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Ascension is around the corner. Christ continues to teach and to prepare the Disciples to welcome the Holy Spirit. He is going away but He will not leave them orphans. He calms their anxiety by promising that His Advocate will be present to them. Within the context of the Paraclete’s coming, Jesus links love with keeping His commandments. Love and commandments are two side of the same coin. To love Him is to be obedient to His commandments.
There are commandments and there are commandments. What does this mean? Firstly, we can already discern how the Holy Spirit was at work in the early Church. In the first reading the Apostles decided not to burden the early Christians with the Jewish requirement of circumcision. What they did was to instruct the early Christians to avoid certain practices.
What does that tell us?
There is no freewheeling when it comes to love. There is a tendency to view the love and keeping the commandments as oil and water. Love is more forgiving and more accepting. Laws are a bit more restrictive. Moreover, we tend to associate love with the Spirit.
However, Christ in the Gospel was clear. He will send to Spirit to teach the Apostles and to remind them of His teaching. While the Lord will be absent but He is not an absence. He will leave them but that is not an abandonment.Instead He will be present via the Holy Spirit. We need an ability to discern the Spirit’s presence in the Church.
According to Pope Benedict, we can interpret the Church according to certain hermeneutics. There are basically two lenses to view the history of the Church. We can view tradition as continuous or discontinuous.
It is fashionable to interpret Vatican as a break with the past and therefore a divergence from the tradition that we inherited. When the Apostles took the decision not to impose circumcision, they also gave the Gentile Christians certain prohibition. There was a break from the Jewish past but it was not a complete break.
The question we need to ask ourselves is where Christianity came from. Christ Himself was a Jew. However, in academic circles, there is a growing tendency to speak of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures as if they were discontinuous. In actual fact, they are linked one to the other.
Such a kind of discontinuity tends to reduce the Holy Spirit into an “accomplice” because He is the spirit of spontaneity and possibly stands on the side of greater freedom. Sadly, discontinuity was the seed for the Protestant challenge to tradition that as a result it reduced every individual to the supreme interpreter of Christ’s teachings. Everyone is a pope.
What is closer to the truth is how continuous we are with tradition and how itacts as an anchor that allows to engage in the world that is changing fast.
In fact, a world which is in constant flux is a source of anxiety and disengagement amongst young people. Can you imagine all those denominations of “churches” that claim to have preserve the teaching of Christ in its entirety. How? God’s revelation seemed to have died in the post-Apostolic age only to resurface when this or that denomination was founded. How convenient!
Instead, what is more consistent in the matter of God’s revelation is that He reaches out to us through the ages and He speaks through the Holy Spirit,Sacred Scripture, the Magisterium and the Tradition of the Church.
Pope Benedict XVI pointed out the blessedness of Christianity’s first expansioncame through its contact with Greek philosophy. The interaction and interchange with Greece gave Christianity the language that allowed it to appreciate God’s self-revelation as the Blessed Trinity. Without passing through Hellenistic linguistic and philosophical framework, we might have had a less defined way to appreciate the Blessed Trinity.
The role of the Holy Spirit promised by Christ is to help the Church be consistent in her teachings through the ages. In fact, the Holy Spirit who is the author of the Sacred Scripture is also the author of the developing tradition and constant magisterium. Furthermore, we can see how faith and reason are not incompatible with each other. Why? Because both have the Holy Spirit as their author.
In the end, when we speak of love, we recognise that commandments or regulations or prohibitions are not alien to a life in the Spirit. The Spirit blows where it will and therefore, both freedom and spontaneity are creative qualities that allow the Church to navigate the changing tides fads and fancies. But what is also heroic is keeping the law or being faithful to Tradition. When it comes to the Magisterium and the handing down of Tradition, clarity and charity are not mutually exclusive. They are two sides of one coin. When the Church teaches clearly, it is an act of love. And the Church also manifests her love by teaching clearly.
Thus, in whatever challenges that we face, our life in the Spirit requires patient discernment and courageous acceptance of where God is leading us to. When we hear the word cosmetics, we recognise that it is associated mainly with the world of beauty. However, its etymology is far more “sedate” or “legal” than we realise. The root of the word cosmetic is cosmos and it directs our attention to the well-ordering of the universe. Perhaps a point to consider that the process of well-ordering cannot come about without commandments, restrictions and obedience. Submitting to God’s will may even run contrary to one’s desires but under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the embrace of God’s will is well-orderedfreedom and true obedience.
We continue from the previous Sunday’s Gospel. Picture in your mind a Jesus teaching during the Last Supper and today the central theme is love.
There are two Sacraments of service that are directed to the salvation of others and the building up of God’s Kingdom. The priestly vocation and by extension, a religious calling are both expressions of the one and the same loving service. In the past, the priestly cloth and the religious habit were deemed to represent a higher calling but today, love within the context of marriage between a man and woman is considered on equal footing. The service of love is spoken of in terms of Christ’s glory and how He would give glory to the Father.
Everyone is familiar with love but what it is exactly, is not easy to pin down. The word itself is used rather loosely to mean anything when essentially, love is a virtue. It is an action and a commitment to a set of behaviour that is intended to benefit others. Sadly, the over-sentimentalisation of love has narrowed our focus more on feelings rather than on love as a choice. Love is highlyromanticised.
Love has to be more than feeling because it is a matter of willing. It is a desire to love others, even more than oneself. Therefore, it is a way of being and behaving. I remember in a class in my first year of philosophy, there was a discussion on love. The professor defined love through definitive actions. “I love by not killing”. “I love by reaching out to others”. “I love by taking care of the poor”. In other words, love does not reside in the generic but rather in the specific actions we carry out. To love, we need to draw boundaries and this is the part where we may fail to appreciate. Love cannot be anything can because it is not licentious.
I was talking to an altar server about his fellow servers and what has happened to them. I named one and remarked that I was happy that this ex-server was still attending Mass regularly. This astute young man replied pointedly that the situation is rather sad for me to be contented that one ex-server still going to Church. Then he said something else, “I have come to realise that in whatever I want to say about the Church, in my behaviour, there must be obedience”. I was impressed immensely by this young man.
Love is obedient. It has to be which is why we draw boundaries so that we can behave in a particular manner. Contrast love with lust. Lust knows no boundaries. Moreover, the idea of a celebrity screaming “I love you” rings hollow at best or at worst, they are empty platitudes. How many of our movie stars have had their hand dirtied in loving the underprivileged or the poor? Many of them are just happy to lecture us on the virtue of ecological responsibility while whizzing around in their carbon-emitting private jets.
Without a doubt, love has an emotional component to it. It is feelings but it is also more. Pope Benedict brilliantly illustrated this in “Deus caritas est” (God is love). Love is both emotion and reason. Emotion is beyond us and it imposes itself uninvited. Those of us who feel angry and cannot control the anger know the experience of being out of control. But love is also reasonable because it involves choice and action. We can choose to behave in a particular way.
If love were merely emotion, it cannot fully satisfy. Why? It drives a person from one thing to another. Ask anyone who is an addict and he or she will tell you that they are driven and the worst part of it, they are never fulfilled. In fact, the more “feeling” or emotional love is, the more exhausted, unfulfilled and depressed we will be. But when we introduce love as both choice and action, then emotions can be purified.
When Jesus spoke of the love that lays down its life for others, it is in reference to one’s self-fulfilment. It does not feel like it but you speak to anyone who has loved without self-preservation, they can tell you that they find themselves most when they have given themselves to others. That is the power of self-sacrifice.
Love one another as I have loved you. In the Catholic context, this commandment is exemplified in the two Sacraments of Service—Holy Orders and Matrimony. In the case of marriage, how best to love if not through a spouse?
Some of you who are married must be sitting next to your spouse, whom you barely tolerate but for some reasons have learnt to live and let live. Fair enough. There are some who might feel that they have no choice but to stay on in a marriage because it is too late.
But when you first got married, did any one of you enter into marriage and in your mind there was a proviso that it would not last forever? Even in the most desperate case of a marriage, when a person walks down the aisle, he or she does so believing that this is the first and the last. Otherwise why do it?
Marriage itself provides us with an answer of what it means to truly love and to sacrifice in love. The many failures in marriage are not proofs that love is not a calling to sacrifice. It is precisely when a partner enters into marriage thinking of himself or herself that the marriage will soon fall apart.
Think of Ephesians chapter 5. A man is the typology of Christ Himself. A woman is the symbol of the Church. When we read this we often hear the spiel that wife should obey her husband. In a feminine-sensitive culture, this is a definite no-no, right? How antiquated to urge a woman to obey her husband? Many fail to hear what St Paul, the so-called misogynist, taught about marriage’s sacrifice. The man is supposed to sacrifice himself as Christ sacrificed Himself for the Church. If a man wants an obedient and dutiful wife, he must be the first to lay down his life for her. Therein lies the equality of self-sacrifice. There is as much to sacrifice from both parties and when each spouse is ready to lay down his or her life out of love for the other, the marriage will flourish.
Finally, emotions or feelings are therapeutic but that is not the goal of love. Imagine Jesus issuing the commandment to love. None of the martyrs submitted to deaths because Jesus imposed upon them this duty. Instead they courageously embraced death because they loved Him and had surrendered their hearts to Him. The drive to obey Him is deeper than feelings and more than a duty. Ultimately the ability to embrace the commandment comes from a heart that has fallen in love with Jesus Christ. The only way we can ever love like Jesus,forgive like Jesus and die like Jesus is to keep close to Him, to be taken up by Him, to be graced by His Spirit because He is love. Mother Teresa herself when asked about her tender behaviour towards a leper said, “I would not do it. But I do it only because I love Jesus”. Without love for Jesus, sacrifice will feel odious and burdensome. Only love for Jesus will make the yoke easy and the burden light.
Nobody likes to be nagged on things they have to do. For example, your parents keep telling you to be careful each you walk out of the door. I am sure you will get exasperated and perhaps answer, “Yeah, I know” or simply ignore them and just walk out. The Gospel today feels a bit like this. We are being reminded about the challenges of following Christ. Sunday in and Sunday out we talk about Jesus and the demands of Christian living. The repetition is tiresome like “Ah, again ah?” and you tune off.
Last year 29th Dec, South Johore Vicariate cancelled all Sunday Masses except for the one Mass here in the Cathedral to launch the Jubilee year. Quite a few turned up for the cancelled 6:00pm Mass later that evening despite the repeated announcements we had made preceding the event.
Jesus says that we can hear and hear but fail to listen.
Sometimes repeated reminders are needed for the message to truly sink in. A message which has not sunk in for many of us, in the last 60 years, is connected to this Sunday’s challenge of following Jesus. It is the question of vocation. I have raised this issue in the last couple of weeks. Priests are getting older.Where is the next generation of vocations?
Firstly, the average age of the congregation is climbing up. There was a bigger group of people who used to serve the Cathedral and they have aged and the number is dwindling due to deaths. Secondly, membership in the youth group has dropped reflecting the smaller size of the family. However, this reality does not gel with our statistics. The world’s population has gone over 8 billion. A hundred years ago, were we about 1.6 billion inhabitants? But we still had a thriving vocational scene. Young men were entering seminaries in droves. Now, with more than 8 billion, it cannot be that we are running short of human beings, no?
Perhaps what is more reflective of reality is how we have stopped listening and responding to both God’s call and invitation. The crisis of vocation is a crisis of listening and responding.
Following Christ is a life-long journey. It requires everything from us. On the one hand, we cannot give what we do not have. On the other, what is in it for us? That was Peter’s question to Jesus. “Look, we have left everything to follow you. What will we have?”. Our reward system, unfortunately, has been short-circuited by materialism. Reward is measured through instant gratification. Delaying pleasure is not our strength now. If that be the case, it is not easy to accept what God wants to give to us because at the back of our head is the incessant demand of instant gratification.
We need a vision that looks beyond the surface of materialism. It is an ability to appreciate a prize that is beyond the present which as a consequence allows us to carry on despite opposition, rejection, persecution and the Cross. Our imageof the Cross is tied to suffering—and human that we are, we tend to avoid any forms of suffering. But the Cross is the greatest symbol of love and only love can explain suffering. That is why St Paul waxes an ode to the love that is courageous in the face of difficulties and suffering.
When we think of love, we think of being loved. Whereas the vocation to the priesthood specifically and to religious life in general is to focus on others rather than on oneself. True love is never for ourselves or of ourselves. In the face of challenges, a natural response is to take things rather personally. Jeremiah may have been consecrated in the womb and yet he faced rejection. If he had taken that rejection personally, he would never have stuck on with being the prophet that he was. While rejection is often personal, we must go beyond the personal and a way to do it is to love beyond the self.
A mark of Christianity is loving to the point of self-sacrifice. In other words, the specific vocation to serve God’s holy people, as His priest or religious, is to imitate Christ, poor, chaste and humble. It is a love that lays itself down for the other. Perhaps the Easter Candle can help illustrate what it means to be loving.
A candle is just a candle when unlit. It becomes a torch when it is burnt. Its usefulness lies in burning itself out. To understand this we may have to make a distinction between selfishness and self-preservation. Self-preservation is a natural human instinct. It is not selfish per se. We draw boundaries in order to protect ourselves—our physical and mental well-being. Selfishness on the other hand is self-preservation at the expense of others—I prioritise myself and disregard the needs of others. The vocation to follow Christ will take us beyond self-preservation. A candle burns itself out so that others can see in the darkness.
Perhaps the idea of vocation or having Good Shepherd Sunday during Easter is good because the idea of self-sacrifice can only make sense when we believe in the Resurrection. Why? The instinct for self-preservation is real and it kicks in because one naturally shy from sacrificing. Nobody wants to die. Instead, everyone wants to live forever. Yet, living forever is never meant to be earth-bound. Everyone knows it. Why? When we have lost all faculties, we instinctively know that our time is up. Only when we realise what feels like a defeat is not a total loss that it is possible to lay down one’s life. The Resurrection is that assurance. Belief in the Resurrection gives one the courage for self-sacrifice.
Jesus Himself said, unless a seed falls unto the ground and dies, it remains but a single seed. But if it dies, it yields a hundred-fold. Sometimes, when I am in the car with friends and the driver is weaving in and out of traffic, I will scream “I do not want to die. I am still a virgin” and we will burst out laughing. It a joke but clearly symbolic of how earth-bound our sense of fulfilment is. Those who sacrifice for the love of Christ will never know defeat. Instead, they will reap a reward beyond their imagination. If you know it, you will never be afraid that there is nothing left of you or for you. What you dare to give up for Christ, He will give you back a hundredfold. So, young men, young women. Come. Follow Him.
We are about a week after Mercy Sunday and the Pope’s funeral. Christ continues to appear to those closest to Him. A feature which is common to these appearances is that they did not recognise Him.
Think of weeping Mary Magdalene at the entrance of the sepulchre. She thought Him to be a gardener. Or the two dense Disciples on the road to Emmaus curious that Jesus had no idea what had happened in the last three days. Today we have Peter and a few others after a night of empty net.
It leaves us wondering the quality of Jesus’ disciples. They consistently failed to recognise Him. Or perhaps closer to the truth is not their blindness but rather to ask what paradigm these disciples operate under.
Without a doubt the Resurrection is an experience out of this world. Perhaps what many could only fathom is Lazarus (Jn 11), or the son of the widow of Nain (Lk 7) or the daughter of Jairus (Mt 9; Mk5; Lk 8). Essentially, everyone came back to life. What happened to them was a temporary interruption. Amodern analogy would be to think of their coming back to life as surviving a clinical death in a hospital through a revival or resuscitation using a defibrillator.
But, in the case of Jesus, it was beyond interruption, termination or resuscitation. He returned to a whole new reality. He could walk through walls. He could appear and disappear from their sight.
Lazarus and all those who came back to life operated on the material plane. It is a material world, after all. The Resurrection is material too because we profess belief in the bodily resurrection. An inkling or a hint of the Resurrection is the Transfiguration. His Body was transfigured to the point that it was out of this world—what we may call the Beatific vision. A close example is St Thomas Aquinas whose theology was so sublime that he earned the monicker Angelic Doctor. At the top of his theological game, he apparently experienced a beatific vision after which he could no longer proceed. Why? According to him, whatever he had written paled in comparison to his vision of heaven. Unlike Peter who wanted to build three tents, Thomas felt that nothing could even measure up to what he had seen.
Perhaps this is where we are challenged in our Easter experience. What does it mean to be resurrected? The Pope’s passing away was surreal in the sense that he made his final journey on Easter Monday. Easter is not just the Sunday after Holy Saturday. Instead, Easter is an Octave meaning it covers the period between Easter and Divine Mercy Sunday. All these 8 days are counted as one day and because it is the Solemnity of the Resurrection of the Lord, nothing else, with the exception of funeral Masses, can be celebrated. But the Catholic world was seized by a kind of paroxysm about whether or not to have a memorial Mass for the Pope.
Liturgical law seems to prohibit a memorial Mass but because it was the Pope, different dioceses found ways to commemorate the Peoples’ Pope. Should we have had a memorial Mass for him is not a point of contention here. Rather the discussion centred on whether we should follow the law may just highlight how “materialistic” our worldview has become.
The Octave expresses Christ’s great Resurrection and nothing should obscure that beatific vision that we all have been invited to. Our eyes should be fixed on this central truth of our faith. The exception of a funeral Mass during the Easter Octave is a human consideration. All else can wait.
Could it be that our sense of recognition is as dense as Mary Magdalene at the sepulchre and Peter by the shore. We struggle to appreciate the Resurrection.
The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is instructive. There are two ends to their journey. The first is quite human. They were on pretty decent pilgrimage. After about a 10-kilometre walk, the two invited Jesus to a meal with them. The second end, which is spiritual, is the one to which we are invited. While they were at table, He took bread, said the blessing, broke it and handed it to them. Then He disappeared.
They hurried back to tell the Eleven that they had recognised Him at the breaking of bread. Imagine the Proddies huffing and puffing about Catholics not familiar with the Bible. Yet the Proddies fail to recognise Jesus in the Eucharist. But before we patronise them, we too may suffer the same blindness.
Frequently we do not realise that we have the greatest gift to help us recognise the Risen Christ. The entire journey of the two Disciples to Emmaus is ascriptural description of the Eucharist. It is almost a frame-by-frame account of what we have been commemorating for the last two thousand years. The part of the journey where Jesus explained Sacred Scripture to the two disciples pertains to our Liturgy of the Word. While at table, the four verbs detailing the actions of Jesus direct our attention to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. He took bread corresponds to the offertory. He said the blessing is the Eucharistic Prayer. He broke the bread is our Fractio Panis. He gave it to them is the reception of Holy Communion.
The point here is when the consecrated Host is broken, do we recognise the Risen Lord? We are definitely familiar with the other three verbs of taking, saying, giving but often enough we fail to pay attention to the breaking of Bread. Jesus broke the Bread so that the Disciples may recognise Him—the Risen Lord.
The Easter Octave should give us a view of the Resurrection unobstructed. But the experience of the Pope’s death during Octave may have uncovered our materialistic world view for we were distracted from focusing on the Risen Lord. Every Eucharist highlights the Resurrection and the Easter Octave simply emphasises this truth that not even the death of a Pope should obscure that vision. The fact that we were caught up with honouring the Pope or not revealed how earth-bound our vision has become. The devil’s victory does not lie in holding on to us forever. His victory is to mislead us to an earth-bound existence.
The Devil cannot win over us. Not because he is weak but because Christ has won the war and He will not allow Satan to dominate us. The Devil can only prevail because we allow him to. Satan wins when we lower our gaze or restrict our vision to a merely earthly existence.
