CatholicBoard

The Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

The very purpose for our life, the meaning of all this fuss and ado, is to become a child of God. God’s ultimate purpose for us – the reason we woke up this morning – is to be conformed to what we became the moment we were baptized by water and the Holy Spirit: a son of God conformed perfectly to the image of the only Son of God who became incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary 2,000 years ago.

This is what Saint Paul wrote to the Church in Rome: “For those [God] foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).

In this process of conversion, of conformation, of becoming evermore what we have been made in our baptism, we must conform our minds and our wills to the very person of Jesus. This is made possible by the powerful indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it” (Mt 13:45).

This conformation requires that we conform our outlook, our desires, and our goals to that of Jesus. The Kingdom of Heaven must be sought as the ultimate end of all our thoughts and actions. Not food. Not a padded retirement account. Not a long and distinguished resume. All these will be long forgotten soon after our bodies cool and are placed in the grave.

The prayer of today’s responsorial psalm is the prayer of every authentic Christian:

“My portion is the LORD; I promise to keep your words. Teaching from your lips is more precious to me than heaps of silver and gold … Truly I love your commands more than the finest gold. Thus I follow all your precepts; every wrong way I hate” (Psalm 119).

This was the prayer that Jesus prayed as a good Jew in the First Century as he partook in Jewish liturgical prayer. He meant every word of this Psalm and he fulfilled every word with the life he lived, and because he did this, we now can do it too. We now can pray this Psalm with all of our heart and fulfill it by the indwelling presence and power of his Holy Spirit!

Like Solomon in the first reading who asked for wisdom instead of earthly riches in the face of the task ahead of him, it is the privileged duty of each Christian to value the divine wisdom from on high above all earthly goods and to follow that wisdom with divine faith.

We discover from St. Paul that Jesus is “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). As Christians, we follow not an abstract moral code, but a Person who reproduces his life within each disciple, guiding the Christian in the new life of holiness – the path that leads to life eternal.