Seeking to Understand God’s Inscrutable Judgments and Follow His Unsearchable Ways, 31st Monday (I), November 6, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Faithful Departed
November 6, 2023
Rom 11:29-36, Ps 69, Lk 14:12-14

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!,” St. Paul exclaims today. “How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” There should always be fascination with God’s ways, because there will always remain some mystery. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways,” God tells us through the Prophet Isaiah (55:8). All the same, Jesus told us during the Last Supper that he called us friends, “because I have revealed to you everything I have heard from my Father.” Jesus came down from heaven to earth to disclose to us, as much as our finite minds could handle, what God’s ways are, so that we could become as compassionate as God is, so that we could become “perfected” like our Father. The whole point of a Christian life is to become rich in the wisdom and knowledge of God and to imitate his still-partially-inscrutable judgments and follow his ever-partially-unsearchable ways.
• We see an instance of God’s inscrutable and rich wisdom in the first reading today. St. Paul describes the way God plans to save the Jews. Obviously there was a deep theological and pastoral concern in the early Church that so many Jews had rejected Jesus the Messiah when at last he came. St. Paul says that this was so that the Jews would need to ask for God’s mercy, just like the Gentiles needed to ask for God’s mercy. The Jews would see how merciful God was to the Gentiles and be able to beg for it themselves. “God delivered all to disobedience,” St. Paul writes, “so that he might have mercy on all.” For us, if we’re going to learn God’s wisdom and follow his ways, then we need to grasp that sometimes God permits others to sin against us so that we, like him, can be merciful to all, so that we can be as merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful.
• We see another instance of God’s inscrutable and rich wisdom in the Gospel — and how far we can sometimes be from God’s ways. Jesus tells us, “When you hold a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or sisters or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.” This is precisely, of course, what we almost always do. Most of our families regularly invited relatives over for dinner and vice versa. Most of us at a university regularly get together for meals with our friends. Jesus is not telling us never to do so, but he’s stressing something else. “Rather, when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” This is what God does. He invites us here despite the fact that most days we have nothing or little with which to repay him for the gifts he’s given us, despite the fact that in following him we are crippled and lame, falling down all the time as we seek to follow in his footsteps, and despite the fact that we’re blind in seeing him in so many others, including the physically poor, crippled, lame and blind around us. But he invites us all the same. Those are his ways. And he wants us to imitate him in doing so, because that is the inscrutable path by which he wants to save us. At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” He doesn’t just say at the “resurrection,” because we know that at the end of time, there will be the “resurrection of life” and the “resurrection of condemnation” (Jn 5:29), there will be the separation of the “sheep” and the “goats,” respectively, to the kingdom of the Father or to the fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Mt 25:31-46). Jesus says specifically that those who do this will be repaid at the resurrection of the “righteous.” Jesus is indicating to us a clear path to heaven by acting on what he’s teaching today: the actual act of inviting and caring for those who cannot repay us, as well as the spiritual point of not doing things in any circumstance in order to be repaid.
• The greatest instance of God’s inscrutable judgments and unsearchable ways happened in Jesus’ incarnation and then crucifixion, death and resurrection, when God who took on our humanity allowed himself to be tortured and murdered by his creatures precisely in order to redeem them, drawing the greatest good of all from the greatest evil, taking our sins upon himself, so that we might receive mercy through our and everyone’s disobedience! That same Lord Jesus who loved us that much mysteriously and wondrously invites us here, as he does each day, in all our poverty, handicaps, and blindspots, in order to feed us with himself. And then he sends us out to do this in memory of him.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
ROM 11:29-36

Podcast: Play in new window | Download