God provides gift upon gift upon gift

11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ex 19:1-6a
Second Reading: Rom 5:6-11
Gospel Reading: Mt 9:36 – 10a 

God created humans from nothing, purely out of love and a desire to have them share his happiness. However, Adam and Eve sinned; they chose their own way instead of his.

As Catholics, we know that when we sin we can repent; we simply “go to confession.” However, Adam and Eve could not. Any move toward reconciliation had to come from God.

And God did not hesitate to act. On his initiative, God the Son became man and, by dying, repented for us. “Christ died for the ungodly,” St. Paul says. “While we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

As the Church says at Easter, “to ransom a slave,” God “gave away” his Son, recapitulating what he had done when he freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt, bearing them to himself “on eagles’ wings.”

Now we can repent because, as members of Christ’s Mystical Body, we share in his death. Through the sacrament of reconciliation, God has reconciled to himself all human beings without exception.

What God did was a sheer gift. We did not deserve it; God did not owe it to us. He gave it to us “without payment.”

However, the gift comes to us not directly from God, but through the Jews, the people he chose from all the nations.

“If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples,” God said. “Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” 

Accordingly, when Jesus first commissioned his apostles, he said, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

God is not democratic. He makes choices. He discriminates – not against us, but for us. He is not merely just: he goes beyond justice and gives freely, like the vineyard owner who paid the workers hired last as much as those hired first.

Salvation comes to us as a gift, therefore, not simply from God, but also from the Jews, enriched by this double giving.

During the first few centuries after Christ, Christians started thinking that because some Jews had disobeyed God and rejected his covenant, the Jews were no longer God’s “chosen people.”

No, St. Paul said in his letter to the non-Jewish Romans: “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.”

Comparing Jews to a cultivated olive tree and Gentiles to branches of a wild olive tree, he says that some branches of the cultivated tree have been cut off and branches of the wild olive tree grafted on so that they, too, might benefit from the cultivated tree’s “rich root.” Those grafted on must remember, he said, that they do not “support the root,” but rather the root supports them.

The Church cannot “forget that it draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree on to which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles,” Vatican II said.

The Jews are “our elder brothers in the faith,” said Pope St. John Paul II when he first visited a Jewish synagogue in Rome. “Spiritually, we are all Semites,” said Pope Pius XI.

However, even apart from the Jews, God’s gifts come to us through others.

“I distribute the virtues quite diversely,” God told St. Catherine of Siena, in a passage quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “I do not give all of them to each person, but some to one, some to others … I have willed that one should need another and that all should be my ministers in distributing the graces and gifts they have received from me.”

Thanks to God, thanks to the Jews, and thanks to others, we can turn back to God again and again in the sacrament of reconciliation. Let us, in turn, continue passing on God’s gift to others.