Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday of All Saints of Rus’-Ukraine. The Holy Martyr Hyacinth. Our Lady of Perpetual Help
Romans 6:18-23; Romans 8:28-39; Matthew 8:5-13; Matthew 5:1-16
Read Romans 6:18-23
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
The most important thing St. Paul says in today’s reading is his statement about how to interpret what he is writing: “I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations.” Analogies are just that, analogies; they are not the actual thing. A good analogy will help us understand something about the actual thing.
Relationship with God, who is love, is just that, a loving relationship between persons, not a mechanical relationship with concepts. Paul is using an analogy to explain the continuity between the relationship with God revealed through the Law given to Israel, and the relationship revealed through the Gospel whereby both Jews and Gentiles can live out faith in God within the Church. There are not entities called “sin” and “righteousness”; there is God who is righteous and humans who sin.
In saying that those who put their faith in Christ have “been set free from sin, (and) have become slaves of righteousness”, Paul is pointing out an inescapable reality of our existence as created persons: “you gotta serve somebody.” Even if one perceives one’s thought and action to be completely independent, even of God, once one commits to a course it becomes what one serves. We have learned much about this through greater understanding of compulsive behaviours like addictions. Such actions don’t feel like a choice but are the result of unconscious, ignored, long-forgotten decisions that we follow through on, unaware of their origin.
How do we get wages? We work for them. What are the wages of working for sin? Death. So, the opposite must be true, that if we work for righteousness our wages will be eternal life. No. When we become servants of God through faith in Christ, our sanctification and its fulfilment in eternal life is all a free gift.