Readings for the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time: 
Jeremiah 20:10-13 | Romans 5:12-15 | Matthew 10:26-33

On Romans 5:12-15

Throughout the summer of 2026, the second reading at Sunday Mass comes from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. When we hear the readings from St. Paul at Mass, we can often feel confused because his language seems strange, we do not know the context of the selection being read, or simply because he writes in such a way that he piles up clauses without any clear verb! Thus, we will dive into the message and experience of God contained in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. The main experience and message of the epistle is that God’s love is gratuitous and free; God only asks us to let ourselves be loved by surrendering to God in faith. Perhaps this summer we need an experiential reminder that, unlike gas and groceries, at least one thing in life is free and never subject to inflation: God’s grace.

St. Paul sets the stage for his great message of God’s universal and lavish grace by unveiling the predicament of humanity: we are hopelessly trapped in sin. We are imprisoned in hate, selfishness, and extreme illusion. In Catholic theology, we call this original sin – not so much personal wrongdoing as the human capacity for evil and corruption. St. Paul does not hold back his condemnation. But he condemns only to lift up. For Romans does not leave us trapped but uses this description to heighten the tension and our incredible need for the gift of God in Christ.

The comparison of two biblical figures highlights the human predicament and its salvation: “For if, by the transgression of one person, death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one person Jesus Christ (5:17).” Through the disobedience or lack of surrender of Adam, we come under the dominion of sin and death. We are all oppressed by evil and sin, and therefore in desperate need. St. Paul wants to stress this, and he does not need much help to establish it. All we have to do is look around the world and see the genocide, war, starvation, immense loneliness, poverty, government corruption, sexual abuse, and racism. The evils multiply. For St. Paul, this is not surprising. Sin is our endless capacity for self-rejection, self-destruction, and our inability to sustain a relationship (any!) but especially God.

For St. Paul, sin means we have an inability to remain connected to love and an incapacity to believe in radical grace. When we haven’t experienced the Gospel, we do not know our eternal dignity. We remain ignorant of our inherent oneness with God. Consequently, we become alienated, compulsive about guilt and shame, obsessed with pleasure and power, or just unhappy. Then we act out in selfish and harmful ways. Sins are really symptoms of sin as a state of disconnection.

While Adam brought on this extreme disconnection through his disobedience, Jesus brought us back to divine connection by his obedience and surrender. In Jesus, we are saved from sin and its resulting death. In Jesus, God rescues us from evil and sin by pouring out infinitely more love: “where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more” (5:20). What makes this terribly good news is that we can discover divine grace even amidst our selfishness, cruelty, and utter sin. Divine love is even when we sin! Hence, St. Paul calls us to turn away from our misery to God by simple faith; by letting go of our thinking, especially ruminations over past mistakes, we drop down into the deep well of mercy within us that is the divine indwelling.

A potential stumbling block to this message lies in St. Paul’s use of the theme of divine wrath. St. Paul writes, “The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (1:18). Wrath is not the emotion of anger but how those in the sphere of sin experience the consequences of their sinful attachments, with the misery and slavery entailed. "God’s wrath…is not so much a punishment that God inflicts on humanity as it is the absence of God’s presence. Apart from the divine presence, humanity lives in a world of its own making—a world from which it has excluded the truth about God” (Frank Matera) The “punishment” is simply living without God and the consequences of this.

Hence St. Paul in the first chapter of Romans uses the phrase “God handed them over,” which means sin has consequences, namely, misery.

The wondrous medieval mystic Julian of Norwich enthusiastically agrees with St. Paul. She says, “There can be no wrath in God.” Entranced by God’s wild and tender love, Julian insists, “I did not see any kind of anger in God – neither in passing nor for an extended time…While we may feel anger, disagreement, and strife within ourselves, we are always mercifully enfolded in the Beloved’s gentleness, kindness, and humble accessibility.” Commenting on Julian, Grace Jantzen writes, “Julian insists that there is no wrath in God: the wrath is in us, when we choose to separate ourselves from him. God does not blame us for our sins; he sees the frailty of our nature and our fractured contrariness, and recognizes that sin is both a consequence and an augmentation of our brokenness.” The wrath is not in God but in us when we are not consciously abiding in divine love.

Similarly, St. Paul stands entranced by the love of God poured into our hearts with wild abandon. In Christ and the Spirit, St. Paul knows God’s love given to us, to him specifically. He asserts we will know God’s love for us if we also give ourselves over to this love in faith.