Catholic lectionary for 15 October 2005

King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

Romans, Chapter 4, verses 13, 16-18

¹³ By faith only he and his seed received the promise, ¹⁶ Abraham is the father of all that believe

¹³For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.
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¹⁶Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all,

¹⁷(As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.

¹⁸Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations; according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be.

Read more:Romans, Chapter 4

Luke, Chapter 12, verses 8-12

¹ Christ preacheth to his disciples to avoid hypocrisy and fearfulness in publishing his doctrine

⁸Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God:

⁹But he that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of God.

¹⁰And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven.

¹¹And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say:

¹²For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.

Read more:Luke, Chapter 12

NOTES

“You are worth more than many little birds”—for many people today these words sound like a revelation. When a human life is worth next to nothing (or worth a great deal of money), food inevitably becomes...

Speaking to the disciples about the Kingdom, Jesus describes it above all as a new life opened to those who seek it. But it can be found only in the case of absolute openness on one's own part. To live the life of the Kingdom...

Speaking about the Kingdom and about how to obtain it, the Savior, as can be seen, puts first the question of life, of what kind of life a person lives...

Speaking about the Kingdom and about how to obtain it, the Savior, as can be seen, puts first the question of life, of what kind of life a person lives. Such an approach can be considered quite traditional. Indeed, in the Bible, when the subject is a person and his life or life force, the Synodal translation in this case usually says "soul," a clear line is drawn between the person as he was before the fall and the person as he became after the fall.

Before the fall, this force was connected above all with the breath of life that God breathed into the human being at creation. After the fall, it became connected mainly with blood, with the physiological essence of the human being, just as in animals, where it too is connected with blood. As can be seen, life is presented by the biblical authors as whole and indivisible. It is not divided into spiritual and physical in such a way that one of its components could be separated from the other. But the quality of life can differ, being determined by a person's spiritual state: the fuller and more intense his relations with God are, the more spiritual there is in the person's life, and the more his spiritual component prevails over the natural one, subjecting it to itself. In the Kingdom, as can be seen, a person's life is completely transformed.

Only one thing is important here: whether the person lives this life or not. If his life turns out to be part of the life of the Kingdom, then even the death of his physical body changes nothing in principle. After all, in the Kingdom nature in its former quality does not exist, and in its new, transformed state it is no longer something completely foreign in nature to the spirit, as it is in the untransformed world. And to the extent that a person's life in our transforming but still untransformed world belongs to the Kingdom, he need not fear losses at the moment of physical death, because death has no relation to the Kingdom. But if the whole life of a person remains connected only with the untransformed world and with untransformed bodily existence, he has nothing to count on: death will prove to be the only and final reality for him.

The Kingdom will in any case eventually transform our world, making it part of itself, but a person who has no relation to the Kingdom will have no relation to this triumph of the Kingdom, at least until the day of Judgment. That is why Jesus advises us to fear not the one who can kill a person physically, but the One who can deprive him of the Kingdom: after all, having the Kingdom, a person loses nothing even in the case of physical death; but having lost the Kingdom, he will sooner or later inevitably lose everything, including the physical life he preserved at such an inadequate price.

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