Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost. Our Holy Father Paul, Archbishop of Constantinople and Confessor (c. 353-61)
Galatians 6:11-18; Luke 16:19-31
Read Galatians 6:11-18
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
“One of these things is not like the others…” That well known line from Sesame Street has become a common way of commenting on the glaringly obvious difference of something or someone. Today’s reading says that about our identity in Christ, that it is fundamentally different from identifying with God through the external keeping of His Law. That it had to be said, both then and now, shows that it isn’t always as obvious to us as it should be.
When the Apostle Paul says that, by the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, the world has been crucified to us and us to the world, that is true for Jesus Christ, the One who was crucified, but how it that true for us? God’s self-sacrificial love for the world and His otherness from it, embodied in Jesus Christ, is His reality but how can that possibly be our reality too? Have you and I ever been crucified? Therein lies the difference between our baptismal identity in Christ and the basing of our identity on the keeping of God’s Law – the identification with Christ which baptism brings into reality is such that we actually have been.
Pause and let the wonder of this reality, summarized in Galatians 2:20, percolate through your entire being:
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”