Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 25, 2026: You know what sort of people we were among you...

You know what sort of people we were among you…
What is the source of our integrity as a people? 

    One of the most important functions of the scriptures is to help humankind to understand what it means to live in the context of each other, in community. In the Book of Exodus, once the people of Israel reach Mount Sinai, the Lord God spends no small amount of time helping them understand that their identity, and therefore their collective integrity, is based on the relationships they cultivate with God and with one another. You shall not oppress or molest an alien, the Lord tells them. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. Their own memory of what it was like to live in another land, without any rights or possessions or land, should remind them that they were once dependent upon other people’s generosity and good will. Like the Lord God, they themselves must be compassionate, responsible to other because they value the compassion that God and others have shown them, and will imitate it. Psalm 18 invites the people of Israel into the present moment, where they can recognize God’s compassion towards them now – My God, my rock of refuge, my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold – and ground themselves in the identity and integrity that relationship builds for them. 

    When, in Matthew’s Gospel, the scholar of the law asks Jesus, Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?, he does so to test him. Here, the Pharisees have clearly missed the point: their relationship with the Lord God does not depend on the absolutes of Mosaic law, but on the message of love Jesus embodies in their midst, even to the point of loving the very Pharisees who will one day effect his death. Love of God is necessary to love of neighbor, as love of neighbor is necessary to love of God. The love in question here is not a feeling, but an action: to will the good of the other in order to insure the collective identity and integrity of the community. This is how you enter into right relationship with your God, Jesus says: by loving. 

    Likewise, in his Letter to the Thessalonians, Paul will affirm the righteous conduct of the community that has become imitators of the apostles and of the Lord through their reception of the Word of God. It is the Word that is effective; it transforms, sustains, and is spreading all over the known world. The Word is the source of their integrity – it is their belief in God’s mercy and love, revealed in Christ crucified, revealed in their own life in community. The Word is their integrity – is it ours?

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Praising my Savior all the day long (CeCe Winans and Terrence Blanchard)

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God,

Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood. 

This is my story, this is my song,

Praising my Savior all the day long;

This is my story, this is my song,

Praising my Savior all the day long. 

Perfect submission, perfect delight,

Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;

Angels, descending, bring from above

Echoes of mercy, whispers of love. 

Perfect submission, all is at rest,

I in my Savior am happy and blest,

Watching and waiting, looking above,

Filled with His goodness, lost in His love. 

To hear CeCe Winans and Terrence Blanchard perform Blessed Assurance in honor of Cicely Tyson, click on the video below: 

Image source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/theater/cicely-tyson-and-blessed-assurance.html?_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&adxnnl=1&emc=edit_th_20130528&adxnnlx=1369763276-4uipPr4qYEURbYzfOo9hxw
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God's glory is the source of my life (Br. Andrew Lyons)

Life in man is the glory of God;
the life of man is the vision of God. 

--St. Irenaeus 

    [In the above statement,] Irenaeus is not saying that my life should be a source of God’s glory; he’s saying that God’s glory is the very source of my life… [When] I [first] read it, [I] thought of how I could reveal God to others through my life, but Irenaeus was trying to make me think of how God’s revelation of himself to me is my very life. In short, I thought the quote was about me; it was really about God. 

    Irenaeus [is expressing] the fundamental conviction that man comes to life when he knows God. We pray and study in order to know God, and we preach so that others also might know him. Knowing God must come first—everything else, everything that we do, comes second. 

    We still need to hear this truth today. Human nature hasn’t changed—even a devout Christian still thinks first of himself, of what he can do to glorify God. Although this is a good and holy desire, placing it first can be dangerous—it draws our eyes on ourselves rather than on God. [Instead, let us put] first what ought to be first: the contemplation of Truth, the “vision of God.” 

--Br. Andrew Lyons, O.P. 

Image source: Theophanes the Greek, The Transfiguration, detail (15th century), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Transfiguration#/media/File:Transfiguration_by_Feofan_Grek_from_Spaso-Preobrazhensky_Cathedral_in_Pereslavl-Zalessky_(15th_c,_Tretyakov_gallery).jpeg
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To be grateful for all of our lives (G.K. Chesterton / Henri Nouwen)

I would maintain that thanks are
the highest form of thought;
and that gratitude is happiness
doubled by wonder.

 --G. K. Chesterton

    To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives -- the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections -- that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. 

    Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God. 

--Henri Nouwen 

Image source: https://medium.com/refresh-the-soul/the-silent-artistry-of-gratitude-finding-wonder-in-everyday-life-fc1ab823e4ba
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Render unto God what is God's (Pope Francis)

    [In today’s Gospel,] Jesus concludes: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (cf. vv. 19-21). On the one hand, suggesting they return to the emperor what belongs to him, Jesus declares that paying tax is not an act of idolatry, but a legal obligation to the earthly authority; on the other — and it is here that Jesus presents the “thrust” of his response: recalling the primacy of God, he asks them to render to Him that which is His due as the Lord of the life and history of mankind. 

    The reference to Caesar’s image engraved on the coin says that it is right that they feel fully — with rights and duties — citizens of the State; but symbolically it makes them think about the other image that is imprinted on every man and woman: the image of God. He is the Lord of all, and we, who were created “in his image” belong to Him first and foremost. From the question posed to him by the Pharisees, Jesus draws a more radical and vital question for each of us, a question we can ask ourselves: to whom do I belong? To family, to the city, to friends, to work, to politics, to the State? Yes, of course. But first and foremost — Jesus reminds us — you belong to God. This is the fundamental belonging. It is He who has given you all that you are and have. And therefore, day by day, we can and must live our life in recognition of this fundamental belonging and in heartfelt gratitude toward our Father, who creates each one of us individually, unrepeatable, but always according to the image of his beloved Son, Jesus. It is a wondrous mystery. 

--Pope Francis 

Image source: https://new.coinsweekly.com/antike/the-four-coins-jesus-knew/
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Gratitude (John Ortberg)

    Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift that liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation. 

--John Ortberg      

Image source: The Samaritan woman’s gratitude at Jesus’ gift of salvation, https://margmowczko.com/everything-i-ever-did-john-4/ 

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Our lives must be acts of praise and gratitude (Bishop Robert Barron)

    Our lives must be acts of praise and gratitude to the Creator. 

    Such obligations would indeed be burdensome and dehumanizing if they proceeded from a competitive and needy supreme being, but since they come from the one who cannot compete with us and who stands in need of nothing, they are in fact liberating. The gratitude that we offer to the true God is not absorbed by God but rather breaks against the rock of the divine self-sufficiency, redounding to our benefit. 

    In one of the prefaces to the Eucharistic prayer in the Roman rite of the Mass, we find this remarkable observation directed toward God: “You have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation.” 

    It is precisely because God has no need of our praise that our act of gratitude is a gift; it is precisely because God’s plenitude cannot be increased that our prayer intensifies rather than compromises our participation in the loop of grace. 

--Bishop Robert Barron 

Image source: Noah in the ark as the dove returns, from the Catacomb of St. Peter, ca. 2-4 B.C., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah#/media/File:Noah_catacombe.jpg
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