A Superabundant Hospitality: Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time 2025

                                                A Superabundant Hospitality:

Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time 2025 

November 2, 2025

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Wisdom 3:1-9 Psalm 23; Romans 6:3-9; John 6:37-40

 

We see that God practices a superabundant hospitality. The Gospel and the first reading by Wisdom assure us of God’s comforting care for all who know God. God knows everyone who God creates and can never forget anyone. Our souls reside in the palm of God’s hands and we have personal protection from all that may harm us. Our faith in God gives us ultimate peace. This is a reason these passages are used in the Mass of the Resurrection when one has died. We trust in God and live on in hope. 

 

 We celebrate All Saints and All Souls Days contiguously because we believe in the communion of saints that extends from this temporal world into the future. In our faith, we believe that since we live in God’s world now, we will live in God’s presence after we die. We believe that death is a liminal reality, a space in which God’s world and ours touches during the moments we love each other and share each other’s pain. Death is but a doorway into another reality in which God’s love is constant and we realize that our earthly life is but a brief pilgrimage. 

 

 This final month of the Church year is one in which we reflect fondly and charitably upon and remember that good lives that have gone before us. We remember also those with whom we have had ambiguous relationships and the suffering associated with them. We do not always remember everyone fondly and we consider the unreconciled moments and the pain we have seen and the relationships that could not be mended. We trust in God’s greater will. Life is messy. Life is hard. Death brings about a finality to the chance for reconciliation and greater understanding. Not all saints were holy, pure, and ideal, and there are many people who would never be canonized as saints but were remarkably holy people. Humanity at times is a mess. Death reminds us of the messiness of human existence, which is the reason we appeal to the superabundance of God. 

 

This God has a personal relationship with each person, those who are flawed and those who are saints, and God works out everything in the end. We believe in God’s justice and that each person has the opportunity to see more clearly upon death. We hope and pray that those whose actions and words were hurtful and unreconciled have now come to support us with prayer from heaven. We believe God will take each person into God’s embrace and that this love will change hearts and minds. God’s justice will always bend towards mercy and forgiveness.

 

We recognize there is no limit to God’s forgiveness, and if we are open to the need to transform our lives, we will experience and understand that forgiveness. Somehow, God will work in our lives to bring us peace and integrity and prompting us to reconcile our broken relationships, even if the person has died. God wants us to be open to the possibilities of transformation because God will do all that is possible to make us whole. 

 

These feasts of All Saints and All Souls help us to dream again of God’s plan for our salvation. As we remain open to the mysterious world of God’s superabundance, we can see the many ways in which God calls us to be our best selves and to be centered with a contented joy. We can recline in trust that God will work out everything for our good because this is a God of unwavering mercy, this is a God of superabundant wisdom, this is a God who will not stop trying to enter deeply into our lives and love us in a way we have never been loved. This is a God who lives deeply within us and finds us lovable. This God will not ever be able to stop loving you or gazing upon you in wonder and admiration. God will always hold you in the palm of God’s hands – now, and forevermore. 

 

Scripture for Daily Mass

Monday: (Romans 11) The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. Just as you once disobeyed God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now disobeyed in order that, by virtue of the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy.

 

Tuesday: (Romans 12) Let us exercise them: if prophecy, in proportion to the faith; if ministry, in ministering; if one is a teacher, in teaching; if one exhorts, in exhortation; if one contributes, in generosity; if one is over others, with diligence; if one does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

 

Wednesday: (Romans 13) Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.

 

Thursday: (Romans 14) None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's.

 

Friday (Romans 15) But I have written to you rather boldly in some respects to remind you, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in performing the priestly service of the Gospel of God, so that the offering up of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

 

Saturday (Romans 16) Now to him who can strengthen you, according to my Gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages but now manifested through the prophetic writings and, according to the command of the eternal God, made known to all nations to bring about the obedience of faith, to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ be glory forever and ever.

 

Gospel: 

Monday: (Luke 14) When you hold a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or sisters or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.

 

Tuesday: (Luke 14) "Blessed is the one who will dine in the Kingdom of God." He replied to him, "A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many. When the time for the dinner came, he dispatched his servant to say to those invited, 'Come, everything is now ready.'

 

Wednesday (Luke 14) Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion? Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work the onlookers should laugh at him and say, 'This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.'

 

Thursday (Luke 15) The tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to Jesus,
but the Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."

 

Friday (Luke 16) A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’

 

Saturday (Luke 16) Now to him who can strengthen you, according to my Gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages but now manifested through the prophetic writings and, according to the command of the eternal God, made known to all nations to bring about the obedience of faith, to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ be glory forever and ever.

 

Saints of the Week

 

November 2: All Souls Day is the commemoration of the faithful departed. November is known as All Souls Month. We remember those who died as we hasten towards the end of the liturgical year and the great feast of Christ the King. As a tradition, we have always remembered our dead as a way of keeping them alive to us and giving thanks to God for their lives. 

 

November 3: Rupert Mayer, S.J., priest (1876-1945), resisted the Nazi government and died while saying Mass of a stroke. In 1937, he was placed in protective custody and was eventually released when he agreed that he would no longer preach.

 

November 3: Martin de Porres, religious (1579-1639) was a Peruvian born of a Spanish knight and a Panamanian Indian woman. Because he was not pure blood, he lost many privileges in the ruling classes. He became a Dominican and served the community in many menial jobs. He was known for tending to the sick and poor and for maintaining a rigorous prayer life.

 

November 4: Charles Borromeo, bishop (1538-1584), was made Bishop of Milan at age 22. He was the nephew of Pope Pius IV. He was a leading Archbishop in the Catholic Reformation that followed the Council of Trent. During a plague epidemic, Borromeo visited the hardest hit areas so he could provide pastoral care to the sick.

 

November 5: All Saints and Blessed of the Society of Jesus are remembered by Jesuits on their particularized liturgical calendar. We remember not only the major saints on the calendar, but also those who are in the canonization process and hold the title of Blessed. We pray for all souls of deceased Jesuits in our province during the month by using our necrology (listing of the dead.)

 

This Week in Jesuit History

 

• November 2, 1661. The death of Daniel Seghers, a famous painter of insects and flowers. 
• November 3, 1614. Dutch pirates failed to capture the vessel in which the right arm of Francis Xavier was being brought to Rome. 
• November 4, 1768. On the feast of St Charles, patron of Charles III, King of Spain, the people of Madrid asked for the recall of the Jesuits who had been banished from Spain nineteen months earlier. Irritated by this demand, the king drove the Archbishop of Toledo and his Vicar General into exile as instigators of the movement. 
• November 5, 1660. The death of Alexander de Rhodes, one of the most effective Jesuit missionaries of all time. A native of France, he arrived in what is now Vietnam in 1625. 
• November 6, 1789. Fr. John Carroll of Maryland was appointed to be the first Bishop of Baltimore. 
• November 7, 1717. The death of Antonio Baldinucci, an itinerant preacher to the inhabitants of the Italian countryside near Rome. 
• November 8, 1769. In Spain, Charles III ordered all of the Society's goods to be sold and sent a peremptory demand to the newly elected Pope Clement XIV to have the Society suppressed.