Our Merciful, Kind, Gracious and Faithful God

Homily for Tuesday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time

The responsorial psalm for today, Psalm 103, is categorized as a hymn of gratitude to God for the gift of faithful covenant love. Verse one of the psalm tells us that it was one of the psalms that was written by King David.

The first reading from the Book of Exodus appears fourteen chapters after God presented Moses with the Ten Commandments. This point is important because it tells us that God identifies as a merciful, gracious, kind and faithful God who is slow to anger and rich in compassion even after the children of Israel had created a golden calf and worshipped it. Their idol worshipped had so angered Moses that he had thrown the stone tablets upon a rock and broken them. Despite this fact, God still identifies as a merciful God, a God of covenant fidelity.

In composing Psalm 103, David carefully wove all the words that describe God into his hymn of gratitude. The psalm traces the workings of God’s faithfulness from the personal experience of David, the psalmist, through the history of God’s people, to the witness of the whole cosmos. All of reality is given life through the strong and tender love of God.

The Jewish faith has no formal written Creed such as our Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. Judaism has been described as a religion of deeds rather than a religion of words. However, the encounter between Moses and God on Mt. Sinai produces the statement that has become known as the “Little Creed,”

Though we only recite four of the stanzas of what is a longer psalm, the words with which God identifies are included in our responsorial today. Merciful, gracious, kind, and faithful are all adjectives which we can hope will one day be part of our eulogy.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator