A homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Before turning my attention to St. Paul, whose great letter to the Romans is the source for today’s second reading, I’d like to note the opening lines from our first reading, taken from the Book of Sirach: “Wrath and anger are hateful things. Yet the sinner hugs them tight.” These words should, I believe, appear onscreen whenever someone opens YouTube, TikTok, or any other purveyor of so-called “information” on the internet.
There’s a reason Sirach belongs to a category of biblical texts known as Wisdom literature. Be it Pope Leo, Clavicular, Meghan Markle, or pretty much any public figure (except, apparently, Dolly Parton), the vitriol and abuse hurled at prominent people, and maybe especially at the Church (or, sadly, between different groups within the Church, while pounding their manly Christian chests) are so unrelentingly hateful and toxic that they should come with a public warning. So, keep that in mind when you’re doom-scrolling: there’s plenty of decent or just silly stuff online, but there’s also a very deep well of the most noxious, deceptive swill, and we can become inured to it, to our spiritual detriment.
Anyway…St. Paul, who sometimes writes to communities to share hard truths but never falls into hatefulness. In today’s passage, he writes to the young church at Rome, which he has yet to visit personally, about the overwhelming consideration that captures us and ought therefore to guide our entire life and action: that is, when we say—as Paul does back in chapter 6 of the letter– that “Christ has died for all,” it means that we who attach ourselves to him and call ourselves disciples have also died, with him, that is, died to sin and to any claims made against us because of sin. That former life is done. Over. Finished. We can’t live anymore in a way determined by “slavery to sin,” which just to review, in Pauline theology, is a radical selfishness: my way or the highway, me first, I will determine the conditions for my own salvation. To some that may sound like freedom. To Paul, it amounts to death.
No, we who have been baptized into Christ’s death and his resurrection are now a New Creation, living a new life. The world may not recognize it and maybe at times we don’t model it faithfully—when we take delight in hatefulness or vicious snark, for example—but we live fundamentally transformed lives because of Christ Jesus the Lord. So, we no longer live for ourselves—radically turned inward on ourselves—but we live for Christ and Christ’s values in the world. And what are those? I refer you to the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are the pure of heart, blessed are those who show mercy, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who desire righteousness. Jesus embodies and models in his own life, most intensely in his suffering and death for us, his values. Faith, kindness, goodness, compassion, humility, above all, love. Committed to those same ideals—committed to putting them into action, letting them determine our way of being in the world—then whether we live or die, whether we’re lawyers or social workers, poets or programmers, whether we die young or advanced in age—we live or die for the Lord. It’s a radical claim that Paul makes, but very straightforward.
Make no mistake, we can still also live or die for our families, or for our country, or to advance knowledge. Paul’s claim doesn’t preclude those other commitments. But it does supersede them—we belong first to Christ—and that will determine how we honor our other commitments. It will ground them and lend them coherence. When he writes to the Christians of Rome, Paul is dealing with a church divided among those who still cling to a traditional worldview as laid out in the Old Testament and judge those who do not, and an opposing group that judge and despise those traditionalists as weak and legalistic. Just imagine how that conflict would play out on YouTube! But Paul is saying, no: Jesus is Lord of all. He has overcome the barrier between the earthly (living) realm and the afterlife, that is, the realm of dead. Our primary identity in this new life, as a New Creation, is our conformity to Christ. Not race, not sexual orientation, not gender, not tribe or family, not citizenship or economic status. We belong first to Christ. It’s radical, and radically freeing in a world organized around very different principles.
Image: Raphael, “St. Paul Preaching in Athens,” Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Fr. Gregory Waldrop, SJ
Fr. Gregory Waldrop, SJ, is Associate Chaplain at Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale University. After graduating from Yale, Fr. Waldrop spent a year as a lay volunteer in Peru, before completing a master’s in journalism at Northwestern. In 1989 he entered the Society of Jesus; Jesuit formation took him to New Orleans, Tampa, Rome, and Boston, before his ordination to the priesthood in 1999. An art historian, Fr. Greg earned his PhD from UC Berkeley, with a focus on the Italian Renaissance, and has taught at Fordham University in New York and Loyola University New Orleans.
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