Rogation Sunday AD 2024
In today’s Epistle, St. James compares listening to the Word of God to looking in a mirror and shows that there are two opposite ways to react to it, one of which is to forget what was heard and the other to follow it.
When we say that God’s Word is like a mirror, it means that through His Word God shows us ourselves exactly as we are. Not only that, but God’s Word also shows us what we should be like according to His will and teaches us what we must do to achieve the goal God has set for us. Above all, living according to God’s will consists of active love of our neighbor and keeping ourselves “unspotted from the world”.
The first thing God shows us through His Word is how far we are from this ideal. We are sinners, we are stained and burdened by guilt, and we are unable to free ourselves from it. God has come to our aid here, redeeming us through the death of His only-begotten Son on the Cross and washing us clean in His precious blood. God has adopted us as His children through the washing of regeneration in baptism and continues to cleanse and refresh us through penance and the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.
It is all grace, the only conceivable response to which is the effort to live a new life for the glory of God. If we don't, we are just like “a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was”. But when we do, we are like a man who “looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.”
The perfect law of liberty is the Gospel: the good news that our sins are forgiven, our guilt is erased, the curse on us has been lifted and we can live as new people in righteousness and true holiness. We are still in the fallen world; however, we no longer live in the ways of the world, but “unspotted by the world”. And we know that whatever we ask our Father in heaven in the name of Jesus, He will give it to us.