Mystical Word: 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a | Romans 6:3-4, 8-11 | Matthew 10:37-42
On Romans 6:3-11
The Letter to the Romans tells us to live for God in Christ as a response to the unmitigated grace and love God shows us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Everyone is “justified freely by [God’s] grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). As we continue to reflect on the letter to the Romans through the summer of 2026, we need to understand one central reality: St. Paul’s theocentrism, that is, his absolute focus on God.
The experience St Paul shares with us in his letter to the Romans is profligate love and unimaginable mystery. St. Paul met the God who is both absolute mystery and superabundant grace revealed in Jesus crucified and risen. He shares his faith in this very cruciform God, in whom coincide incomprehensible mystery and unimaginably tender love. He has met the God of “priceless kindness” (2:4) and invites us to surrender our very lives to this God.
Recall, Romans is about “the Gospel of God” (Romans 1:1). The epistle centers on God and God alone. God justifies us by the death and resurrection of Jesus. God frees us and loves us. St. Paul invites us to faith in God alone, in whom we discover a wildly reckless yet tender love. St. Paul’s letter is thoroughly theocentric. This God-centered-ness key to the whole letter.
St. Paul shows this theocentirsm at the beginning of Romans: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: for Jew first, and then Greek. For in it is revealed the righteousness of God from faith to faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous by faith will live” (Romans 1:16-17). The “righteousness of God” is better translated as “God’s own righteousness.” Righteousness here is God being faithful to being God – it is just God being God and acting as God acts, namely, with gratuitousness: God’s love is wildly free, a gift beyond all measure and all being. We cannot fathom the incomprehensible love of God for us. Out of love, God wants everyone to share the divine life.
God’s own righteousness is the covenant faithfulness of God. The covenant between God and the Hebrew people: “I will be your God, and you will be my people” (see Jeremiah 31:33). Additionally, the divine name of YHWH can be rendered “I will be there for you.” Further behind this idea of righteousness is Exodus 34:6-7: “The LORD, the LORD, a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love and fidelity, continuing his love for a thousand generations, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin!”
Divine love is constant, irrevocable, superabundant, forgiving even before one needing forgiveness, infinitely tender and kind – love here is hesed – faithful, covenant love, God being true to God in loving, loving and saving “for the sake of the holy name.” “Not for your sake do I act, house of Israel, but for the sake of my holy name” (Ezekiel 36:22). This is the righteousness of God – hesed, God being God as transcendent, saving, tender love. In Romans, the word is agape, selfless love, love beyond all things, transcendent love. Yet, there is a difference between those who open themselves to divine love and enjoy it and those who close themselves off from divine love and experience the generational “punishment” because sin it is own punishment – sin spreads and infects and traumatizes generationally.
Regarding St. Paul’s message, Richard Rohr preaches, “Righteousness, for Paul, equals God. You alone are our victory. You alone are our righteousness. And any attempt for you individually to attain your own validation, your own verification, your own signification - the reason that it’s wrong is precisely because it’s yours…You’re trying to do it independently, autonomously, apart from union with God - that is sin…Any righteousness that you have accrued by yourself, for yourself, to yourself is by that very definition not righteousness. God alone is good; it’s that simple. God alone is righteous. God alone is good. Everything you do is for mixed motives; everything you do protecting yourself. He’s happy to simply keep saying, ‘You alone are righteous. You alone are good. You alone are merciful.’ And therefore the only righteousness that you and I can have…is by
participation…it’s a mystery of participation in the righteousness of God.” Everything in Romans focuses us on God, not ourselves and our sin but simply God.
In today’s reading, St. Paul emphasizes baptism as an experience of the paschal mystery: the dying and rising of Jesus. Baptism plunges us into the death of Jesus; we live our baptism by dying with Jesus and letting God raise us up. “As to his death, he died to sin once and for all; as to his life, he lives for God” (Romans 6:10). The fundamental sin in Romans, in the whole of Scripture, is idolatry. It is the root sin: not acknowledging the Absolute as Absolute but treating the ephemeral as Absolute. Dying with Jesus means detaching from idolatry, egocentricity, and selfish desires.
St. Paul draws out a massive conclusion: “Consequently, you too must think of yourselves as [being] dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). Just as Jesus lived for God alone, we live for God alone – this is decisive for being in the realm of grace versus the realm of sin. We “are still prone to the power of sin and will sin unless [we] remain united with Christ” in his dying – hence living a life of letting go into God. Faith means living for and in God alone. We identify with Jesus in his death and his resurrection when we let go. Faith means letting go into God – letting go of our thinking, our desires, our selfishness, any reference to self at all. Faith means letting go of self as the center of life for God to be the center of life. We shift the center of gravity of our lives to God and away from self: not thinking of self or thinking at all because it is limited and self-referential but resting in the divine presence - the darkness of the holy mystery - by the faith that is deeper than the operations of the mind. Identifying with Christ Crucified, we let go into God.