Monday in the 31st Week of Ordinary Time, November 3, 2025

Romans 11, 29-36

Brothers and sisters: 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 God be glory forever. Amen.

St. Paul here reaches a summit in his letter to the Romans — a moment of pure contemplation that bursts from the long and arduous path of argument. It is as though he has climbed, step by step, through the dark mystery of human disobedience and divine mercy, and at the peak he can only gaze, astonished, into the radiant depths of God’s wisdom.

The Apostle has been grappling with the fate of Israel, the chosen people, and with the mystery of how their unbelief became the occasion for the Gentiles’ salvation. Yet even as he writes of human disobedience, he sees God’s mercy shining behind it. What appears as tragedy in human eyes becomes, in the divine plan, a door to grace. “For God delivered all to disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all.” This is not to say that sin itself is willed by God — but that he, in his unfathomable wisdom, allows human failure to become the instrument of His compassion. Nothing is wasted in His providence; even rebellion is woven, through repentance, into the tapestry of redemption.

“The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” What God begins, he will not abandon. His covenant with Israel was not annulled but fulfilled in Christ, and His covenant with us rests on that same immovable fidelity. We often measure divine grace by our own fickleness, fearing that our sins have cancelled His promises. Yet Paul insists that God’s gifts do not expire with our failures. His call remains even when we turn away; His mercy endures beyond the measure of our repentance. The God who called Abraham, who spoke to Moses, who raised Christ from the dead, does not change his mind. His constancy is the great rock on which our trembling faith finds rest.

And so Paul, overwhelmed by this vision, abandons argument for adoration: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” Here theology yields to praise. The human mind, having traced the logic of salvation as far as it can, must fall silent before the abyss of divine wisdom. God’s plan is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be worshipped. His judgments are “inscrutable,” not because they are irrational, but because they are too vast, too luminous, for our narrow sight. We glimpse their outline in the cross of Christ—a mercy that conquers judgment by passing through it, a love that redeems by suffering what it did not deserve.

Paul closes with what may be the most sweeping doxology in all of Scripture: “For from Him and through Him and for Him are all things.” In those few words lies an entire theology. All things come from God as their source; all things exist through God as their sustainer; all things tend toward God as their final goal. Creation itself is a vast circle returning to its origin, drawn home by the same love that first called it into being. Sin breaks the harmony of that circle, but grace restores it—until at last everything that has been scattered by disobedience will be gathered again into Christ, the center of all things.

To read these words is to feel Paul’s heart lifted from anguish to adoration. The God whose ways confound us is also the God whose mercy enfolds us. He owes nothing to anyone, yet He gives everything. We cannot repay him, yet he asks only our praise. And so, as Paul does, we must let our questions give way to wonder, our reasoning to reverence, and our hearts to thanksgiving.

“To God be glory forever. Amen.”