The One Who is Righteous by faith Will Live.”
Today's Mass Readings
The letter to the Romans is not an easy letter to grasp. It contains some basic Christian teaching which has influenced Christian doctrine even to this day. In today’s first reading for example (Rom 1:16-25), we find the basis for Catholic teaching on natural law. St. Paul elaborates on what we find written in Psalm 19, namely, that God can be known by all through the world around us. God created the universe, and everything in it, and has left His mark on the created order. The difficulty is that through sin, our sense of God and of God’s law has been impaired. If we were sinless, we would easily perceive God through the created world, and we would have clear access to the natural law through our conscience, which would clearly perceive the Holy Spirit speaking to us. Because of the reality of sin, the Church does not teach that we should obey our conscience blindly, but rather we should only obey an informed conscience. A conscience that is well informed about God’s law through Church teaching, or one that is in the process of being well formed, is in the process of learning once again to see the world clearly. Poorly formed consciences are blinded, and in sore need of proper formation.
In St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul informs us that God handed over those who have not followed Him over to the impurity of their own hearts. This is not the punishment of a judge, so much as the loving permission granted by an Almighty Father to allow us to freely chose how to live. St. Gregory the Great informs us, in his famous Moralia in Job, that God does not force us to love Him. Rather, when we chose to sin, God allows us to sin. He constantly pursues us, however. When we recognize that our sins will not ultimately satisfy us, He is there to pick us up again and raise us to Himself to love and cherish us. Blinded by sin, we cannot always perceive God’s love clearly. Like the parent who lets a daughter or son fall off a bicycle, God allows us to fall down and scrape our souls, but none of us is beyond the reach of God’s healing touch. We only need to turn to Him in repentance, praise, and worship.
Let us strive, then, to give God the praise that is due. Let us try to be other-centered, and not self-centered. This is best done when we are truly Other-centered, that is, centered on God.