Overview:

Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

“For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self,
but I see in my members another principle
at war with the law of my mind,
taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
Miserable one that I am!
Who will deliver me from this mortal body?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 7:22-25).

“‘You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; 
why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
‘Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?’” (Lk 12:56-57).

Find today’s readings here.

There are three questions in today’s readings, and each of them pulls my heart into my stomach. 

First, Paul’s “Who will deliver me from this mortal body?” is as devastating as the tension of wills he pains over in his epistle. Then, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ “Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” sobers, along with the frank “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” 

Recently, another text has confronted me similarly: C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce

When shown by his heavenly guide that all of hell, which had once felt impossibly expansive, was small enough to fit in the tiniest crack in the ground of the world of light he finds himself led through, Lewis’s narrator makes a grave and plain remark about the underworld: “It does seem big enough when you’re in it, Sir.” With mercy there, Lewis articulates the anxious confines of a life lived without concern for the love of God down in that grey hell, a life caught up in itself.

In both Lewis’s and Paul’s searches for deliverance, they are looking at their hands and coming to terms with their capacities for evil. Lewis’s narrator is literally peering down at the ground, and St. Paul is seeing his members “at war with the law of my mind.” We can use Jesus’ gruff questions for the crowds as a call to look upward.

“Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” God is here, in all things, right now.

“Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” With closeness to our conscience and consciousness, we come closer to doing God’s will.

The limits of our neurons and synapses and our skin and bones are not the limits of our hopes and dreams. Should we orient ourselves toward God, we can know something far more grand than the hell we make for one another. 

With the Gospel and some help from C.S. Lewis, we can answer Paul’s question that he, of course, already answers for us with an expression of thanks: “Who will deliver me from this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Julian Navarro is America Media’s advancement manager.