Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 5, 2025
Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4; Psalm 95:1-2, 6-7, 8-9; 2 Timothy 1:6-8, 13-14; Luke 17:5-10
The first reading and the Gospel for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time provide us a glimpse of the reality of the people at the time. The first reading mentions violence, destruction, discord, strife and misery. The Gospel describes a world of servants and masters in their proper places.
It is a reality quite similar to the reality of our world today. It is not a world where we love our neighbor as ourselves, as Jesus commanded us, nor is it a world where everyone has life to the fullest, as he promised.
In the first reading, the author lamented that God didn’t heed their cry and intervene. In the Gospel, the apostles asked Jesus to increase their faith.
In both readings, the response from God and Jesus is not a magic wand that will make everything alright. Instead, God invited the people to participate in making a world anew. The people are invited to write the vision and have faith as the vision will surely come.
This invitation is true for us today. We are being invited by God to write the vision. How would we write the vision? Would our vision be in sync with the vision of God for us. What is God’s vision for us, for our world? Simply, a world where everyone has life to the fullest, where we love one another as God has love us.
Jesus’ narrative of the servant and the master in the Gospel sounds harsh, with the servant required to do only as commanded. However, if it is taken in the context of following Jesus’ commandment to “love one another as I have love you” and “love your neighbor as yourself,” then our world will be living profitably in love.
The readings invite us to have faith, make God’s vision our own and with God, live towards the realization of that vision, a world of love and life to the fullest for all creation.
Maryknoll Sister Maria Leonor Montiel, from the Philippines, served vulnerable communities in Cambodia for two decades, promoting human rights, healthcare access and community development. In 2021, she was elected to a six-year term on the sisters’ Congregation Leadership Team.
To read other Scripture reflections published by the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, click here.
Featured image: In Cambodia’s Kandal province, Maryknoll Sister Leonor Montiel visits a young woman who was given work as a seamstress as well as a bicycle through Maryknoll’s Seedling of Hope program. (Sean Sprague/Cambodia)
