Wednesday in the 29th Week of Ordinary Time, October 22, 2025

Romans 6, 12-18

Sin must not reign over your mortal bodies so that you obey their desires. And do not present the parts of your bodies to sin as weapons for wickedness, but present yourselves to God as raised from the dead to life and the parts of your bodies to God as weapons for righteousness. For sin is not to have any power over you, since you are not under the law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Of course not! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, although you were once slaves of sin, you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were entrusted. Freed from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness.

We continue to reflect on the passages from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans used for the First Readings at Mass during this time.

In the last reflection, on Romans 5, we saw how God created the human race in Adam at the very beginning and how as a result of the Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve all their descendents were affected, becoming the heirs of death.  Then, in God’s merciful Providence, his Son became our New Adam, joining himself to our nature and making us members of his Body through the grace he won for us in his Passion and Death.  Now, all those who share in his life through this grace have become the heirs of eternal life.

And yet, eternal life may be lost.  Just as a Jew separated himself from his family’s heritage by renouncing an ancestor, so someone who has been baptized and begun to live the life of grace can separate himself from this life by renouncing the New Adam through sin. As St. Paul warns: “Sin must not reign over your mortal bodies so that you obey their desires.”  When we were baptized and later confirmed, we or our parents, speaking for us, rejected Satan and sin.  This rejection must be continual so that God “reigns” in our mortal bodies and not the wickedness of the Evil One.  With God in us through the gift of his grace we are made “weapons for righteousness”, that is, believers who seek to bring others into the Faith, “stealing” them from the devil.

This is possible because “sin is not to have any power over you, since you are not under the Law but under grace.” The Law here is the Old Law, the Law of Moses which did not have the power to save but which did point out the need to be saved.  St. Paul, writing to a congregation containing Jewish Christians as well as Gentiles, makes clear that all who believe in Christ and are members of his Body are under the New Law, the New Covenant in Christ’s Blood.  Sin no longer has power over us unless we surrender to it, rejecting the Law of the Lord Jesus.

St. Paul likens accepting the Law of Jesus as becoming his “slaves”: we obey him in all things. This slavery, unlike human slavery, is in our best interests because it leads to eternal life: “Blessed are those slaves whom the Lord, when he comes, shall find watching [for him]. Amen I say to you that he will gird himself and make them sit down to meat and passing will minister unto them.”  Indeed, we are no “slaves of sin”, but of righteousness, rejoicing in the privilege of serving him who died for us.