Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXI per Annum A

23 August 2026

Today we hear beautiful words from the psalm response that speak to us of the heart of our life and relationship with God. “Lord, your love is eternal.” So complete and perfect is God’s love that it endures, not just for a really long time, but rather it is eternal. It is outside of time. It is not only in the past, as if God’s love is over. It is not only something we still await in the future. No, God’s love is ever-present and always now. “God is love” as the Letter of St. John says (cf. 1 Jn. 4:8).

That we experience this love is the heart of our spiritual life. But how do we experience this love? One important lesson to take from the whole of Scripture is that God has not been absent from history. He did not create the world and then simply sit back and observe in disinterest. Time and again God has made His presence known. He has used events of human history to speak to us. He has mediated His love through people and events. His love was made known to our first parents in the Garden. His love was expressed to Abraham. He called together and formed a people out of love by the work of people like Moses, the prophets, and the Davidic kings. And, in the fullness of time, God Himself entered human history by the incarnation where God the Son took on our human flesh and was revealed as Jesus. This work by people called to help bring God’s love to the world continues in the Church established by Jesus Christ, who is the love of God made visible. The Good News presented to us by the Scriptures this weekend is that God’s love is meant for each person in every time and place and so, in a special way, God has formed an ongoing succession of those who minister God’s own authority and who are called to be like fathers to God’s beloved children.

We see the roots of this ongoing succession in the first reading. That first reading showed us the establishment of the office of master of the palace in the kingdom of King David. That position was made to help extend the authority, fatherhood, and leadership of King David to the entire kingdom. And that position was to be filled in an ongoing line of succession, from one master of the palace to the next. The reading from Isaiah described the master of the palace: “He shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah. I will place the key of the House of David on [his] shoulder; when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open. I will f