6th Sunday of Easter Year C 2022

A day dedicated to the Holy Spirit’s descent can be misleading in the sense that it can condition us to think of the Advocate’s coming as a before and after event. It is true that we are approaching Pentecost—the great solemnity of the Holy Spirit—and the days of Jesus’ appearances to His Apostles are drawing to a close. While the Farewell Discourse at the Last Supper presents an imminent departure, it is also clothed in the promise of the Paraclete. However, the division before and after presents a false picture of the Holy Spirit as if He was absent prior to Pentecost. In fact, the presence of the Holy Spirit is already felt in the Readings for today. In the Gospel passage, Jesus beautifully paints a portrait of the indwelling of the Divine Persons in the life of a Christian and the community.

Right now though, we are in transition, preparing for the Ascension as well as Pentecost. During the Last Supper, Jesus gave the assurance that He would never leave the Apostles alone. This was by no means the only time He assured them. It was the same promise given to Peter when He said, “Upon you, I shall build my Church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it”. And just before He ascended, He instructed them to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth and to baptise all nations. Within this Great Commission there was also a pledge that He would be with them till the end of time. This commitment is fulfilled through the Holy Spirit.

As Jesus withdraws, the Spirit will become the animating force in the Body of Christ. He plays the role of reminding and teaching the Church everything that Jesus had taught. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ is present to the world through His Church.

How should one think of the Holy Spirit with regard to this promise and what is His relation to the Church?

What comes to mind with regard to the Holy Spirit’s presence is “Zeitgeist”. It is a Germanic word which expresses the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as illustrated by the ideas and beliefs of the time. A good example would be “gender identity”. Who you are is not determined biologically but psychologically. It has not arrived here yet but it will via social media influence. “Zeitgeist” is also identified by relevance in which it expects everyone or even the Holy Spirit to submit to its dictate. Along with the confusion of the Holy Spirit with “Zeitgeist”, there is also an implied bias which relegates the “old” to the “useless” and at the same time elevates the “new” to the forefront of “relevance”. “Reading the signs of the times” is “almost” equivalent to capitulating to the changed circumstances of the present. Celebrities and corporations live in fear of the mob of “cancel culture” so much so that they have to “virtue signal” that they are in step with the prevailing thinking. For example, Calvin Klein newest advertisement features a pregnant transgendered man.

The sobering fact is that Spirit is more like the Church than we realise. Christ is the founder of the Church. The Spirit sustains His Church to shape and prepare her for His 2nd Coming. However, when Jesus asked Peter “Do you ‘love’ me?” three times, the Greek words used were twice “agape” and once “phileo”. The change in word usage signified Jesus’ acceptance of Peter’s “limited” capacity to love, not of the highest sacrificial type but one of natural affection. In this exchange between Jesus and Peter, we catch a glimpse of the Church in the making and the role of the Holy Spirit would play in the Church in moulding the Church into the instrument that she is supposed to be. Just like Jesus, the Spirit accepts our frailty in the sense that He works with us according to our fallen nature. It is not easy.

The Holy Spirit is a less a spirit of spontaneity and more a spirit of stability. But ours is a generation that does not like constraints. We chafe at limits because we have deified personal autonomy and as such, there is a tendency to conscript the Holy Spirit into our service. For example, when Pope Francis was elected, a Jesuit was hear proclaiming proudly that that the Holy Spirit has returned to the Church.

This exuberance runs counter to the “specific” role of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit leads us recognise and prompts us to profess the faith of the Church that “Jesus is Lord” (cf. 1 Cor 12:3b). He directs us to Christ who saves us through His Church. As the Gospel of John reminds us, the Holy Spirit acts for Christ because He is the breath of the Risen Christ. Thus, through the Sacrament of Baptism, He breathes new life into us.

It is a banal idea which can make the Holy Spirit sound “boring” because we are more at home with a “Spirit that blows where it wills” (John 3: 8). Furthermore, in the last 70 years as the world shrivels into a global village, given our fondness of diversity, pluralism and equal respect, we have had to account for the multiplicity of religious beliefs. Could an insistence on Jesus Christ as the ONLY Saviour and the necessity of the Church for salvation “cramp” or limit the movement of the Holy Spirit when it comes to the redemption of those who are not Christians? Not to mention the whole idea of “superiority” inherent in the ONLY Saviour claim.

In the past, we could not conceive of salvation outside the Church but we have come to accept theologically that the mystery of God’s salvation cannot be constrained by the “institutional Church”. However we want to play out the “respect” and “equality” game, what the Church as Church cannot hide from is her own credal conviction that Jesus Christ is the ONLY Saviour. Without reducing Jesus to a saviour amongst saviours, this begs the question of the role the Holy Spirit has in terms of salvation of those who do not know Christ.

Today the confession of Jesus as the ONLY Saviour is expressed as “All salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is His Body”. Lumen gentium, the Church in the Modern World, in relation to all the other religions, points out that “the Church considers all goodness and truth found in these (other) religions as a preparation for the Gospel” (LG 16) showing us that the Holy Spirit could be at work in the religions of the world. Nevertheless, God “the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son’s Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation… She is that bark which in the full sail of the Lord’s cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world” (CCC 845).

If we accept that Christ is the ONLY Saviour of the world, then the Holy Spirit has an unenviable role of leading us to recognise where He blows in the other religions. However, the more difficult task is to convince Catholics that the Church is the barque intended by God for salvation. Why? So that we can take our membership in the Church seriously, meaning that we appreciate our baptism deeply and live in such a manner that we can be attractive. Otherwise, it is definitely easier to buy into the idea that multi-religiosity is an expression of the Spirit blowing where He wills than to admit that we have failed in convincing others that Jesus is truly the Saviour of the world. The history of salvation is also a history of our poor cooperation with the Holy Spirit in the personal conversion of our lives. We easily concede pluralism as the “zeitgeist” but the scenario as the Apostles broke out of their prison of fear is the same as what we have today. They did not proclaim Christ as Saviour to a homogenous crowd. Every known nation of the world was present then. 3000 were convinced solely by the proclamation of Peter to embrace the Gospel. Today, it is not enough just to proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. Personal conversion is the only message credible enough to convince others that Jesus is the Risen Lord. He is alive in His Church through the Spirit that animates Christian lives. In other words, our lives reflect the active presence of the Spirit of Christ at work in our salvation.

5th Sunday of Easter Year C 2022

The previous theme of Vocation on the Sunday dedicated to the Good Shepherd flows naturally into this weekend’s reflexion. On Tuesday we celebrated St John of Avila, a recently declared doctor of the Church, who made the connexion between the priestly vocation and the Eucharist. The Eucharist provides an insight into the topic for this Sunday which is the commandment to love.

If the popularity of boybands were to be a rule of measure, then we must be experts at loving. Yet, the world seems racked by rejection, hatred and violence. To love has become more complicated because Western civilisation has entered the era of post-truth. We are influenced by this development and whether we like it or not, we need to come to terms with it.

Apart from the philosophical and theological complications associated with the phenomenon of post-truth, another difficulty which Christians encounter is “unfair” expectation. It is commonly accepted that all religions teach their adherents to do good. “Sadly”, the Church, founded on the theological virtue of charity finds herself subject to the litmus test of love exemplified by the life-giving self-sacrifice of Jesus. It is a higher moral standard, no doubt. But the love of Christ is regularly used against Christians in the oft-repeated grievance “Are you not supposed to be loving?” which quite effectively pull the rug from under a Christian’s feet. This expectant derision of Christianity’s failure possibly masks a misconception of what love truly is.

Love is much higher a standard than we are used to. Genuine love frequently runs counter to our feelings. It is not easy to love a person for whom one has no sympathy which makes love a commitment of the will and not an expression of our sentiment. In the early history of the Church, a phrase stands out when it came to describing Christians. “See how they love one another” documented how struck pagans were by the witness of Christian love. It extended beyond the family and friends to one’s enemies.

In fact, the descriptions from the Acts of the Apostles direct our attention to the perceived “Golden Age” of the primitive Christian communities. Yet we should not be misled by this lofty suggestion of the initial utopia of Christianity. These halcyon days of harmony cannot be further from the reality of Paul and Barnabas’ falling out with each other. Or later when the split took place between those who were for Paul and those who sided with Apollos.

This shows us that what happened then was no more than what is happening now. Firstly, the failure of love that resulted in fragmented Pauline communities stems from an effect of Original Sin. Fallible man makes fallible mistakes. If Lucifer, a pure spirit can rebel against God, how much more, we who are embodied spirits? We are weighed heavily by a concupiscence which works against God’s grace. Secondly, the era of post-truth places an added challenge to the commandment to love because we are expected to conflate love with acceptance and tolerance. It is an idea of love that springs from a culture adrift aimlessly in the sea of moral relativism; present philosophical underpinnings are not moored to objective standards. Instead, truth is reduced to whichever is the prevailing narrative accepted or imposed. To paraphrase St Paul in Eph 4:14 we are “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”.

The challenge is that this attitude of oscillating between one extreme and another seems to be the only acceptable position for a Christian to take if one were to survive this modern scourge that truth and its objectivity is unattainable. In this daunting landscape, the Christian is to exercise his charity. How do we love when truth is reduced to positions that shout the loudest? How to love when truth is defined by who has the power to impose the accepted narrative? Think of misinformation.

This stems from being trapped in echo chambers that are comfortable zones of self-acceptance and self-validation where we feel secure and safe. Many exchanges we have merely amplify and reinforce our accepted belief. From the security of our self-righteousness, we can “judge” those who are do not echo our sentiments. Internet trolling is just a mild version. Mostly, the judgements can be harsher and even violent. Just to illustrate: the present debate about abortion. It is such a divisive topic and for those who hold a vision that life is sacred from the moment of conception, the command to love is perilous.

How does love navigate itself in a fractured and fragmented world in which the non-acceptance of the approved narrative will only invite shaming, silencing and shunning?

To love is also to speak that love in truth. Admittedly, this is really not easy in a very noisy environment filled with so many ideologies. But love demands it. For love to be love, it demands that we stand with truth. For the Christian, thankfully, truth is not just a set of cold hard facts. Truth is Jesus Christ. He is our goal and standard.

He is our model of speaking and living truthfully even there is exerted pressure to “tailor” that “truth” to fit the conditions of life. In other words, we are expected make Jesus fit our stories. Jesus is love, right? That being so, it means He must love us no matter what. It is true that God loves us no matter what but this unconditional love is not a truth in which “what” has no objectivity to it. To wit an example, a simple “what”, that is, a limit, a standard or an objectivity is “not to kill” proving that “God loving us no matter what” is not indefinite or ambiguous.

A probable reason for lukewarm or ambiguous love is not because we are afraid to love. The opposite of love is not hatred but rivalry. In heaven, Lucifer considered himself to be a rival of God. It was not the hatred of God but jealousy that drove Lucifer to subvert and undermine God’s plans. Satan is still at it. Likewise, in many of our own quarrels within ecclesiastical settings, they are not marked by “hatred” but by insecure rivalry that sabotages each other. Imagine how effective our evangelisation could have been if we were not working against each other?

How then do we love when there is deep-seated fear arising from insecurity?

The Eucharist is our answer. At the beginning, the link was made between the vocation of priesthood and the Eucharist. It turns out that there is more to the Eucharist. It is also a vocation of love. Just before Jesus ascended Calvary, He celebrated the sacrifice of love with His Apostles. Even as He broke the bread and blessed the chalice, there amongst His closest collaborators, sat a traitor, a denier and a doubter. If you sit here with jealousy, anger, hatred and feeling unworthy, then you are in good company. The meal of love is not a meal of the perfect but a preparation for the extraordinary sacrifice to take place at Calvary. Broken and ineffective, we draw strength from this Sacrament of Love so that little by little as we climb Calvary, our love may be purified and perfected so that at the summit, we would have nothing to weigh us down but only love for God and for one another [1].


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[1] Finally, to tie in with last week’s theme, it was mentioned that every Christian is a vocation of friendship with the Lord, then authentic love must draw its inspiration from its source, the Eucharist. A robust friendship with Christ through the Eucharist will make our love more divine. In a world which struggles to love the unlovable, then divine love is in the extraordinary which expresses itself most powerfully in suffering. It may be humanly impossible to love especially our enemies, those who do not share our conviction and those who hate us. But Christ’s love for His Father gave Him the strength to forgive those who had sinned against Him and to love until the last drop of His Blood.

4th Sunday of Easter Year C. Good Shepherd Sunday.

Nearly 20 years ago, I collapsed whilst celebrating Mass. Whether it was contrived or coincidental, it was the 4th Sunday of Easter. Today is known as the Good Shepherd Sunday, otherwise, it is also Vocation Sunday. The limelight lands specifically on an important facet of Catholic life and in some parishes, it is the opportunity to promote priestly and/or religious vocations. Parishes might put up posters or exhibits and invite priests and/or religious to share their vocation stories. Importantly, the entire collection for all Masses this weekend goes to supporting the formation of our diocesan seminarians.

The notion of vocation as a calling to a way of life can feel a little bit cold and almost calculative. It sounds dutiful from the perspective of responsibility, meaning that if one has a calling, then there is a burden to be borne and that one should just get on with it. In a sense, to be a priest and/or a religious is to live a public vocation which at times can feel overwhelming and onerous. It is similar to celebrities who live constantly with the social media targeting their back.

Thus, the Gospel provides another way of thinking about vocation which is less an imposition, much less a burden. Instead, it springs from the Heart of Christ the Good Shepherd. To grasp the connexion between Christ and this special vocation of service to the Church, we should define what vocation is in general, before shining a light on the particular calling to priestly and/or religious life.

A little repetition might be helpful. Last week we touched on the forgetfulness of the Apostles in their post-Resurrection experiences. They had trouble recognising the Risen Saviour. Again, today’s Gospel highlights the theme of recognition. Some background information might provide context for understanding the imagery of the shepherd described by Jesus. In an agrarian setting, similar to that of the Semitic people, when different flocks of sheep are brought together, they are enclosed into the same sheepfold. There are basically two ways of sorting out which sheep belongs to whom. Firstly, a shepherd knows each individual sheep by heart that he probably has a name for each one of them. Secondly, on the part of the creature, each sheep recognises the voice of its shepherd.

The mutuality of affection between the shepherd and his flock that can help deepen our relationship with the Lord. Where vocation is concerned, duty does not inspire. Intimacy is the backdrop or framework for God’s invitation. We are called because we are known personally and individually by Christ the Lord. He knows our every move and grasps the very contour of our hearts and despite our failures and betrayals, He still entrusts His mission to each one of us.

The question is how well we know Him and not just know “of” Him. The famous quip of St Jerome’s comes to mind that the “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”. To know Him profoundly we need to travel the length, the breadth and the depth of Sacred Scriptures. But that is not the only way of growing to know the voice of the Shepherd because the Bible is never independent of His Church. We hear His voice through the teaching of His Church.

When lovers are attuned to each other, they become more sensitive to each other’s moods, feelings, desires so much that one can anticipate what the other needs. This is the intimacy that we are called to. When applied to discipleship, we can appreciate how John is called the disciple that Jesus loved. He ran all the way to the tomb but stayed outside because he acknowledged that Peter, the appointed leader, should be the first to go in and confirm for himself. John, the beloved disciple, is whom we are supposed to be—the one who knows, recognises and acknowledges the Lord and His ways because between them there exists a profound friendship.

Friendship is key to our relationship with Christ the Lord. To call Him, our friend may have an indulgent ring to it. It feels so because in a utilitarian setting, “friendship” is often conceived of as a valuable commodity because through “connexions” that doors are open. In general, people accept that to have more well-connected friends is an advantage because it is not what we know but whom we know that facilitates our ascent to power.

So, instead of benefits, think of friendship in terms of Jesus calling God, Abba. There is nothing indulgent in this relationship. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed aloud, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine”. Their intimacy gave Jesus the strength and the resolve to embrace the Father’s will.

To be a Christian is really a vocation of friendship with the Lord. A caveat or a caution is necessary to grasp the true meaning of friendship. When our relationship with God is defined in terms of obligation, then we must ask the quality of our friendship with Him. Where is the love in that? For example, Sunday is not merely a day of rest. It is also a day dedicated to our friendship with God. The “rest” enjoined upon the Christian is so that he or she may spend time with the Creator and Father. When this relationship is reduced to an obligation, then a “forced” or “imposed” rest in order to connect with God does not make sense. And not just that, Sunday is no longer a day of the Lord. It has long been colonised by our work-a-day world which makes the obligation or “imposition” even more odious [1].

Friendship with God is the basis of our vocation. Even though every Christian “is” an expression of friendship with God, still He invites some to a special relationship with Him. He calls some to the public service of the Church [2]. Priests are unique ambassadors of His mercy and love. The Word is accompanied by the life that all priests, in particular and religious, in general, embrace and live. “In persona Christi” means to stand in for Christ. Through this office, Jesus’ instruction to “Do this in memory of me” is central to why the priesthood is a must for the Church. This vocation may have lost its shine in the last couple of decades but it does not invalidate its necessity for the Kingdom, for life eternal as pledged by Christ Himself.

Jesus in affirming the promise of eternal life premised that possibility on consuming His Body and His Blood. How else can that promise be kept if we do not have the Eucharist? No matter how poor the quality of our priestly witnessing, still it does not take away the fundamental truth that the priesthood is the fulfilment of Christ’s promise to feed us for eternity. Without the priesthood, there is no Eucharist. Without the Eucharist, there is no Church. Without the Church, how can Christ save us? This sounds like an assertion that limits God’s omnipotence. By the very fact that Jesus Christ was incarnate of the Blessed Virgin Mary, God has chosen a particular way to save us—through the Church who gives us the Eucharist. There is a crisis of vocation which we try to fix by “clericalising” the laity, that is, increasing “lay involvement” in the Church’s sacramental life. It does not address the central issue that God continues to call men, especially, to the service of the altar. Instead, it merely highlights that we have stopped responding.

Increasingly, the life of a priest (and/or religious) is alien in a world where God is banished to the margin. If at all He exists, His function is to serve, fulfil and make us happy. Despite man’s increasing possibilities of accomplishment, achievement and self-realisation, there is still an emptiness, a void, a thirst which cannot be ignored nor wished away. It is in this vacuum and in a world troubled by this agonising loss of meaning that the priests, by extension, the Religious and all who work for the Kingdom of God must live in a manner which affirms that our life here carries with it a meaning far beyond what is in this world.

If religious life is a sign of the Kingdom to come, then the priesthood is the assurance that we can reach that Kingdom. The vocation to the priestly and by extension Religious life is a blessing which God chooses to give to the Church for the salvation of the world. St John Vianney reminds us, “The priesthood is the love of the Heart of Christ”. When what we see around us is failure and decay, do not be surprised. Do not even despair but look beyond the priests, beyond the entire corpus of fallible priests to the gift or love that Christ has given to the Church. This great gift for our salvation—the priesthood—may inspire each one of us to embrace the duty and devotion to pray for all priests that they may have the Heart of Christ to love the world, to serve the Church and to worship the Lord.

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[1] Rituals express our relationship with God. An elaborate rite merely symbolises the rank of the person to whom it is directed. However, what we have done is to “do away” with them because they are inconvenient. In the interest of “accessibility”, we have transferred our major Solemnities to Sundays. Convenience merely masks the “fear” we have of expressing our relationship with God.

[2] The Sacrament of Marriage is also a call to public witnessing.

3rd Sunday of Easter Year C 2022

If gratitude is the memory of the heart, then amnesia could be the wellspring of ingratitude. We can sense forgetfulness already at work in the history of the early Church especially in the impulsive action of Peter. So far, we have been following John’s account of the Risen Christ, albeit in Year C, the normative Gospel should be from St Luke. Even though the passage today is taken from a section of John which some commentators believe to be additional material to the last chapter, still, it is not different from the other apparitions where at the start of an encounter, it was marked by forgetfulness.

According to the Johannine post-Resurrection timeline, the first appearance of Jesus was to Mary Magdalene. She did not recognise Him at first and instead assumed that He was the gardener. The second manifestation, Jesus stood in the midst His Apostles gathered in the Cenacle or the Upper Room. Thomas, who was not with the other 10, refused to believe. But finally, Jesus showed Himself to all of them, including Thomas, who occasioned for us the sublime confession: “My Lord and my God”.

The initial refusal of Thomas to believe could be explained from the oft-repeated adage that “seeing is believing”. But it is more than just the necessary “seeing in order to believe”. Why? We can be spoilt and selfishly short-sighted, like the Israelites in the desert. But what makes our present generation even more myopic is that like hostages suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, we are prisoners of progress who seem to worship technology as our saviour.

What does that mean?

Imagine the movie “Avatar” which is based on the principle of transhuman enhancement. Perhaps you can appreciate how our mechanical mindset coupled with our self-absorption facilitate our fascination with technology. We may have unwittingly embraced a vision that life should imitate the smooth running of machines. Technical evolution supports such a myth so much so that even a tiny problem can very quickly overwhelm us and we slide into a pit of despair. In desolation we easily forget the blessings we may have had. In trials, we are tempted to doubt and when we forget, we will not recognise. Modern man mindlessly loses consciousness of God’s faithfulness when troubles arise.

Maybe it makes sense that many of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances took place within the setting of a meal. The most famous one was the Road to Emmaus which ended with the Breaking of Bread. Only then did they recognise Him. Now, by the seashore, again we witness both a recognition and a reconciliation set within a “Eucharistic” meal and this is reminiscent of the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish. The Disciple whom Jesus loved recognised Him from the haul they caught and after Jesus gave them bread and fish, a restoration of friendship took place between Him and Peter.

This meal context for the rehabilitation of relationship teaches us an important reality in our friendship with Jesus. Healing takes place at the Eucharist, in Holy Communion. The strength of their relationship was built upon the memory they have of Christ. The Apostles were all missioned with an important task and at a time most confusing, they forgot the mission and they returned to the routine which they were most familiar with. From fishermen, He had called them to be fishers of men but now they have reverted back to their previous profession as Peter announced. “I want to go fishing”.

For them, it was a case of familiarity as in “better the devil you know than the devil you do not know”. Frequently, in our journey of conversion, we easily revert to old habits like drunks to drinking, gamblers to gambling, junkies to doping, adulterers to adultery, etc. We mistakenly believe that sin we have been trying to shake off is a viable source of life. Returning to what they knew best, they caught nothing. Their portion or destiny lay with Jesus and His way or path and not with what they had been familiar with. Conversion requires leaving behind sinful ways and the forgetfulness of Jesus opens the door for a return to old sinful ways.

One could consider that the amnesia and the subsequent rehabilitation of Peter as a recovery of love, a return to love. To recognise Jesus, we need love. Without love, the Truth whom Jesus is, is harder to get at. But the relationship between love and truth is a little more complicated than we realise.

To illustrate, we generally cannot see the weakness of those whom we are partial to. Remember how when your children fight and one will accuse you of being unfair because you have taken the side of your favourite child whom you can see no wrong? Or you might wonder why sometimes a person can be so blind to the obvious faults of his or her beloved. When we are partial, we cannot see the full truth. Not everything loving is true love. Hence, the relationship between love and truth is nuanced when we see what demands will be made of Peter. When asked three times if he loved Jesus, Peter answered in the affirmative. Then Jesus reminded him to feed His lambs and His sheep. For all his impulsiveness, Peter needed to grow in love and the three questions of Jesus were to help Peter clarify his love.

The fuller picture of love for Jesus reveals that love is more sacrificial than it is sentimental. For Peter, love for His Lord and God will express itself in laying down his life in due time. Likewise for many of us, only true love for Jesus makes it possible to embrace the discipleship of self-sacrifice even if it does not, in the process, smoothen its path. True love for Jesus is forged in the furnace of suffering. This we observe in Peter’s courageous stand in the face of opposition and persecution.

Finally, to love and follow this Crucified and Risen Christ perfectly requires that we know him better. How can we do that? As Jesus gave them bread and fish to eat by the shore, He continues to give us down the centuries His Body and Blood to eat and drink. Our love for Jesus, like Peter, will always be imperfect. But again like Peter, healing of that imperfect love takes place in the Eucharist. To deepen our love for Jesus, love the Eucharist (and also the other Sacraments) because the most perfect memory of Christ comes from the Eucharist.