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We have inevitably arrived at the crux of Christ’s teachings which are centred on two commandments. To love God and to love one’s neighbour. The background for these commandments is easy to appreciate. The Israelites had escaped Pharaoh’s slavery. Any exile is haphazard because the people were fleeing for their lives. Within our living memories are the boat people who had to leave everything behind when South Vietnam fell in 1975 and more recently, the Rohingyas escaping from the wrath of the military of Myanmar.
As in the case of flux and change, what is crucial are laws and the Lord gave Moses warnings about the treatment of the refugees. God took the side of the orphans, the widows and the poor. And their prayers will be heard by Him.
We may not have open borders but the reality is that we do have those who come from overseas and who have overstayed. Even if they have not broken the law by overstaying we still have a substantial number of foreigners residing in our country. Migration is an economic issue. Even though we can preach that man does not live by bread alone, man still needs bread in order to function, in order to survive.
Today’s commandments given by Christ add to how we can function and they are crucial to how we treat others.
I remember my first encounters with post-communist era Jesuits. They came from the supposedly picture-perfect socialist systems which were designed to uphold the human person’s dignity by ensuring that each man/woman is treated according to what he/she needs. Each according to his or her needs and not his or her wants.
The thing about us, especially, in the West, is that we are accustomed to wearing our hearts on our sleeves. Some of us may remember the 1980s, when images of starving children flooded our living rooms. Since then, the world has been shamed into action, terrified that staying silent would make us look heartless. In fact, some of our actions for good are nothing more than virtue-signalling. For example, I read that Ed Sheeran’s silence with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has hurt his popularity. This is yet another example of virtue-signalling imposed by the prevailing orthodoxy.
The idea of loving God and neighbour has to move beyond this need for performative virtue-signalling. To help the poor on a short-term basis is easy in the sense that we can always provide food. Readily we give out rations etc to help the poor tide over their economic crunch. Long term, the situation might be different. It is not easy.
Our inspiration can be drawn from the Cross which is made up of the horizontal and vertical beams. The vertical beam denotes our love for God, our worship, our prayer and our longing for union with Him. The horizontal beam denotes our relationship with each other. It is the love and honour we owe to each other because each one of us is made in the image and likeness of God.
In the context of the practice of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve, whether out of the need to virtue-signal or not, the thing is that we are strong on emphasising the horizontal aspect of our relationship. Otherwise, can we explain why there is this need refute the usual claim that the Catholic Church is cold.
When one of my Jesuit confreres from the western world used to stress the idea social justice and the need to make sure that all be treated equally and etc, another Jesuit confrere, from Eastern Europe said something which has remained with me till this day. He said, “You preach social justice. We live social justice. We queued up for two hours for a loaf of bread”.
When I visited Poland, I was intrigued by the fact that going to Church for most Polish Catholics was a matter of expressing their relationship with God. They are strong on the vertical dimension of the Cross and when it came to “Let us offer each other a sign of peace”, they were not entirely bothered to turn around to exchange a sign of peace.
It was interesting. Both emphases are one-sided in the sense that a focus solely on the vertical dimension or a focus on the horizontal dimension will lead to an impoverishment of our faith. But I wager that there is a need, not just for a balance of the two emphases but also to respect a kind of priority in terms of the which emphasis comes first.
If we look at Jesus, we realise that He reached out to all those marginalised because He had a right relationship with His Father. A right relationship with God always leads us to love our brothers and sisters. All the great missionaries were driven to leave everything because they were in loved with their God. In fact, our hospitals were all founded on the idea that our love of God led us to care for His brothers and sisters. This is usually what we hear “How can you love God whom you cannot see if you do not love the brother whom you can see”. It is usually the guilty pitch that goads us into action. The truth is that we do not need to love God to love our neighbour because philanthropy does it. Philanthropy is the love for humanity. The desire for action must flow from God to neighbour. It means like the saints, when we love God, the fruit of that love for God will be our love for our neighbour.
To pay or not to pay taxes. It is a familiar dilemma for some of us, no? This Catch-22 situation Jesus found Himself in is different from our moral debate between tax evasion and tax avoidance. It is closer to a cloak and dagger scenario: "Amicus meus, inimicus inimici mei" (My friend, the enemy of my enemy). In this case, the Herodians and the Pharisees, quite mortal enemies to each other, have joined hands to gang up on Jesus. They were hoping that whatever answer Jesus supplied would incriminate Him either way. So “Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t”.
Maybe a way to wriggle out of this conundrum is to focus on where the question is coming from. The trap they set for Jesus opened up the question on how one should be a citizen of both the City of God and the City of Man.
In effect, the attempted entrapment was to test Christ’s loyalty. But Jesus turned the table on them providing the appropriate answer concerning a person’s loyalty. In effect, we are citizens of both the City of God and the City of Man. We are destined to be citizens of Heaven which means that we must labour in a manner so that we can gain a foothold in heaven. Hence most of our salvation is worked out in this life, that is, in the City of Man.
At the recent concluded Malaysia Pastoral Convention, what was evident was how many of the delegates in the open forum were asking for the Church to provide organisational structures that will facilitate the faithful to be Catholics in Malaysia. One of the Bishops during his final exhortation encouraged the younger delegates present that they should enter politics.
We all know how politics makes strange bedfellows. We get first-hand experience of political prostitution in our country. Parties merging and dividing and merging again. As Lord Palmerston, the UK PM said in the British Parliament, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”. Politics is the art of the possible and it has to do with self-interest or its preservation.
A sentiment expressed over ang again during the MPC was how the Church should become a source of moral authority. Given that much of politics is self-serving and in a way, open to corruption, the Church is presented with a possibility of being an alternative voice which can be trusted. As the Bishop who encouraged young people to enter into politics said, “Yes, enter into politics but be clean”.
In the matter of our engagement as citizens of God and of Man, ours is not a divided loyalty as a King once thought. Henry VIII’s treatment of St Thomas More gives us food for thought. At the execution of his good friend and Chancellor, Thomas said: “I die the King’s good servant but God’s first”. St Thomas’ final words merely highlight the truth of God’s primacy. Tension arises whenever earthly authorities arrogate upon themselves the sovereignty which belongs solely to God. The instruction of Jesus to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar is part and parcel of our discipleship. There is no divided loyalty as long as we recognise the supremacy of moral commands which come from God. If we accept this, then as good citizens, we should make greater contributions to the various systems and structures which govern and administer our nation. If politics is supposed to be clean and cleaned, then the disciple, conscious of his or her citizenship in heaven, should attempt to make sure that this world, temporal though it may be, bears the characteristics or the marks of heaven.
Thus, the Church, as the Body of Christ, plays an important role in the world. Our impact as citizens, whether we be of this country or any other, is immense. In the past the Catholic Church led in two major aspects of life in which communities were changed and civilisations were forged. She played a foundational role in social welfare and education, in hospitals and schools.Apart from feeding the soul spiritually and sacramentally, the Church also tended physically to the body and ministered intellectually to the mind. But somehow, as civil societies advanced, we basically seemed to have loss most of these humanising and civilising institutions. There is a vacuum and for most parts, we have come to expect the “state” to take up the role of the care of the minds and the bodies of the citizens. In other words, we expect the state to play the nanny.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of what is called World Mission Sunday. We have a mission still. If a diminishment in the number of missionaries like priests and nuns is a reality, perhaps the word mission should be enlarged. We are Church and each one baptised has a role in the mission of the Church. Not just the priest or the nun.
The core mission of the Church is to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ, to extend His salvific action by administering the Sacraments and to bring to fruition God’s plan of salvation. In short, each one is missioned to sanctify the world through his or her life and in the end, gain eternal salvation. The theatre is the present and not in any form of future fantasy. We take our daily life, boring as it may be, and allow it to become the locus where encounters take place between heaven and earth. Somehow, the simplest tasks are the hardest to perform. For example, the daily chores of looking after family or even doing routine office work. These are not glamorous and do not attract any kind of clicks on your Instagram. But perform them with diligence and with devotion and we are already part of the movement to sanctify the world.
We live a stone’s throw away from a country where everything seems to function better. We long for an improved country where all citizens can thrive equally under the Malaysian sun. But it feels impossible with the result that many believe that a better Malaysia is found in Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc. Many believe that these are the places where your children will thrive and their talents appreciated. A better Malaysia must start here and now and not in Canada, New Zealand, Australia or even Singapore because you must believe that you are part of the solution to a thriving Malaysia rather than elsewhere.
Finally, waiting for the “Church” to transform society is like passing the chalice. Waiting for others to perform what is basically our duty is an invitation to wait forever. The City of Man needs each baptised person to take personal ownership of his or her role in the mission of the Church. As one Bishop at MPC remarked, “People keep asking the Church to do this or that, the question is ‘Who is the Church?”. “You are”. The ball is actually in your court!!
Jesus criticised the leaders in last Sunday’s Gospel. This weekend the spotlight lands on the topic of salvation, what value does it have and the range. The Gospel uses the marriage feast as a metaphor to showcase God’s invitation which according to the 1st Reading is extended to everyone. God will prepare a banquet for His people. God will provide abundantly and the scope of the invitation reveals His mercy and benevolence.
There is a twist in the Gospel. Those invited persistently rejected Christ’s invitation. We can presume that Jesus meant to infer that the religious leaders were those who rejected God’s initiatives. To underscore the gravity of the situation, God’s seeming violent reaction reveals how serious the loss of salvation is for those who are obstinate in their rejection.
Talking about reactions, in 2011, on the 1st Sunday of Advent, the new translation of the Mass for the English-speaking world came into effect. Well, there were similar reactions to the new translation of the text. One important alteration which caused a stir was in the Institution Narrative where a minor alteration was made. At the consecration of the wine in the chalice, the words were changed from “which will be poured out for you and for all” to “which will be poured out for you and for many”. From “all” to “many”. If the reactions were not violent, there are still priests who have refused to comply because you can still hear “for all”.
The reason for the change was simple. It was a return to a more accurate and faithful translation of the original biblical texts. The change would make us all be in tandem with the more ancient liturgies of the Eastern Churches. Moreover, “Pro multis” in Latin and “Pollon” in Greek, which is translated as “for many”, were found in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Yet some have felt that the change seemed to have short-changed Christ’s salvation. Did He not die for all?
There is a slight theological distinction. Ontologically, Christ died for all. He offered salvation to each and everyone. In other words, He was not choosy. It makes a lot of sense that the mission of Christ is not provincial or parochial. He is the Saviour of all mankind and not just Christians. Thus, the scope of God’s salvation is extensive. It covers everyone but effectively, this salvation is received only by the “many” meaning that not everyone will be saved. Hard as this may be to digest, this is not a form of exclusivity. Just like the Gospel today, some chose to go to the farm. Some decided to engage in business. In fact, some were even harmful to the messengers. Salvation is offered to all and it is a testament to God’s great benevolence but He does not force upon us His salvation. Like the famous quotation, attributed to Saint Augustine and found in the Catechism, which says, “God created us without us; but He did not will to save us without us”.
Since God who created us without our permission cannot save us without our consent, that means, we are free to accept or reject His salvation. Creation and salvation are two different realities. We have no say in creation but we have a big part to play in our salvation. Who is to say that salvation is cheap? Much like those cheap free gifts given away at trade-conventions that visitors accept but later throw away. In fact, the acceptance of God’s salvation comes with a price.
We value our freedom. We do. In fact, we guard our autonomy so jealously that the idea of God creating us without our permission is rather jarring and also somewhat irritating to hear. In fact, if my life were “crap”, I would rail against God. “Why the hell did you create me for?”. This not only shows how entitled we have become but that we are enamoured by our freedom. But more than that, it also reveals a certain hubris with regard to God’s way of proceeding.
I remembered an experience during my youth that a relative committed suicide. He was buried outside the cemetery as a sign that the person had made an irrevocable decision to reject God in his life. Notwithstanding that our understanding of human psychology has progressed and that there may have been mitigating reasons for a person’s less than “composed mental” state, the present practice seems to state that our decisions are never totally free. And that God is not in any way bothered by our decision. And we in a way project onto God, that He has no choice but to save us all which is rather ironic given that we are so jealous of our “freedom”.
We do have the freedom to reject God and God respects that. And there have been cases where someone made a decision and then at the funeral, just for those alive to “feel” good, priests are required to perform some rituals and pray for the soul of the deceased as if nothing of his or her decision mattered at all. The range of God’s redemption may be extensive but there is a value to being saved because freedom has consequences.
After those invited rejected God’s initiatives, many others were invited. But those who came had to follow protocols. As we read about that individual guest who attended but did not dress up for the occasion. He was thrown out. God’s salvation requires that we change or be transformed.
The value of salvation is that it is not free or not cheap. The good thing is that according to St Paul in the 2nd Reading, Christ is there. We can change because He is the strength and the grace which gives us an ability to respond to a higher calling. We are graced by our baptism to live a life in Christ our Lord. The Wedding Garment is therefore the call to our conversion and a call to a life of holiness. Holiness is to be in Christ, to be like Christ, to be Christ in the world
This weekend, the imagery of the Vineyard comes to fore. In the 1st Reading, the Lord sings beautifully of His love for His Vineyard, Israel. In fact, He goes out of His way to protect Israel, the choice vineyard. In the Gospel, Christ speaks of the treacherous tenants who foolishly thought that by destroying the owner’s son, they could take over the inheritance. Of course, this parable was told days before Christ’s execution and the reference was to His impending passion and death.
But there is more to this prophecy and there are valuable lessons we can learn from this.
Firstly, it highlights ultimately the rejection of God’s sovereignty. The killing of the landowner’s son represents humanity’s desire to be rid of God’s authority so as to take ownership of humanity’s own destiny. There has always been a desire on the part of humanity to be the architects of its own fate. The parable is really reminiscent of the Tower of Babel. In the Gospel, greed was not the main issue even though the parable does sound like a land grab. Rather, it was a chronicle of humanity’s illusion of its own radical autonomy. The rebellion was exercised through ignoring God’s messages. It progressed to the stage of violence against the messengers themselves and finally it climaxed with the murder of God’s only Son.
In this saga of rebellion and in trying to chart our destiny, there is a truth which may escaped rebellious humanity.
Secondly, I had a honour of working with someone in a project to renovate a Church. She told me, “Money is not yours until you spend it”. I have since taken to heart this pithy wisdom. It was not an advice to be profligate, that is, to be reckless or prodigal in one’s spending. Instead the parable touches on one fundamental truth which is of ownership and it is relevant in an age of hoarding.
Hoarding does not make sense if we are sure that the moral in the parable is about our stewardship. Money has been entrusted to us for good. The wealth of the land has been put into our hands so that greater good can be done for others.
In short, we are not masters of our destiny but rather we are stewards or servants of creation. We are not and we cannot be the masters of our destiny no matter what. In the 1st Reading, God dug the soil, cleared it of stones and planted choice vines. In other words, God has bestowed a lot upon us. He gave us His laws expressed through the Church. He also bequeathed us His Sacraments in our liturgies. God has carries a far greater load than we have.
If anything, what the parable has shown is that we are not owners but stewards. Even though the Israelites have been given a lot, the fruits of the vines were sour and tart. They failed to acknowledge the honour God has given to them to be the light of the nations. God’s choice of them was for a great responsibility, given for a greater good, for the furthering His Kingdom. Failure to recognise that, they instead turned that privilege into something else. And it was catastrophic for their religious leaders.
Stewardship is not to be trifled with. We hear this, right? It is my life. It is my body. It is my time. It is my money. And I can damn well do with it the way I like. This might not sound revolutionary simply because we do not see anything wrong with absolute ownership. Instead of focussing on an issue which is immediately polarising and that issue is abortion exemplified in “my body, my choice”, let us look at something else. This is a matter which is less threatening or upsetting.
It still belongs with the notion of “my body, my choice” and it concerns the matter of scattering of ashes or what is now called “cremains”. It is trendy nowadays to leave instructions that after one’s death and cremation, one’s ashes should be scattered into the sea or over a field. The idea is to be free, to let go and to be reunited with nature. The truth of the Church’s prohibition is more than just the affirmation of the Resurrection of the Body. The Church views the human body as sacred simply because it is the temple of the Holy Spirit and as such it needs to be treated with profound dignity even after death. Perhaps more fundamental than it being the abode of the Holy Spirit, how about viewing the human body as belonging to God. We own nothing.
Even our body, whilst gifted to us, is still on loan from God. It might just upend our notions of what autonomy and ownership are. We own nothing and everything we have is on loan to us. Even life can be described as living on borrowed time. Everything is lent to us. A priest, whom I like very much, used to quote his favourite Opus Dei trope… “If you can, leave a place in a better state than when you first found it. If not, leave it as you had found it. Never worse than before”.
We have been entrusted with a lot. The Jews first. The Church next. If the Gospel is to be taken seriously, the religious leaders were complacent because they viewed their privilege as an entitlement. God’s choice was removed from them and given to those who could bear better fruits. Likewise, we might think that we have inherited the privilege of the Jews and that we might be untouchable. A notion of stewardship might help to disabuse ourselves of this entitlement.
Thus, in the 2nd Reading, St Paul reminds us to be the fruits that God desires. If we model our lives on Christ, a life of integrity, charity and justice we might act like those who are stewards who, at the proper time, humbly handover the proper fruits to the Landowner
NATO, not “North Atlantic Treaty Organisation” but “No Action, Talk Only”. Today the Gospel gives us an example of NATO. Two sons responded to the father’s request. The one who said yes but did nothing was “NATO”. The one who said “No” but eventually carried out the work is an example of conversion to the will of God.
We all may begin with a level playing field meaning that each one of us (except, you know who) starts with a deficit. This is because each one of us, except Mary, and consequently Jesus, inherits humanity’s wounded inclination toward sin. Even though we have been created good, we are nevertheless imperfect because each one carries with himself or herself a spiritual deficit otherwise known as Original Sin. If anything, we are united in our starting point by ourneed of God’s grace for salvation.
Thus the 1st Reading makes sense. It is a given that we need grace. But the necessity of grace means we have to take personal responsibility for our behaviour. It is a wonderful realisation that God does not judge us because of our past. We hear this kind of guilt expressed when the Israelites lamented “Our forefathers ate sour grapes and our teeth are set on edge”. So how can God punish us for our fathers’ sins? And the Lord concurred. I am not punishing you because of your father. I am fair because I punish you for not taking responsibility for your future. It means that we are not locked in by our past. And what we perceived as God’s unfairness is actually His mercy.
How so?
We cannot depend on our past good deeds as if nothing of the present matters. Life is clearly unfair because one can be good or virtuous his or her entire life but because of one stupid mistake, the person is condemned. And to rub salt to wounds, a person can be dissolute his or her entire life but at the last minute is saved by conversion or a change in behaviour. Our sense of justice is somehow assaulted when we consider how that last minute or in the final moment, a bad person can gain heaven whereas a mostly good person can be condemned.
God’s fairness is basically our hope and it behoves upon us to take responsibility, not once but always. It means a life-time of choosing good and rejecting evil. No matter how late, the door of grace is always open to sinners.However, the past goodness of a person does not guarantee a person’s salvation in the matter of his or her present choice. A person who for most of his or her life has been a good person, he or she still can still go down the wrong path at the last minute.
This is frightening because it means we have great freedom. Secondly, it means we must choose wisely. And it is really a challenge not to be proud. The 2nd Reading can be interpreted from this perspective. The first part of Philippians Chapter 2 lays the foundation for our interaction with each other. We care for each other and that if there were supposed to be a competition amongst Christians, it is to have the mind of Christ. To be like Him. Even though His state was divine, He clung not to His divinity but became a slave. The Cross was Christ’s ultimate choice for His Father because He gave up His life in order that we might be saved.
In that way, both the Readings come together and they invite us to think more of who we are with regard to God’s will in our lives. When Christ told the elders that prostitutes and tax collectors were beating their paths to heaven, He was not condemning the elders. Instead He was warning them not to be blinded by their complacency.
Like the elders, we can be faithfully attending Mass Sunday in and Sunday out. We go for Confession regularly, recite the Creed each Sunday, receive Holy Communion faithfully and yet our hearts can be far away from God in the sense that we think these are enough to get us past the pearly gates. That is the danger of a complacency that considers the minimum as an expression of our relationship with God.
What happens when we leave our Sunday worship? We only spend an hour or thereabout each weekend in Church. The vineyard which the father asked the sons to labour in is not restricted to Church-grounds. There is a vast vineyard where we can still cultivate our relationship with God through our interactions with the world. Out there, we can still be selfish in our behaviour. Or we may continue to gossip about people we do not like. We might just live an unexamined life.
The point here is not so much to label whether one were inside or outside. Rather we can be both. We can be both outsiders and insiders—the prostitutes, the tax collectors and the elders and the Pharisees. It is not a matter of who is more virtuous. The fragility of grace indicates that one day we can choose good and the danger is the next day we choose otherwise. We are called to consistently to choose God and this ability is assisted by God’s grace and the faculty of choice for the good is strengthened by the Sacraments that we receive.
I guess for many of us, we have a lifetime of faithfulness to concretise meaning that we strive day in and out to live according to God’s laws. If we are good and if we consistently choose God, all the better and perhaps the challenge is not to be prideful that we are on the side of good. If we are struggling to be faithful and we are failing time and again, then the challenge is to cling on to God and not to give in to despair trusting that even at the end God’s mercy awaits us.
Everyone knows this German description even if they do not know this German word. Schadenfreude. The Oxford dictionary defines it as a feeling of pleasure, joy, or satisfaction at the bad things, troubles, or misfortunes that happen to other people. It combines two German word: schaden (harm) and freude (joy). The Malays have a similar saying, “padan muka” or “serves you right”. It sounds rather unchristian to take joy or pleasure in someone’s misfortunes but I suppose it arises from our instinct for transactional fairness. I mean you would hate it too when going to the fruit seller and coming home with the 2kg of duku which actually weighs 1.7kg. No one appreciates the feeling of being cheated.
We want fairness but the Gospel today reveals to us how God is characteristically unlike us. He measures worth not by output nor by effort spent but by love and presence. Still it is not easy to comprehend the behaviour of the landowner in the manner of payment which leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. But God the landowner was not unkind or unjust. Leaving aside the dissatisfied feeling of being cheated, we see how God was in fact just and merciful. The manner of God’s proceeding was to deal with what was needed and not what was desired. The transaction agreed upon by both the landowner and the original group of workers was that they will receive a living wage at the end of the day. The 1 denarius agreed upon possibly represented the necessary wage, on a daily basis, for a family to survive. At the end of the day, the landowner gave those who worked less what they needed but he was not unjust to those who had worked more because that was agreed upon wage whereas those who came last were mercifully treated by the landowner. Despite their little output, he gave them enough to survive on.
Often our instinct for fairness is tinged with a measure of envy. We feel entitled to what we have worked for and we resent how those who did not work also got what they should have. Perhaps the invitation is to move away from the bitterness of jealousy to the rejoicing of celebration. “I wish I have gotten what you have but I am able to be happy that you have gained so much more”. I am sure you can find it in your own experiences to know how envy and rejoicing work.
When I was younger, certain dynamics simply passed me by; they were outside the ambit of my experience. But the last round of bishops' appointments was eye-opening. I watched how those who believed their time had come, but were passed over, subtly leaked their resentment through passive-aggressive behaviour. It became clear that ecclesiastical robes do not shield the heart from envy. How difficult it is to trade resentment for enjoying someone’s elevation.
Remember the Prodigal Son? We often focus on the relationship between the father and the wayward son. But a main story we might miss out on in the Prodigal Son is the older brother whose resentment did not stem entirely from jealousy or envy. The father’s response to him was telling. “All I have are yours”. Sometimes our resentment comes because we have such a low esteem of ourselves that we resent those who got it better because we do not believe that we are entitled to a good deal.
I remember an incident during my years of studies overseas when I complained to the spiritual director in one of our monthly conversations. It was the Confession thing. I was pointing out how another Jesuit was not living out his vow of poverty. I still remember the “light-bulb” moment as if God was slapping me “You are just jealous that he dared to live while you refused to live”. I remember preaching once about how sometimes we want justice, not because we are just, but because we are envious that the unjust can get away with murder. We may secretly desire the same opportunity to get away with the same crime. It was jealousy but more than that, I learnt one valuable lesson. I should ask for what I want and if I got it, I should be grateful. But if I did not, I would not be jealous that someone got it. I can tell you how spiritually free one becomes when there is no jealousy because my happiness is no longer based on what others got or did not get. Schadenfreude or not, we must never envy God’s generosity.
St Paul is inspiring from this perspective. He has arrived at a point in his life where Christ truly was his centre. Where Jesus is, Paul wants to be. Given a choice, Paul would have wanted to be gone from this life, from all the messiness involved in his ministry. His experience is not different from ours. Even amongst the early Christians there was jealousy or envy. The reason why the order of deacons came to be instituted was to mitigate the breakdown of fair community care due to favouritism and comparison.
St Paul challenges us because for him, labouring for Christ was a privilege and not a chore and definitely not a competition. Petty jealousy often stalls our ministry, kills our momentum and damages the impact of our evangelical witnessing. The beauty of St Paul was that he was not concerned by what he could gain except that life with Christ was the prize he loved most. He was not tracking his achievements but in all things he maximised his love for the Lord. Detached from selfish ambition and human comparison, St Paul was only concerned with glorifying Christ. We should emulate Paul’s example that to live or to die is Christ. Always Christ.
Have you ever felt stupid for being good? Pretty sure you have. Some of us more and some of us less. Giving up your seat on the train to someone who may need it more than you do can feel stupid or maybe even unnecessary. If you take public transport, you routinely notice how a person gets onto the bus or even train, occupies the seats reserved for the sick, elderly, disabled and pregnant and goes to sleep. Why? So that they can be oblivious should any one from the marginalised categories board the bus or train.
Modernity, particularly the Anglo-Saxon world, is confused. Our language routinely blur the lines between good and bad. Michael Jackson, “You know I’m bad, I’m bad, you know it”. It intends to assert that he is actually good. One has to be bad to be good which may account for the way movies portray how anti-heroes are actually the heroes. Our reality now is that the boundary between good and bad are blurred that we no longer know what is what. And for that, our culture reinforces this uncertainly by teaching us “not to be stupid”. In other words, “don’t be a loser”. Nobody will praise you for standing up in the bus or the train. Nobody appreciates you for sacrificing. If anything, society will think that you are merely showing off.
Today’s 1st Reading talks of anger and resentment and the inability to forgive. It flows into Peter’s question in the Gospel about how many times we should forgive. “How many times” is not really the question but “How should one forgive” or “If one can even forgive” are. These two questions touches or challenges our idea of what is it to be good or bad.
Imagine a woman traumatised by rape. What should she do? She should seek justice, should she not? The perpetrator/s should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, should he/they not? What if she chose to forgive the rapist and refuses to press charges? How?
Of course, the arm of the law is long and no matter what, the rapist should face the consequences of his or their actions. The notion that a woman, raped and traumatised, wanting to forgive her rapist is rather unacceptable to our mentality. At the very least, psychologists will label the woman as internally oppressed or she has been so traumatised that she no longer can think clearly or properly etc.
The absence of boundaries between good and bad is possibly a consequence of the loss of heaven. It means that we are not entirely certain that there is a heaven. The idea of having fun to the maximum is symptomatic of this loss. After all, what is the point of “delayed gratification” when there is no heaven, right? The other tell-tale sign is related the notion of justice. It must be seen to be done, for if not, then there will always be a sense of incompleteness, miscarriage of justice because the person has not been properly compensated.
When heaven is not certain, why is there a need to be good? Bad is even as good, is it not? What we do has no eternal consequences per se. Thus, the demands of justice require that all scores to be settled now. The idea of forgiveness does not make sense because there is no heaven to enforce justice. We. have heard that the arm of the law is long forgetting that the arm of eternity is even longer. In fact, God peers into the deepest recesses of the human hearts and He knows what our needs are, including justice, even before we ask for it. As the author of the Ecclesiasticus reminds us: God keeps a strict account of sin. That is an assurance,
How many people hold on to their past hurts? We might dislike a person, which is a mild enough emotion or we might “hate” a person, which is a strong emotion. The stronger the emotion, the more we are imprisoned. Therefore, to forgive is a deeply and truly an act of faith. God’s justice is far better than human justice. When we forgive a person, we trust, contrary to human perception, that God will not be blind and that we can trust Him to be just in His mercy and also be merciful in His justice.
The Resurrection is real and so too is heaven. These eternal truths give us reason to stand up for others. They help us not to hold on to resentment and not let go of our hurts. They give us reason to live even though everything seems bleak.
For many of us, our reality or truth is restricted to what we can perceive for seeing is believing. So we must be out there with all our cameras etc etc. Facebook, instagram, Tiktok etc. How about a woman who serves and is unknown? How about a soldier blown into pieces by an American missile? The point is not debating the morality or legality of the conflict in the Persian Gulf. Rather it asks the question of invisibility. What happens to those thousands of souls unknown, unheard of and unseen? Who will remember them?
God will. So, on the last day, all will be gathered before Christ the Judge and He will separate the sheep from the goats. Both will be ignorant of their actions but Christ reminds us how He sees everything done, if not to Him, then to the least of His brothers and sisters. We can get away with murder here on earth but we cannot escape God’s justice. It is with this certainty that we dare to give and not to count the cost. To fight and not to heed the wounds. To toil and not to seek for rest. To labour and not to ask for reward. We dare to leave what we cannot settle or solve not because we do not care but because we know that all is in the hands of the Jesus for He is the Lord of the living and the dead.
We live under an oppressive cloud of “Who am I to judge?”. Ever since that famous “ex aeroplano” utterance we have retreated even more behind the walls of “irreproachability”, that is if there were such a word. It is almost “anathema sit” today if one should judge a person’s behaviour because social convention dictates that we just should not. Full stop.
The 1st Reading begs to differ. In no uncertain terms does it warn that everyone is responsible for everyone’s moral well-being. Present social convention dictates that one should mind one’s own business and not be bordered by another’s person’s unwashed linen. The stark contrast is how fearful we have become of what the Gospel tells us to do. If your brother has done something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves. It is a call to correction.
Perhaps, we are not that special and the wall of irreproachability is merely a smokescreen. We celebrated almost exactly a month ago the feast of St Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers. He faced a formidable foe, a herd of heretics, called the Albigensians or the Catharis. A usual approach we are accustomed to when dealing with wrong is to invoke the might of right—a right derived from the possession of truth. It is basically described by “I am right and the only choice you have is to change”.
Well, change was certainly the goal to accomplish for St Dominic but the method was not the invocation of right. Rather, St Dominic followed the truth with humility and the power of persuasion was derived from charity. The previous attempt by Pope Innocent III to convert the Albigensians was to send in the Cistercians monks. They were unsuccessful because the Albigensians were already so ascetical in their lifestyle that there was basically nothing the Cistercians could point to in the Catharis’ lives that showed them to be morally corrupt. Of course, the Cistercians were not corrupt either but they failed the test of credibility because their way of living was not ascetical enough.
St Dominic went in with two tools. Firstly, he met the Albigensians where they were. The Dominicans were ascetical because they lived simply and that made them more credible to the Albigensians. It was Dominic’s way of going down to the level of those with whom he intended to enter into conversation.
Secondly, the Albigensians were interested in the imitation of God’s perfection. While that may be a noble desire but it is impossible simply because perfection has always been God’s gift to us. When the Lord created the world, it was “perfect” but that did not mean that it bore the quality of eternity. Even the most perfect creation, in this life, under the regime of time and space, will have to “suffer” an end. In other words, creation has an expiry date. Hence, the Albigensians, though they wanted to be perfect like God is, went about the wrong way.
St Dominic converted them not through the condemnation of their “wrongness” but through charity, that is, love, he slowly changed their vision. The first community he founded at Prouille was in fact for the nuns and women who have returned to the Church so that they could be cared for. He gained greater credibility simply because he was a man, who before he spoke of God, he spoke to God. It was this kind of intimate knowledge that gave his words greater impact.
In a world which has witnessed so much contradiction, credibility is possibly the only weapon we have against disinformation or misinformation. Both the Great Wars, I and II, were conducted under the aegis of “rationality” meaning that humanity has never been more rational or reasonable and yet, against reason, we went to war. Then, time and again, those with power, namely governments or those who were in government, under the auspices of the common good or the protection of the citizens, were found wanting for they lied and lied and lied. Even the most benevolent governments routinely lie to their citizens. Time has passed enough for us to look back at how the powers-that-be have behaved during the Pandemic. Remember the elites who ruled and yet their behaviour was perfectly captured by the slogan: “rules for thee but not for me”. What is even more blatant was not that we were educated and persuaded to the good of the measures taken to protect the public but instead the citizens were either guilt-tripped or shamed to behave according to the dictates of the establishment.
More and more credibility is the only weapon we have in order to preach or be able to preach convincingly. An important distinction needs to be noted though. The truth of a position is independent of a person’s moral status. As the saying goes, even the devil can speak the truth. Just because we do not like a person, it does not mean that he or she cannot utter something which is true. But having said that, what is clear is that the preacher’s credibility is truly dependent on his personal moral uprightness. As Paul VI in “Evangelii nuntiandi” reminded us "Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses”.
The lesson today is that we must care for each other’s moral future. The wall of irreproachability or unteachability is not because people refuse to hear. They simply cannot hear because their faith and goodwill to change has been abused by those who preach one thing but behave otherwise.
There is an innate search for the good in all of us. Like the Albigensians, some of us might be misguided. Still that does not negate our search for the good. What happened is that repeated failures in expectation has made our listening so much more difficult because we are incapable of dealing with the constant barrage of propaganda or doublespeak, especially from the powerful elites. The reassuring news however is that despite our wounded expectations, Christ has never abandoned us. He is present to us in His Church. Notwithstanding the frailty of her sons and daughters, the Church remains the only sanctuary where we can reliably hear the authentic voice of Jesus Christ. To be able to hear Him, many of us need to humbly dismantle the barrier that we are beyond reproach because pride can easily imprison us from hearing the truth. We can do it if we cleave to Christ, hold on to His Church for in Him and His Church we can find the common ground of credibility and charity in our care and concern for each other’s moral good and eternal salvation.
From the height of professing faith in the Christ of God last Sunday, how easily Peter falls from the lofty pedestal of his new office. From being the rock to being the block. Right after confessing Jesus to be the Son of God, Peter began to look for a softer Jesus whom He can worship easily.
This Sunday might be a good time to disabused ourselves of wrong ideas of who this Jesus is supposed to be. As the 2nd Reading goes, we are challenged to model our perspective not on the premise supplied by the world but based on our dignity as thinking or reasonable beings who have been redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ.
We might be distracted by the failure of Peter and even to think of it as a moment of weakness. Perhaps we should view Peter’s failure from the perspective of Jeremiah’s experiences.
Firstly, Peter is known for his impetuous reactions. Consider these incidents. He asked to walk on water but as soon as the winds picked up, he faltered. At the Transfiguration, he blurted out that they should build three tents for Moses, Elijah and Jesus. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he drew the sword and sliced off Malchus’ ear. Prior to the Passion, he boasted that he would never deny Jesus which he resoundingly did three times over. Today Peter remonstratedwith Jesus when the latter predicted His coming Passion. According to Jesus there would be a harsh reckoning awaiting Him in Jerusalem. Our Jerusalem Bible translation uses the word “remonstrated” which means Peter pleaded with Jesus when in actual fact, Peter was quite adamant as in other translations, Peterrebuked or commanded Jesus. In other words, Peter decided that the Jesus he wants to follow should not be meeting that kind of a violent end.
In fact, right down to the end, Peter struggled with the real Jesus which is reflected in the post-Resurrection apocryphal Acts of Peter. The text is the origin for the narrative centred on Peter’s cowardice. “Quo vadis, Domine?” translated as “Where are you going, my Lord?”. According to the legend, Peter was facing his death but chose to escape. At the moment of his departure from Rome, he saw coming towards him, Jesus, which occasioned the question, “Quo vadis, Domine?”. Jesus gave this answer, “Eo Romam iterum crucifigi”. (I am going to Rome to be crucified again).
The fact that Peter turned back and finally met his death in Rome is beside the point. The truth about him is how closely we resemble Peter. All through his life, Peter struggled to accept the true path of Jesus much like we do. We all want a Jesus we are comfortable with, a Jesus we can manage and a Jesus we can even control.
In a way, Peter was very much like Jeremiah. Both were lovers. Both may have been misguided in their love. In the case of Peter, his idea was that Jesus should be a powerful figure. Not unlike Judas Iscariot. For every Jew, to breathe is to inhale the covenant that they are a chosen race, a people set apart. Chafing under the tyranny of a pagan occupation, one can appreciate Peter’s delusion of grandeur. Any Jew would want to have a Saviour who is powerful and capable of over-throwing the uninvited Romans. But beneath that passion was someone who had fallen deeply in love with Christ. Both Peter and Jeremiah were souls deeply in love. In fact, Jeremiah spoke of being seduced by God and expressed the feeling of being cheated. Peter may have been impetuous but he loved Jesus.
As such, he had to learn the true meaning of leadership and discipleship. More than a political liberator, Christ had come to show what it meant to be a leader who serves. To a certain extent, Jeremiah was not wrong. He complained to God and made excuses. Who would not? We all want the glory espoused by Peter but we fear the Cross proposed by Jesus.
How do we overcome this reluctance or this reticence of humanity’s natural indolence to become the man or the woman God intended us to be? In the Gospel, the Cross is mentioned and proposed as the sine qua non of discipleship. The issue is not the Cross. Human experiences have providedproof after proof of how frequently the spirit excels under duress. We are not even speaking here of the call to martyrdom or stoic acceptance. Our experience shows us that a soul spared in the storm rots in the calm.
The only way that the Cross becomes not a cost to be borne but a prize to be gained is the love of God, the love for God. Each in his own ways came to the realisation that their love for Yahweh, in the case of Jeremiah or for the Son of God, in the case of Peter, is the driving force. Our discipleship should be rooted in or driven by love and not fuelled or motivated by guilt or shame.
I think I recognise this especially when we are trying to motivate God’s holy people. Fear of hell is one motivation. Shamed by stigma is another. Let them be haunted by hellfire. Jesus scolded Peter but not out of anger, even though He called Peter, “Satan”. Rather, He was trying to purify Peter’s motivation. “Since you love me, so, just follow me. No need for the excuses of Jeremiah etc”.When a heart is in love, it is easily led. Jeremiah spoke of being seduced by God and a feeling of being cheated. The truth was he was neither seduced nor cheated. Jeremiah realised that it was not a matter of deceit but rather that he had been smitten by his love for Yahweh.
In a previous pastoral posting, I witnessed how children, especially servers were disciplined by fear to coerce compliance. It is not the best way to teach or motivate. Discipline is needed; it is true but children will respond best when there is love. Authentic discipleship should be driven by love for God rather than be motivated by fear or guilt. Love does change everything.
When I was studying in Dublin, I received an email from a well-known chocolate brand canvassing about a possible new chocolate product. I had never experienced this before but I suppose that must have been an industry standard—to manufacture taste and to create demand. The questionnaire polled a number of propositions and asked if I would agree with the name, ingredients and the taste of the product they intended to manufacture.
It was a survey much like Christ surveyed His people by asking two questions. “Who do people say I am?” and “Who do you say I am?”. Unlike the survey regarding the possibility of a new chocolate product, Jesus was not asking so that He can conform Himself to what people expected Him to be. Instead, He was asking where people stood in regard to who He truly was.
The questions are important simply because they touch on who Jesus is and how much we are willing to acknowledge Him. It is easy to know about God. We can in fact expound a whole treatise on who God is but still have no relationship with Him. As observed in a proverb attributed to the Chinese, “Makers of idols rarely believe in them”.
It is true that purveyors of the sacred sometimes have little respect for the sacred. Another way of describing this known experience is familiarity breeds contempt. Sometimes priests can make fun of the Mass they celebrate etc because of their familiarity with it which begs the question of what they truly believe in. Priests are not alone in this matter. Doctors or lawyers can speak disparagingly of their patients or clients.
We can know a lot about God without any personal investment. Hence the questions that Jesus posed to the disciples are important. However, the answer to His questions is equally important in the sense that there are as many definitions as they are ideologies.
In the 19th century when historical accuracy was the trend, there was a serious search for this Jesus whom historians felt had been obscured by the passage of time. The “real” Jesus seemed to be shrouded by centuries of theological veneer which the Church had painted or glossed over Him. In short, historians felt that the Church had made the real Jesus unrecognisable. The irony within the early scientific search for the historical Jesus was that the rejection of the Christ worshipped by the Church was replaced by a Christ who resembled more of an English gentleman. In trying to strip away the theological layers of who Jesus was, historians ended up with a Jesus Whom they wanted Him to be. This so-called myth of a pristine past where Christ can be viewed in an objective 3-D panorama, a Jesus truly accessible to us, was nothing more than a concept of a Jesus who was already shaped by our scientific prejudice.
Today, we are not that different from that putative 1st Wave of the Quest for the Historical Jesus. We can still end up with a Jesus who mirrors our predilections. We want a softer Jesus, less judgemental and more indulgent of our weaknesses. A type of BBC-Jesus who resembles a cosmopolitan metrosexual and who is not hung up on legalism but is totally one who approves of our lifestyle. At the start of WWII, when Hitler came onto the scene, the German Church was cozying up to National Socialism (Nazism), the fascist movement of Hitler by putting a Christ who was watered down, passive and who rather compromisingly signed up to their lifestyle and demanded no behavioural change from them. We too can end with a Jesus who is culturally contemporaneous but Christologically compromised; definitely not the Jesus of the Gospel.
The recovery of Jesus requires more than a knowing about Jesus. In order to follow Him, we need to know Jesus personally; not just a definition or description of Him and certainly not a caricature of Him. The truth about Jesus goes beyond historical interest and accuracy to the person whom we should love. To love Him is to follow Him and to follow Him, the shadow of the Cross looms large. If we were to accept Bonhoeffer’s definition of discipleship, the justification of a sinner is not merely the forgiveness of one’s sin. Instead, justification must include a change in the sinner’s behaviour. Discipleship in Christ necessarily entails the changing of our behaviour.
We must get away from a cosmic rubber stamp in which the Jesus we know is basically a toothless Saviour who does not expect us to change. Thus, the present accent or focus on authenticity has to be more than being right with oneself. Our therapeutic self-assessments like “I am at home with myself” or “I am comfortable with who I am” can be misleading because these are not the same as being at right with God.
This is compounded by a challenge that we face as a modern society. The challenge boils down to the poles that should be kept in tension. One pole is change and the other is stability. Progressives desire change because we need to keep up with the times etc. Traditionalist desire stability because constant change can create anomie, a sense of loss without an anchor. The tension is to hold onto these polarities as we navigate life. But when society is deeply polarised ideologically, we will have a problem accessing the Jesus we should know. At present, on one end of the ideological spectrum, those who claim to be liberal tend to frame opponents especially those who espouse conservative or traditional ideas as harmful and the best way to isolate them is to vilify them for not loving as Jesus would love. All we need is when someone calls us a racist or a sexist or a bigot and immediately we cave in. And on the other side of the spectrum, the conservatives will label the liberals as Marxists or socialists bent on destruction and dictatorial control etc.
We live in fear of the political fallout of being labelled. Such is the paralysing fear of labels that prevents us from having meaningful conversation about the Jesus we ought to know and love. To know Jesus personally, it requires that we dare to cut through these ideological noises. It requires silence and an ability to sit down with Jesus. Prayer is essential to knowing Him. It is not just the rote prayer we are taught. To grow in Him, to know the Christ of the Church, the Jesus of history, we must embrace a prayerful and deeply sacramental life. In prayer we reach out to Him and in the Sacraments, He nourishes us and reaches out to us. To know Him, we read His word in sacred scriptures. To know Him more, He must become the centre of our lives, our families, our decisions and our destiny. He cannot be a side-piece. Hence, the question of Jesus’ identity has only one answer which is meaningful for a disciple. Who do you say I am? You are my all. You are everything to me.
