Homily for Tuesday, Week 27 of Ordinary Time

Homily for Tuesday
Week 27 of Ordinary Time

Oct. 6, 2026
Gal 1: 13-24
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

Statue of St. Paul
(St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome)

“He who from my mother’s womb has set me apart and called me thru his grace …” (Gal 1: 15).

In the opening verses of his letter to the Galatians (1:6-10), Paul conveys his distress that this community has listened to false preachers.  They’ve begun to think they must adopt the Law of Moses in order to accept the Jewish Messiah as their Savior.  He calls that a perversion of the Gospel.

Jesus cautions those who would be his disciples that those who put their hand to the plow, then look back, aren’t fit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62).  He was referring to basic discipleship.  But the saying also fits Paul’s context.  One who’s accepted the Gospel ought not to look back to Judaism for the path to salvation.  In our time, we’re challenged by various sects of wanna-be Catholics who want to remain in the pre-Vatican II Church, some even holding that the Papacy has been vacant since Pius XII (they’re called sede vacantists).  But there’s no other Church than the one Christ established, founded on the rock of Peter.

To emphasize his point about the Gospel, Paul summarizes his Jewish background and his conversion.  By his grace, Jesus called Paul directly and personally revealed to him the authentic Gospel, surpassing the Law that Paul had until then lived for.  What Paul then preached in Galatia is the real deal.

Paul deepened his conversion experience with 3 years in retreat in Arabia and Damascus (1:17).  We wish he’d told us more about that.  After confirming his understanding of the Gospel by conference with Peter and James (1:18-19), he was ready to set about “preaching the faith he once tried to destroy” (1:23) in Galatia and elsewhere—the Gospel of grace bestowed upon us by faith in Christ’s resurrection.

We have faith, brothers and sisters, that the Lord has likewise called us—has chosen us from our mothers’ wombs—to belong to him.  We deepen our faith by going into our own Arabia thru prayer and also by conferring with the Scriptures and the apostolic tradition—both secured and conveyed by the Church in union with Peter.  The tradition isn’t stagnant; it didn’t bind Jesus or the apostles inflexibly to Moses but enabled them to be like “the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old” (Matt 13:52).  In the living Gospel of Jesus Christ, we, like Paul, glorify God (cf. Gal 1:24).