October 29, 2025
Wednesday of the Thirtieth
Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 481
Reading
I
Brothers and
sisters:
The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness;
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.
And the one who searches hearts
knows what is the intention of the Spirit,
because he intercedes for the holy ones
according to God’s will.
We know that all
things work for good for those who love God,
who are called according to his purpose.
For those he foreknew he also predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son,
so that he might be the firstborn
among many brothers.
And those he predestined he also called;
and those he called he also justified;
and those he justified he also glorified.
Responsorial
Psalm
R.
(6a) My hope, O Lord, is in your mercy.
Look, answer me, O LORD, my God!
Give light to my eyes that I may not sleep in death
lest my enemy say, “I have overcome him”;
lest my foes rejoice at my downfall.
R. My hope, O Lord, is in your mercy.
Though I trusted in your mercy,
Let my heart rejoice in your salvation;
let me sing of the LORD, “He has been good to me.”
R. My hope, O Lord, is in your mercy.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia,
alleluia.
God has called us through the Gospel
to possess the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jesus passed
through towns and villages,
teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem.
Someone asked him,
“Lord, will only a few people be saved?”
He answered them,
“Strive to enter through the narrow gate,
for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter
but will not be strong enough.
After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door,
then will you stand outside knocking and saying,
‘Lord, open the door for us.’
He will say to you in reply,
‘I do not know where you are from.’
And you will say,
‘We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.’
Then he will say to you,
‘I do not know where you are from.
Depart from me, all you evildoers!’
And there will be wailing and grinding of teeth
when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God
and you yourselves cast out.
And people will come from the east and the west
and from the north and the south
and will recline at table in the Kingdom of God.
For behold, some are last who will be first,
and some are first who will be last.”
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102925.cfm
Commentary on Romans 8:26-30
Today’s
reading follows immediately on yesterday’s. Paul continues his message of
encouragement and hope. Paul writes:
…the
Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words.
Just as we
saw that hope sustains the believer in his suffering, so the Spirit also is
with him when he prays. Earlier Paul had spoken of the believer “groaning”, now
it is the Spirit who ‘groans’ as our petitions are passed on to the Father.
Obviously, the Spirit does not literally groan. It simply means that he does
not communicate in words or that his thoughts cannot be expressed in human
language. (And why would the Spirit want to use our kind of language?)
And it is
not that the Spirit, who is God, intercedes in the way that Our Lady or the
saints are said to intercede for us. Rather it is through the Spirit, which has
been given to us in baptism, that the prayers we need to make are carried to
the Father in language that we could never express:
…God,
who searches hearts, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit
intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Genuine
prayer will not be haphazard requests for something we simply happen to want at
any particular time. Nor will it be a kind of arm-twisting by which we try to
make God arrange things in the way we would like. It is not surprising that,
when what we ask for in that way does not happen, we can feel that God is not
listening to us.
On the
other hand, prayers that we make in and through the Spirit will always include
the desire to know the will of God and for the strength to be able to carry it
out in the different circumstances of our lives. In both Matthew and Luke we
read:
If you,
then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more
will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matt 7:11)
and
If you,
then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more
will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:13)
Ultimately,
all genuine prayer will be made in and through the Spirit of God because the
purpose of our prayer is to be united with God. Our prayer is to be “Your will
be done” and not “Lord, my will be done”. We do not just want
to do God’s will reluctantly; we positively long to make our will conform to
his. His wants and ours then perfectly coincide, and that is where our deepest
happiness lies. The purpose of prayer is find out what that will is, to know
where the Spirit is leading us.
The Jerusalem
Bible has this to say about prayer in the New Testament:
Paul
insists on the necessity of constant prayer taught by Jesus himself and
practised by the early Christians. Paul is always praying for the faithful and
asks them to do the same for him and for each other. These prayers must ask for
growth in holiness, but also for the removal of all external and internal
obstacles to it; we have to pray, too, for the orderly conduct of the country’s
business. Paul lays special stress on prayers of thanksgiving for every gift of
God and particularly for the food God gives us; he begins all his own letters
with a prayer of thanks and he wants the spirit of gratitude to pervade all the
Christians’ dealings with each other. In liturgical gatherings prayers of
thanksgiving and praise must predominate and these sentiments must inspire the
hymns that the Christians compose for these occasions. It is the Holy Spirit
who inspires the prayer of the Christian, and Paul prefers to emphasise this.
Paul now
moves on to discuss God’s call for us to share his glory:
We know
that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called
according to his purpose.
And our
“good”, of course, is that we grow evermore into the likeness of Christ and
become ‘other Christs’. It is difficult at times to see how certain experiences
can be working for our long-term good, yet this is a conviction that we need to
learn—that our loving God is present in every experience. Of course, that may
be extremely difficult to see at the time and it may be only after a long
period that we begin to see how this experience was beneficial, that it was a
true learning experience.
Again and
again, people have—and perhaps not till much later on—realised that some very
painful experience, such as a serious illness or the loss of a loved one, has
been an occasion of personal growth and maturing. This will help people who ask
“Why?” or “Why me?” when they have had a very bad experience. In the middle of
everything it can be very difficult to see where God’s love is working, but it
is there. It takes time, it takes faith to realise that God’s love is in
operation all the time.
It is a
limited view of God which sees him as a kind of puppet master who gives good
things to his friends and punishes his enemies. His thoughts are not our
thoughts and his ways not our ways.
The sooner
we come to understand his thoughts the better. And it is important to realise
that this is not fatalism. Fatalism is to lie down passively under the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nor is it the “opium of the people” which
Karl Marx spoke about—passively putting up with a life of suffering (and
exploitation by ‘capitalists’), because of the promise of a happy life after
death. The true Christian responds actively and positively to every experience,
trying to find God there and responding to his call. And finding happiness in
the here and now.
Paul now
speaks of how God, from all eternity, knew those who would be:
…predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the
firstborn within a large family.
Clearly,
we are touching here on the issue of predestination. There are those who
believe that God has decided from all eternity who will be saved and who will
not and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Either you are one of the
lucky ones or you are not. There are those who take the number 144,000 of the
elect, mentioned in the Book of Revelation, as the revealed number of the
saved. That puts billions of the world’s population, including the majority of
Christians, totally out of the running and reduces God’s saving love to a
lottery.
However,
this can be understood in a very different way. God’s knowledge is infinite and
eternal. Everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is known to him
simultaneously in an eternal now. For God there is no past or
future. God then knows who are going to live their lives according to his will
and those who will decide of their own free choice to reject him. If one may
use a rough analogy, it is like a man who stands on top of a hill and looks
down on a winding road below. He sees two cars approaching in opposite
directions at high speed. They cannot see each other, but the man on the hill
knows that, inevitably, there is going to be a serious collision. He knows it
is going to happen, but he is not in any way responsible.
God then
knows now which people will accept the message of Jesus and put their faith in
him as Lord and who, with that faith and commitment, will gradually grow into
the likeness of Jesus, their Lord and Brother. But in so far as they are
modelling themselves on him, Jesus remains the “firstborn within a large
family”—the ‘eldest brother’. He is the One who holds the position of highest
honour in the Father’s family to which we, the baptised, also belong. And he is
the ‘natural’ Son, while we are adopted by God’s gift.
Christ, as
the perfect image of the Father, came among us to restore to fallen Man the
original splendour which had been darkened by sin. In union with Christ, we can
now be formed in the even greater image of a son of God. The glory which Christ
as the image of God possesses by right is progressively communicated to the
Christian until his body is itself clothed in the image of the ‘heavenly’
person:
…those
whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified,
and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Those whom
God’s foreknowledge knows will do his will are those he has called (and who
have answered his call). And because of their call and their positive response,
they are ‘justified’, that is, they are made right with God through their
openness to the ‘grace’ of his love poured into them. And these are the ones he
will bring with him one day to share his glory.
The talk
of predestination, some may find disturbing. In this context, predestination is
really a way of speaking of God’s eternal knowing. God lives outside of time.
For him there is neither past nor future; only the present. Each one of us has
been in the mind of God eternally. The time of our arrival in his creation is
known to him. The progress of our life and all the choices we make are known to
him. We do not make our choices because he knows them; he knows our choices
because we make them. God then knows from all eternity who says ‘Yes’ to him
and who says ‘No’. All those who say ‘Yes’ can be said to be called and
predestined for justification and glory; those who say a final ‘No’ are called,
but are not predestined—by their own choice—for justification and glory.
So, as far
as God is concerned, our predestination is set because he knows what our
choices and responses to his call will ultimately be. As far as we are
concerned, it is not at all set because there are still opportunities for us to
make a final ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Is that worrying? It need not be. As Jesus told
Thomas à Kempis, the author of the Imitation of Christ, if we
concentrate on saying ‘Yes’ to Jesus at every moment of every day the future
will take care of itself and there will be nothing to fear. Have you said ‘Yes’
yet?
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Commentary on Luke 13:22-30
The Gospel
today speaks in terms of predestination, of those who will ultimately be saved.
Jesus is
steadily making his way to Jerusalem, passing through many towns and villages.
It seems that at this time he is in the region of Perea, on the east side of
the Jordan, on his way to Jericho and Jerusalem. He is approached by a man who
wants to know if only a few will be saved. One has the feeling that he expects
the answer to be ‘Yes’ and that he regards himself as being among the chosen
ones.
Jesus does
not answer the question directly. Rather, he implies that those who are saved
are not necessarily those who regard themselves as God’s chosen ones, but those
who walk a certain path in life. That path, of course, is precisely what he is
proposing through his own life and teaching. It is a “narrow door”, he says,
which many will not be able to enter:
Once
the [Master] of
the house has got up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to
knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then in reply he will say to
you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’
Those on
the ‘outside’ will counter by saying:
We ate
and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.
But still
the Master says:
I do
not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!
Jesus was
often accused of eating and drinking with sinners, but it did them no good
unless, as a result of their contact with him, they changed their way of
living.
It is
clearly not enough to be just in Christ’s company or to have heard his
teaching. For example, just being a baptised Catholic or routinely fulfilling a
few religious obligations (like being physically present at Sunday Mass) is not
the same as really being a part of what is going on. To go in the “narrow door”
is to be actively committed to living the gospel in one’s daily life.
Jesus’
next words are directed to some of the Jews, but to Christians also:
There
will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out.
They will
see them enter the Kingdom, not because of their status, but because of their
commitment to serving God.
On the
other hand, many of Jesus’ hearers will be rejected because they relied only on
their ethnic and religious origins. But that is not enough. In the meantime:
…people
will come from east and west, from north and south, and take their places at
the banquet in the kingdom of God.
They will
see these gentile outsiders from the four corners of the earth, people they
rejected and despised, going ahead of them into the Kingdom, again because
these people heard the call of God and entered by the “narrow door” that leads
to life.
This was
already being realised in the early Church as more and more Gentiles heard the
gospel message, were baptised and many died as martyrs. Jesus even says, at the
end of today’s reading:
Indeed,
some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.
It would
be wrong for us to read this Gospel as of mere historic interest—it is
addressed directly to each one of us. It is vital that we, as Catholics, do not
think that, simply on the basis of our membership in our Church, we are somehow
on an inside track and that, if the worst came to the worst, we could always
get a confession or a final anointing to set things straight. That would be
very presumptuous and very dangerous on our part. We could very well be in a
position to hear those terrible words:
Truly I
tell you, I do not know you. (Matt
25:12)
Each day
and every day of our lives we have to walk through that narrow door, that door
of faith and trust and love for Jesus and our brothers and sisters. Only then
will we find ourselves joining the patriarchs, the prophets and all the saints
in that life of unending happiness and union with our God for which we were
made.
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Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Ordinary Time
Opening Prayer
Almighty and ever-living God, strengthen our faith, hope and
love.
May we do with loving hearts what
you ask of us and come to share the life you promise.
We ask this through our Lord
Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Gospel Reading - Luke 13: 22-30
Through towns and villages Jesus went teaching, making his way
to
Jerusalem. Someone said to him,
'Sir, will there be only a few saved?' He said to them, 'Try your hardest to
enter by the narrow door, because, I tell you, many will try to enter and will
not succeed.
'Once the master of the house has got up and locked the door,
you may find yourself standing outside knocking on the door, saying,
"Lord, open to us," but he will answer, "I do not know where you
come from."
Then you will start saying, "We once ate and drank in
your company; you taught in our streets," but he will reply, "I do not
know where you come from; away from me, all evil doers!"
'Then there will be weeping and grinding of teeth, when you
see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and
yourselves thrown out. And people from east and west, from north and south,
will come and sit down at the feast in the kingdom of God. 'Look, there are
those now last who will be first, and those now first who will be last.'
Reflection
The Gospel today narrates an episode that took place along the
road that Jesus was going through from Galilee to Jerusalem, the description of
which occupies one third part of Luke’s Gospel (Lk 9: 51 to 19: 28).
•
Luke 13: 22: The
journey toward Jerusalem. “Through towns and villages, he went teaching, making
his way to Jerusalem.” More than once, Luke mentions that Jesus is on the
way toward Jerusalem. During ten chapters he describes the journey up to
Jerusalem (Lk 9: 51 to 19: 28), Luke constantly recalls that Jesus is on the
way toward Jerusalem (Lk 9: 51, 53, 57; 10: 1, 38; 11: 1; 13: 22, 33; 14: 25;
17: 11; 18: 31; 18: 37; 19: 1, 11, 28). What is clear and definitive from the
beginning is the destiny or end of the journey: Jerusalem, the capital city
where Jesus suffers his Passion and dies (Lk 9: 31, 51). But Luke rarely tells
us about the places through which Jesus passed. This he says only at the
beginning of the journey (Lk 9: 51), in the middle (Lk 17: 11) and at the end
(Lk 18: 35; 19: 1), and thus we know something about the places through which
Jesus was passing. In this way, Luke suggests the following teaching: the
objective of our life should be clear, and we should assume it decidedly like
Jesus did. We have to walk, we cannot stop. The places through which we have to
pass are not always clear and definitive: what is sure, certain, is the
objective: Jerusalem, where the “exodus” awaits us (Lk 9: 31), the Passion,
Death and the Resurrection.
•
Luke 13: 23: The
question regarding the number of those who are saved. Along the road all
kinds of things happen: information on the massacre and the disasters (Lk 13:
1-5), the parable (Lk 13: 6-9, 18-21), discussions (Lk 13: 10-13) and, in
today’s Gospel, a question from the people: “Sir will there be only a few saved?” It is always the same question
concerning salvation!
•
Luke 13: 24-25: The narrow door. Jesus says that the door is narrow: “Try your hardest to enter by the narrow
door, because I tell you, many will try to enter
but
will not succeed.” Does Jesus, perhaps, says this to fill us with fear and
to oblige us to observe the Law as the Pharisees taught? What does this narrow
door signify? About which door is he speaking? In the Sermon on the Mountain
Jesus suggests that the entrance into the Kingdom has eight doors. These are
the eight categories of persons of the Beatitudes:
•
(a) the poor in spirit,
•
(b) the meek,
•
(c) the afflictted,
•
(d) the hungry and thirsty for justice,
•
(e) the merciful,
•
(f) the pure of heart,
•
(g) the peace makers and
•
(h) those persecuted for justice (Mt 5:
3-10).
•
Luke reduces them to four categories:
•
(a) the poor,
•
(b) the hungry,
•
(c) those who are sad and
•
(d) those who are persecuted (Lc 6: 20-22).
Only those who belong to one of these categories mentioned
in the Beatitudes will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the narrow
door. It is the new look on the salvation which Jesus communicates to us. There
is no other door! It is a question of the conversion which Jesus asks from us.
And he insists: “Try your hardest to
enter by the narrow door, because I tell you many will try to enter and will
not succeed. Once the master of the house has got up and locked the door, you
may find yourself standing outside knocking on the door, saying ‘Lord, open to
us,’ but he will answer, ‘I do not know where you come from.’” In what
concerns the hour of judgment, now is the favorable time for conversion, to
change our opinion, our vision on salvation and to enter into one of the eight
categories.
•
Luke 13: 26-28: The tragic misunderstanding. God responds to the one who knocks at
the door: “I do not know where you come
from.” But they insist and argue: “We
have eaten and we drank in your presence, you taught on our streets!” It is
not sufficient to have eaten with Jesus, to have participated in the
multiplication of the loaves and to have listened to his teachings on the
streets of the cities and of the villages! It is not sufficient to be in Church
and to have participated in the instruction of the catechism. God will answer:
”I do not know where you come from; away
from me, all evil doers!” This is a tragic misunderstanding and a total
lack of conversion, of understanding. Jesus considers unjust what others
consider something to be just and pleasing to God. It is a totally new way of
seeing our salvation. The door is truly narrow.
•
Luke 13: 29-30: The key that explains the misunderstanding. “People from east and west,
from north and south, will come and sit down at the feast in
the Kingdom of God.
Look, there are those now last who will be the first, and those now first who
will be last.” It is a question of the great change which takes place with
the coming of God down to us in Jesus. All the people will have access and will
pass through the narrow door.
Personal Questions
•
To have a clear objective and to travel toward
Jerusalem: are the objectives of my life clear or do I allow myself to be
transported by the wind of the moment by public opinion?
•
The narrow door. What idea do I have of God, of
life, of salvation?
Concluding Prayer
All your creatures shall thank you, Yahweh, and your faithful
shall bless you.
They shall speak of the glory of your kingship and tell of
your might. (Ps 145: 1011)
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