Our Venerable Father Onuphrius the Great; Our Venerable Father Peter of Athos.
Apostle’s Fast. Abstention from meat and foods that contain these ingredients.
Romans 9:6-19; Matthew 10:32-36; 11:1
Read Romans 9:6-19
In studying Romans 9, we see how Paul reminds the Jews that not all of Abraham’s descendants were children of the promise. For example, Ishmael was born of the flesh, Isaac was born of the spirit. The covenant was a door, and a door can be walked through or simply leaned against by the inattentive.
As Christians we should think of this more often, because we have become very good at leaning. Why is that? Well, we have the sacraments, we have the Scriptures, we have the centuries of saints at our back, and the teaching authority of the Church girding us. In fact, we have the whole architecture of grace built up around us like a cathedral we were born inside of and have, to be truthful, stopped noticing. There is a particular danger in this: not the danger of the irreligious man, who at least knows he is searching for something, but the danger of the elder son, who stayed home, who did his duty, and who grew quietly resentful of the very love that surrounded him.
We tire. Not dramatically so – nothing so honest as open rebellion – but slowly, the way a fire tires when no one tends it. Meanwhile there are people outside the visible Church, never baptized, never catechized, who live with a tenderness of conscience, a fidelity to what little light they have, that would shame most of us. Their flesh, if you want to call it that, sometimes outpaces our spirit. The sons of the flesh, running ahead of the sons of the promise.
This should not be. It should grieve us the way it grieved Paul…not as competition for its own sake, but because love that is not active is already beginning to die. So let us compete, then, if competition is the word: not for status, but the way runners push each other toward the same finish line. Let us outdo one another in love, in faith, in the stubborn work of staying vigilant. The promise is to be members of God’s family in a paradise we cannot yet grasp in this age.