Friday in the 28th Week of Ordinary Time, October 17, 2025

Romans 4, 1-8

What can we say that Abraham found, our ancestor according to the flesh? Indeed, if Abraham was justified on the basis of his works, he has reason to boast; but this was not so in the sight of God. For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. A worker’s wage is credited not as a gift, but as something due. But when one does not work, yet believes in the one who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness. So also David declares the blessedness of the person to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not record.

When St. Paul turns to Abraham in this passage from fourth chapter of Romans, used for the First Reading of today’s Mass, he is not changing the subject but revealing the foundation beneath everything he has said about justification. The question he asks — What did Abraham find? — is more than historical curiosity. It is an appeal to memory, to the very origin of faith itself. If we wish to understand grace, Paul insists, we must look back to the one who first believed the promise when no law, no nation, no temple yet existed.

Abraham’s greatness lay not in his accomplishments but in his trust. Paul is careful to say that if Abraham were justified by his works, he would indeed have reason to boast — but not before God. Human merit impresses other humans; divine righteousness is of another order altogether. God seeks not a ledger of achievements but a heart open to His word. When Genesis says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness”, it identifies faith itself as the moment of communion. Faith is not a substitute for righteousness; it is the very form that righteousness takes in the soul when God’s promise is received.

Paul contrasts two ways of accounting for worth. The laborer’s wage is a debt owed; it reduces the relationship between giver and receiver to an exchange. But faith upends this economy. The believer does not “work” in order to earn divine favor; he receives righteousness as sheer gift. Grace does not abolish effort, but it transforms its motive. Our actions are no longer an attempt to purchase divine approval but a response to love already given. The difference is as vast as that between a hired servant and a beloved child.

This, Paul adds, is the blessedness David sang of in the psalms: “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered” (Psalm 32, 1). The covering of sin does not mean concealment but healing. God does not hide our wounds; He binds them. The righteousness imputed to faith is not a legal fiction but a moral and spiritual reality — the restoration of the relationship between creature and Creator. The one whose sin is “not recorded” is not someone whose guilt has been ignored, but one whose life has been rewritten by mercy.

Abraham thus becomes the archetype of all believers, Jewish and Gentile alike. His faith preceded circumcision; his trust came before law. In him, Paul sees the universality of salvation: justification cannot be confined to those who observe a particular code or belong to a specific lineage. It belongs to all who believe in the God who raises the dead and calls into being what does not exist. The righteousness of faith is catholic in the deepest sense — it reaches across every human boundary.

There is also an interior progression in Paul’s argument. By citing both Abraham and David, he unites two moments in salvation history: the promise given to the patriarch and the mercy proclaimed by the king. Both testify that righteousness comes from God’s initiative, not human achievement. Faith receives, while pride resists. In this light, justification is not merely a forensic declaration but a personal encounter. The same God who counted Abraham righteous also counts the penitent blessed, not because they have earned it, but because they have been drawn into His covenant of love.

For Paul, the gospel does not begin with the moral hero but with the forgiven sinner. The one who “does not work, yet believes” embodies the truth that salvation is not a transaction but a transformation. The heart that trusts in divine mercy becomes itself the dwelling place of that mercy. The blessedness David described is nothing less than the joy of a soul freed from self-reliance and resting entirely in God.

So Paul leaves us with a paradox that defines the Christian life: faith is both the simplest and the hardest act — simple because it asks only that we believe, hard because it means surrendering every claim to glory. Abraham’s faith looked forward to Christ; ours looks back to him. But the righteousness that clothed Abraham still clothes every believer who dares to entrust everything to the One who justifies the ungodly.