A Reflection for Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
We, though many, are one Body in Christ
and individually parts of one another.
Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us,
let us exercise them:
if prophecy, in proportion to the faith;
if ministry, in ministering;
if one is a teacher, in teaching;
if one exhorts, in exhortation;
if one contributes, in generosity;
if one is over others, with diligence;
if one does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. (Rom 12:5-8)
Find today’s readings here.
In our times, many seemingly “new” versions of Christianity are proposed, and their various merits are often acrimoniously contested on social media. How could this first-century faith become divided into so many variations?
It is a familiar weakness to try to compose a faith that is most to our liking. We seem to prefer a Christianity that does not ask too much of us—not a Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day Christianity. Perhaps we prefer one more compliant to our standards of comfort and autonomy. Our expectations and desires have clouded interpretations of what it means to be a Christian.
Today’s Gospel includes a broad invitation to join the divine banquet, to co-create the kingdom of God, and the directions to reach the party at the end of the world are included in today’s first reading.
Paul has laid it all out for us in an outline as clear and as vivid today as it must have been for these first Christians he was reaching out to. These directions hope to add the flesh of our daily labors and intentions to this new faith and encourage relationship and mutuality, not the closed-off individuality of a spirituality that first serves oneself.
Do the best that you can in service to the other members of the body of Christ, and let your love be sincere; hate what is evil and hold on to what is good.
Accept the invitation to the feast, he urges: Here’s how. Do the best that you can in service to the other members of the body of Christ, and let your love be sincere; hate what is evil and hold on to what is good.
The letter to the Romans includes a framing that would empower Christian socialists of the 19th century before it degraded into a menace in the 20th, a hint of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Paul’s version, of course, is not entirely locked in the material world. His is an exhortation of a mystical reality, the striving of individuals who are part of one divine body. That is a relationship beyond class, nation or culture. Unity in one divine body is a metaphysical truth that should still guide us as we participate in our society today, at the level of our family, community, nation and world.
Jesus told parables that implored those who gathered to hear him to do their utmost with the gifts given to them, to excel and co-create with the Father. Paul urges the same, shaping the beginnings of these early Christian communities.
But we can return to this foundational Scripture and recapture the genius and divinity of a relationship with all people that it implores, to “hold on to what is good,” so that we will be ready to accept the invitation to the great feast in the kingdom of God.
