Tuesday of the Twenty-EighthWeek in Ordinary Time
To worship God in order to understand
For I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: for Jew first, and then Greek. For in it is revealed the righteousness of God from faith to faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous by faith will live.” The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. While claiming to be wise, they became fools Rom 1,16-22
The epistle to the Romans is the highest point of Paul’s theological speculation. While being centered on the theme of the salvation through the faith and ranging in many other subjects, it can be summarized by the first verses of the today passage: the gospel of Christ “is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” and it is the supreme revelation of the truth and of the God’s justice, which manifests itself “from faith to faith”. Every believer, namely, inherits the message of the gospel and the meditations of those who are his predecessors, but he adds his own resonances enriching, thus, the knowledge of Christ in the history. The absolute protagonist of this letter is God the Father, who has decided to save the humanity from the sin, with no distinction between Jews and pagans.In the verses which follow Paul announces that it is the “faith” to allow to penetrate the truth and to learn about it even more. The “reason”, the pride of the Greek and Roman civilizations, and “the law”, pride of the jewish people, although having reached very high targets and developed deep speculations, at some point have been lost because the men “suppress the truth by their wickedness”, by a denial to God of the adoration for what the reason has known or what has been revealed in the law and, “as a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened”. From the multiple truths which the reason can read in the great book of the nature, Paul mentions the eternity, the omnipotence and the divinity: “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made”. The faith, instead, allows to penetrate in depth into both the truths of the gospel as well as those of the creation, through the worship and the contemplation: of the starry sky, of the blade of grass, of the parables and of the whole history of the salvation.