22/10/2025

Wednesday Week 29 Ordinary Time

St Paul wrote this letter to guide the very first Christian community that was then in its infancy in Rome. It has become since then a foundational text for all Christians. 

Most of the first Christians fall into the category of "blessed even though they have not seen" which we also share with all subsequent  generations. St Paul himself is the only Apostle who was personally called after and by the Resurrection and who learned all that he knows of Jesus' life and teaching as do we from the then still living "friends" of Jesus and from the Old Testament.

I have come to realise that the Middle-East chosen by IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT to be the location in this world of the timeless Incarnation was in those days at the beginning of the Pax Romana a place of intellectual and cultural ferment where the creation of vast wealth had enabled millions to devote their time to physical and mental activity which without the Revelations made to Jews in Palestine, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God" is a "literal waste of time" and of human life. It was not just the pure simplicity and poverty known by Jesus in Galilee.

St Paul wrote this letter only twenty-five years or so years after the Resurrection and we  2000 years later have also to encounter and respond to this the final event of God's Revelation as did St Paul on the road to Damascus.

The wealth of the world is now far greater than even then and we are more entangled in our technologically enhanced consciousnesses. We have still been given the gift of rational life, however,  by "Our Father" to enable us to make the free choice to which St Paul encourages the Romans and all other would-be "Christians"  to devote our lives. 

"Become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed and having become free from sin become slaves of righteousness".