Thursday of the
Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
(Romans 6:19-23; Luke 12:49-53)
The man was involved in the numbers racket; that is, in
collecting small bets on the final numbers of the daily stock market trading. As Al Capone is supposed to have said, “That’s
where the money is.” And the man made much
of it and spent it on liquor, dope, and other vices. Now he was dying alone in a rundown rental
room. As today’s reading from St. Paul’s
Romans poignantly says, “…the wages of sin is death.”
St. Paul has especially in mind the fact that sinful
humanity will always die. Reflecting on Genesis,
Paul concludes that the curse of Adam is a tendency to sin that ensnarls every human
being and leads to his or her downfall. That
is everyone except Jesus (and by special dispensation his Immaculate
Mother). He not only transcended
enslavement to sin but boosted his followers out of their entrapment. Trusting in Jesus as Lord, humans can now
overcome the tendency to love creatures more than the Creator – what sin is all
about.
We need to hold ourselves close to Jesus – desperately. Heeding
his warnings and following his example, we actually become freer, happier
people. We become, in other words, beneficiaries
of the gift of eternal life.
