Wednesday, Twenty Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

In today’s first reading, Saint Paul speaks of ‘the depths that I see in the mystery of Christ… that has now been revealed through the Spirit’. The aspect of this mystery he highlights is that ‘pagans now share the same inheritance’ as the Jews, and that ‘the same promise has been made to them, in Christ Jesus, through the gospel’. Paul was very clear that the Lord had come to create a community in which the distinction between Jew and pagan, free and slave, male and female, was made relative by our shared relationship with the Lord. All are equally members of his body and the gifts of all are essential to the health of the body. This vision of a broad and inclusive community is highly relevant in a world where the promotion of one group over another so often spills over into deadly conflict and war. Paul declares in our first reading that this aspect of the mystery of Christ reveals ‘how comprehensive God’s wisdom really is’. Can we imbibe this wisdom of God and work together to make this vision of the Lord a reality? In the gospel reading Jesus speaks of ‘faithful and wise’ servants whom the master trusts sufficiently to place over his entire household. We are all called to become faithful and wise servants of the mystery of Christ, the gospel of one faithful and loving community under God. Paul declares in our first reading, ‘I have been made a servant of that gospel by a gift of grace from God who gave it to me by his own power’. We have all been made servants of this gospel by a gift of grace from God.  Each in our own way can share in the Lord’s work of gathering ‘into one the dispersed children of God’, in the language of John’s gospel. If are faithful to this work we will be embraced by Jesus’ beatitude in today’s gospel reading, ‘Happy that servant if his master’s arrival finds him at this employment’.