Monday of the Thirty-FirstWeek in Ordinary Time
The church will save the jews
For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. Just as you once disobeyed God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now disobeyed in order that, by virtue of the mercy shown to you, they too may (now) receive mercy. For God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all. Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given him anything that he may be repaid?” For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. Rom 11,29-36
A few days ago we invited to lunch Oliviero and Giovanni, two friends with whom more than thirty years ago we started along the path of the faith. As often it happens, when the brothers in the Lord meet, we talked about the Holy Scriptures, a topic which has united us in the past and which unites us also today. Then the conversation moved on the story of the jew people. Oliviero still maintained that it is the chosen people because, as Paul says in the today reading, ” for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable”. I retorted that the jews “are beloved for the sake of the fathers [Abraham, Isaac and Jacob]” but not more than the eskimos and anyhow they are no longer the chosen people since the time has elapsed for them. Today this role belongs to the church, through which – Paul says – also the jew people is called to be saved. It is wonderful that the sins of the men contribute to make more shining the working love of the Father and facilitate the spread of the gospel. God writes straight on our twisted lines! But this strategy of God – Paul says – is nothing compared with the inexplicable abyss “of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God”. He drives the secret plot of the history of the salvation through the events, of which the history of the mankind is woven. “For who has known the mind of the Lord?”. Everything about him is a mystery, of which to us mortals some ray of light is revealed, so that it can always increase our thirst to know him and the desire to worship him. What we can say about the mystery of God is just untied stuttering. But the wonder which is generated by the stars of the heaven and by the blade of grass remains, in front of which a sublime mind as Dante exclaimed: “O abundant grace, where I presumed / to fix my eyes for the eternal light, / so that my seeing is consumed therein” (Paradise 33,82 to 84).