is in love with us.  He has “called [us] according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28), the purpose of being glorified (8:30) alongside our brother Jesus in eternal life.

St. Paul writes “that all things work for good for those who love God” (8:28).  No matter what sins we commit, no matter what evil comes our way, God continues to love us and to make everything come out according to his ultimate plan—our redemption.  Christ suffered terrible evil, was tortured, killed, and buried.  But God the Father raised him gloriously; and that’s his intention also for us who do our best to respond to his love—the love by which and for us he created us and turns us bit by bit, day by day, into images of his Son Jesus Christ.