Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today's first reading is very short. It's actually taken from the first chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Colossians. But in it, there's a lot of food for thought. We'll walk through it verse by verse.
The apostle begins by saying to us, "Brothers and sisters, you were once alienated, alienated from God, and hostile in mind because of evil deeds," He says, Colossians 1:21. The word that's used for mind there in the original Greek text is the word dionia. It means mind, or thought, or attitude, or intention, or plan, or the heart. And the mind and the heart obviously refer to the whole interior life, our thinking, our mentality, our emotions, the intentions of a person.
So the hostility or disconnection or enmity between us and God has its origins where? It's actually on our side of the fence, not on God's side of the fence. St. John Chrysostom points that out in His commentary. It was not God who rejected us. It was us who rejected Him. He always wanted to ask for those who suffer from rejection, who is the first person ever to be rejected by God? Who was it? Who was the first person ever to be rejected in the history of the world? The answer is God Himself was rejected by the fallen angels, was rejected by Adam and Eve.
It doesn't mean that we necessarily formally declared ourselves against God, obviously, at that time, the beginning of the world. But St. Paul is saying that our whole interior life, our plans, our thoughts, our desires, it was all turned against or at least away from the Lord Himself. Isaiah 53:6 famously says, "All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to His own way."  In Romans 8:7, St. Paul says that the mind is set on the flesh, that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit to the law, His law, indeed it cannot, He says. And in Ephesians 4:17-18, the apostle says, "I affirm and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles walk in the futility or the vanity of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart," says St. Paul.
Have you ever noticed with some people, you begin to talk about God to them or about how certain things are moral or immoral and according to what the Church teaches and these people begin to get angry? I don't know if that's ever happened to you. That's a little bit of a taste of what St. Paul is talking about, a hostility to God, to spiritual truths and realities. Why? The apostle says in Colossians 1:21, it's because their deeds are evil. So it has to do not just with our beliefs, but it's also very much tied to our behavior.
It's basically what St. Paul says in Romans chapter one, when He talks about, "The wrath of God being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth." Romans 1:18, St. Paul says at the end of Romans 1, that it gets to the point where you not only do what's evil, but you also aprove and applaud or celebrate those who do evil as well. That's where we are culturally in many ways too. We celebrate and affirm and applaud things that God actually says are evil.
So how does God respond to us being totally thoughtless of Him and His plan and us being immersed in sinful or evil behavior? Amazingly, He does not return evil for evil. Colossians 1:22 says, "God has now reconciled you in the fleshly body of Christ through His death to present you holy without blemish and irreproachable before Him."  So God responds to our wickedness with love and mercy and with the sacrifice of His Son. And we know this, we know that we are reconciled to God through the death of Jesus. But St. Paul here in Colossians doesn't just say that we're reconciled with God through Christ's bodily death. He says that we're reconciled, "in the fleshly body of Christ or in the body of His flesh." St. Paul is stressing something important here. He's underlying the physicality and the materialness of Jesus's body. He calls it a fleshly body or the body of His flesh. Why is He actually doing that?
Well, the biggest heresy in the early Church was the heresy of Gnosticism. Gnosticism denied the physical reality of Jesus's body. Gnostics despised the physical world as unworthy of a truly spiritual God. And so they denied that the true God would dirty Himself, as it were, by taking on a body, something as gross as a human body. Some Gnostics even denied that Jesus left footprints on the earth. They said that because there's no way God took on a real human body, they would say. There's no way you can find even His footprints. For them, there was an antagonism. There was an incompatibility between the flesh and the spirit.
It shouldn't sound so strange to us, believe it or not. What's essentially gender theory? What's gender ideology all about? It's all about saying my body says one thing, says that I'm a man or a woman. My mind or my spirit says something else. I'm really a different gender. And it's my body that's wrong, is what gender theory says. And they do call all kinds of intellectual gymnastics to justify this. It's things that we've talked about in our series of reflections on gender theory that we gave a couple years ago. But essentially, gender theory or gender ideology is a new Gnosticism. It's a schizophrenic separation between my mind or my spirit and my body. And it's my body that ends up getting punished and mutilated and altered.
Question is, how often should you perform transitional surgery and operations and hormone blockers, et cetera, on people who think that they are transgender? The answer is, just as often as you would perform liposuction on someone who's anorexic. Problem is not with the body. Problem is with the mind. It's actually with the soul. It's a psychological and a spiritual problem. But the new Gnosticism says the body's meaningless. I can do with it whatever I want to. It's actually the next logical step from the my body, my choice mentality, pro-abortion, my body, my choice mentality. What's the next step? I can do with my body whatever I want to, literally, whatever I want to.
The incarnation of Christ proves the goodness of the human body, the sacredness of the human body. The sacrifice of that human fleshly body proves the great, great love that God actually has for us. And what is the goal of the sacrifice of Jesus's earthly body? St. Paul says it in the same verse from Colossians. He says that the goal is, "to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before God." That's Colossians 1:22. The goal is to make you holy in God's eyes, blameless in His sight, irreproachable.
But the way St. Paul actually words it is quite important. He says it's not just to make you these things, but it is to present you to the Father as holy, blameless, irreproachable. That phrase, present you, in that respect, those are actually words from the Old Testament used when someone presented a sacrifice to God. In Romans 12:1, the apostle says, "to present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God," He says.
So through our Lord's redemption, we too become sacrifices offered to the Father, not only in our spirit, but also in our bodies, too. Ever wonder why you have to go through so much suffering and difficulties and all kinds of other even physical ailments? That's actually part of the reason. It's because you are part of Jesus's priestly offering to the Father.
Every time you come to Mass, what does the priest celebrate the Mass on? He celebrates the Mass on an altar. What's an altar for? They're used for sacrifice. We see that clearly in the Old Testament. We know the cross is our Lord's altar, and we live that now in the New Testament, in the Mass, and in our lives, too. When we unite our prayers and our life to the sacrifice of the Mass, we're really saying, "I'm part of your offering, Lord. I'm actually part of your sacrifice, body and soul."  Actually, that's exactly what St. Paul says in Colossians 1:24. Our first reading cuts off at verse 23, but in verse 24, the apostle says, "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh, I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church." St. Paul is simply saying there that Jesus has set apart a portion of His cross for us, so our sacrifices and sufferings and our prayers become and truly are Jesus's sacrifices and sufferings and prayers. Why? Because we're one with Him. Apostle says in 1 Corinthians 6:17, "He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him."  I hope that makes sense to us. If you can understand that and accept it, it helps everything to make more sense. It gives meaning to everything else. It helps you to understand everything more from God's perspective. So to be part of Christ's sacrificial offering to the Father is actually a great privilege that we have, and our Lord promises that the benefits we receive from that now and in eternity will far outweigh the costs. God cannot be outdone in generosity. Challenge Him on that. He loves to be challenged. You think you can be more generous than Him? He'll always one-up you.
But all this being made holy and being enlightened by God's truth and receiving forgiveness and salvation from Christ's sacrificial death, all of it is conditional. Paul says that you will share in the blessing of God through Christ, "provided that you persevere in the faith, firmly grounded, stable, and not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard." That's the last verse of the first reading, Colossians 1:23.
So you have to know your faith well, you have to live it well if you want to remain united to the Lord. If we stop living our faith or if we begin to stray from it, we begin to embrace the thinking of the world on one hand, or if we get drawn into cultish pseudo-Catholic groups on the other hand, the faith and the hope that God has given us, it'll be taken away from us. Typically, it doesn't happen all at once. We stray or we begin to walk away, fall away gradually, little by little, by little choices and compromises here and there.
But let's ask Our Lady today for the grace to renew our commitment to the Lord, to renew our commitment to staying in the Church, and to renew or to give us for the first time the desire to do what She wants us to do, the desire to become more like Her and Her Son.  Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.