Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 25, 2024
If you read the full account of today’s first reading from Joshua, chapter 24, it might make you think of the Easter Vigil. Joshua gathers the Israelites at Shechem, where the Lord first appeared to Abram. At that significant place and starting at the beginning with God’s covenant, Joshua recounts how God had been faithful time and again to the Israelites.
From Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and Aaron, through the Red Sea into freedom and victory in all the succeeding conflicts and turmoil, Joshua tells how the Lord delivered them—and all at God’s initiative through God’s gratuitous grace. Only then, having reminded them of their ancestral history of salvation, does Joshua ask the people for their response to God’s saving action.
Baptism and Eucharist—both are gifts freely given by God who, over and over, chooses to bless us without merit or payment on our part.
Year by year, at the Easter Vigil, we hear the story of our salvation and renew our baptismal vows with our elect who make them for the first time. Those vows lead us through the font to the altar where, Sunday after Sunday, through our “Amen,” we declare again that “we also will serve the Lord.”
Baptism and Eucharist—both are gifts freely given by God who, over and over, chooses to bless us without merit or payment on our part. The choice is not whether we will receive God’s blessings but if we will respond to God’s gifts with faith.
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