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| St. Paul of the Cross Today's Readings (Audio) |
Sin must not reign over your mortal bodies
so that you obey their desires.
If sin we run the risk of becoming slaves to sin. Paul issued this warning to his brothers and sisters, people of faith, who were not under the law but under grace. He didn't want his readers to believe that they now had license to do anything they wanted because they were under grace. Neither did he want them to believe that good and right actions would happen and sin would be avoided without any conscious involvement on their parts. Their will, healed and restored by grace, was still needed.
but present yourselves to God as raised from the dead to life
Their faith was meant to allow them to participate in the resurrection life of Jesus himself even while they were still in their mortal bodies. This participation was to begin with the renewal of their minds, believing what was written in God's Word about reality, including about who they themselves had become in Christ. Believing those things made would empower them to be able to bare good fruit. God had given them grace as a gift, but they had to choose to continue to believe in that gift and rely on it and not slip back into their former ways of thinking and acting. It was as though they were presented with the same choice Moses set before Israel:
I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live (see Deuteronomy 30:19).
Yet to respond to this choice was possible for Paul's audience in a way that it was not for that of Moses. Those to whom Paul preached were not under the law but under grace. Yet it was clear that choosing the path "of sin, which leads to death" was still a real possibility for them. Being free from the law was not somehow a freedom from the call to holiness. It meant rather that they no longer needed to rely on their own strength, insufficient as it was, in order to live lives that were pleasing to God.
In the end, they had two options:
you are slaves of the one you obey,
either of sin, which leads to death,
or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
Sin would use and abuse those who surrendered to it, making them weapons for wickedness. What was the alternative to which believers were called? Obedience. Not merely adherence to the law, but obedience, but which was something inherently personal, relational, and based on faith. Anyone could try to keep the precepts of the law if he felt like it. But only a person of faith was in a position to be led by the path of obedience. God was willing to lead those who would rely on him on the path of righteousness, making their very bodies weapons for righteousness, capable of overcoming the strongholds of the dark powers by means of self-sacrifice.
Brothers and sisters, let us believe so that what Paul said of the Romans be true of us as well:
But thanks be to God that, although you were once slaves of sin,
you have become obedient from the heart
to the pattern of teaching to which you were entrusted.
Freed from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness.
Faith inspires us to resist not only big sins, but little ones, knowing that the little sins to which we acquiesce strip us of the firmness of resolve that we need to resist the big ones. We know that the further entrenched we get in sin the more difficult it becomes, humanly speaking, to make an about face. We can't simply hope we'll make a deathbed repentance after a life of embracing sin. Such graces aren't impossible, but represent presumption on our part. Should God contradict our freely expressed opposition to him? May he do so! But let us not rely on it.
Finally, we have all been given much. We are meant to help others receive the food allowance at the proper time. Our call is to lead others to the same feast that we ourselves of discovered in the heart of the Church. When things don't immediately go our way we are tempted to say, "My master is delayed in coming". If we allow this thought to go unopposed our zeal will flag and grow slack. We will not live in keeping with the true identity as risen in Christ. We need to keep the lamp of faith as the guide on which we rely, burning brightly in the night.
We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts (see Second Peter 1:19)
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