Rogation Sunday AD 2025

“Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” Although these words of St. James are an excellent guide whenever we are asked to move from words to deeds and act decisively, the Apostle has in mind first and foremost the Word of God and His will, which we must not only hear, but do. If we knew God’s Word perfectly but did not follow it, then knowing the Word and will of God would not be a blessing to us, but a sin, just as Jesus once said to the Pharisees: “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.”

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, in his “Spiritual Exercises,” writes about three types of people: the first are those who know what God expects of them but never do it; the second are those who accept the will of God will and want to follow it, but at the same time cannot say goodbye to what keeps them away from God; the third are those who know and do God’s will.

What is God’s will? St. James gives us one possible answer: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

To keep oneself unspotted from the world means to resolutely renounce everything that is corrupt and wrong, as is unfortunately very often the case in this godless world. Jesus says that His followers are in the world, but not of the world. Being sent by God in the name of Jesus, we must not wish for the world to perish, but to be saved. At the same time, we must not become like the world, we must live as children of light amidst the darkness of ungodliness.

The mark of the children of light is that they do the works of God – caring for the fatherless and widows and all others in need, and doing good and sharing love at every opportunity. Then we will not be like one who deceives himself, but like one who “shall be blessed in his deed.”