Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord Year B 2021

Today we have two readings from the Gospel of Mark. Palm Sunday is only day in the liturgical cycle with this special feature. But it is not only that. The narrative of the Lord’s Passion is particularly long, and it is recommended that the homily be kept as brief as possible.

The word “proximity” can help us get into the spirit of the Passion. In a recent homily, a link was made that closeness to the sacred is salvific. It may explain the surge of people coming for the services during these most holy days of the Christian calendar. If staying near to Jesus saves, then it is what we ought to do.

The Gospel at the beginning describes Jesus making His triumphant entry into His city, reclaiming the capital, not as a lordly sovereign but rather as a lowly servant, not riding on a steed of war but rather on a beast of burden. Our King is not only meek, but He is soon to be humiliated.

This is the Passion of the Lord and this is the “proximity” we are invited to. Follow Him closely so that we can more deeply appreciate our salvation.

But what have we done?

We have domesticated the Cross, tamed it and turned this compelling badge of belief into an anaemic accessory of adornment. This is inevitable as we have embraced a therapeutic mentality that seems to cling to the crutches of “feeling good”. In a sense, we have reduced “being good” to “feeling good” or therapy. As a result we banish the discomfort that naturally arises from being good or we attempt to eliminate the struggles that comes with the cultivation of moral excellence.

We have forgotten that every endeavour that leads to the Good must somehow involve the Cross. An example to illustrate this is something we all have experienced before: a baby’s teething problem. The pain which is indicative of growth is a good which we, in our fear of suffering will try to eradicate. The basic principle we apply to everything good in which there is pain involved is that we try to get rid of the pain. It means that we want the end result without going through the process of growing. Like the itch which signals that a wound is healing. We want to do away with the itch because we find it difficult to endure the slow progress of healing. In short, banish the process, just jump to the result. We carry this mindset into our religious practices.

But Holy Week requires that we submit to the process. Keep close to Jesus.

The suffering which Jesus undergoes will be excruciating. In the Garden, Jesus begs His Father if He could be spared, not the torture but rather the torment associated with crucifixion. The Cross is one of the most intense instrument of execution fashioned by man. It is designed to inflict optimal bodily harm not in the shortest possible time but stretched to the longest conceivable duration.

The etymology of the word “excruciating” actually brings us back to the cross or the “crux” or “ex cruciare (crucis)”. The taunts, the torments and the tortures are not restricted to Calvary. The cross starts from the get-go. The trial before Pilate with the jeering of the mob, the relentless scourging at the pillar with the soldiers capping a night of tyranny when they fashion a laurel of thorns to mockingly crown Him. The mounting climb must wind through a blood-thirsty swarm of Jerusalem. In the end, the One who survives the disfiguring ascent to Golgotha will be stripped naked and nailed to the Cross.

The next time when we lament  that our agony is "excruciating", remember that we are comparing ourselves to the One who hangs on the Tree who is to be shamed by His denudation and as He breathes His last, the loosening bowel leaves nothing to the imagination. The point is that everything is intended for the utter humiliation of He who dies on the Cross.

This entire week, at least until the morning of Holy Saturday is to be filled with the pangs of death. Instead of running away because death is discomfiting, we linger, we stay as we embrace the proximity of redemption.

The nearness to Jesus is NOT a detached indifference on our part. “Not” is the operative word here. We cannot remain uncommitted from our side because we have safely established that salvation history is fundamentally a chronicle of Divine condescension. God called Saul whereas Jesus chose Levi. In other words, God wants to save and He calls out to us, time and again.

We also read of the woman with the haemorrhage who reached out to Jesus to touch the fringe of His cloak. We accept the need to be near to God and even though it might not feel like it, we are like Paul who had mistakenly thought that killing the early Christians was the right way to keep close to God. In the case of Matthew, he readily walked away from his lucrative livelihood at the invitation of the Saviour, which begs the question why. The wealth he had amassed could not fill the emptiness of his hunger for God.

Proximity to the Saviour is our salvation. So, if you are here after an absence, now is a good chance to come nearer to the Redeemer. To cherish Him, we keep a close watch, follow and stay with Him. The liturgy is not designed to make us “feel good”. What we may have done is to reduce it to a love-fest, a kind of therapeutic Woodstock or self-absorbed carnival that “celebrates” God’s care for us. But it cannot be simply a one-sided love to feed our narcissistic appetite to feel good.

It is true that He died for us, but the gate of Jerusalem represents His entrance into the darkness of our fallen world. He enters to triumphantly shine upon it the Light of His grace. If we have not the strength to follow Him in this final act of salvation, at least, stay alert to await Him. Mindful that the palms we held up for blessing earlier are but soulless symbols. We spread not our outer garments but lay for Him the inner garments of our souls graced by the Sacrament of Baptism. Like every process that leads to the good, we are not in control. But, even if you do not feel good, we are certain that salvation is near. To fully grasp His resurrection, we first need to accompany Christ to His death for we will never rise from the dead if we dare not follow Him into the tomb. Echoing His footsteps, we are made partakers of the Cross so that we may also share in His resurrection and His life.

5th Sunday of Lent Year B 2021

There is a tradition of covering the images and statues beginning this Sunday to signal that the pace is picking up. According to the old liturgical calendar, the Gospel taken from John showed the authorities trying to kill Jesus. But Jesus foiled their attempts as He hid Himself and left the Temple. Apart from flagging the change in tempo, the purple coverings are also called “hunger cloths” (in German, hungertuch) and they are a symbol of our fasting because the divinity of Jesus is now veiled for the coming Passion.

The concealment of Christ’s divinity naturally serves to accentuates His humanity. In the Passion, Jesus is man at his best—in obedience, and not in hubris, making the climb to Calvary. It is an ascent that is not a test of performance, not even of His own strength but a submission to love. Indeed, the hour has arrived not for the trial to begin but rather the revelation to unfold. The covenant between God and man will be fully revealed as love through suffering.

In the Gospel, Jesus lays before us His idea of perfect love. It ties in with the 1^st Reading. In general, our present perspective, centred heavily on individual autonomy, tends to view the Law as codified rigidity even though its original inspiration was love. In practice, any alliance that is significant requires formal recognition and mutual obligations. Can you imagine the sort of friendship that is based on "See you when I see you"? It suggests that "seeing you" is not  important at all. Thus, the compact between God and man is represented by a charter which in the bible is called a covenant—a bond that specifies the love between the two parties. The danger of customs and conventions is the emptying of its content—love. Just like our CNY hampers--beautifully wrapped but full of useless boxes and cans. Thus, the Prophet Jeremiah frames love as the script of the heart rather than formulates it through the language of the law. Instead of legal prescriptions reminding us of love through specified duties and obligations, Jeremiah hones in to the heart of the matter. From now on, love will be written into heart instead of expressed through “lifeless” laws.

Soon this perfect love exemplified by Christ will be stripped and put to the test. It is necessary to grasp the full extent of Jesus’ love in order to appreciate the suffering that He will undergo and what it means for us in this Lenten journey. To breathe life into “loveless” laws, Jesus speaks of the sacrifice of one’s life.

In a way, self-sacrifice is not alien to us. Salt and sugar provide an excellent analogy. When they do not blend in or dissolve into food, we will taste lumps of sugar or grains of salt. In human terms, a mother voluntarily gives up food for children. A father sacrifices himself by leaving the comfort of home and familiarity of country to slog for a better life and education for wife and children. In religious art and symbolism, this self-renunciation is expressed through an observation in the animal kingdom, known as the “Pelican in her Piety”[1]. This is found in numerous illuminations, stone relief, stained glass windows and etc. A pelican picks at her breast in order to feed her chicks—the symbol of sacrifice and love.

But what sort of love is that?

As Jesus reminds us, “God makes the rain fall on evil and good men. Even sinners do the same, do they not? Sinners love their own kind?”. For Jesus, ultimately the supreme act of self-sacrifice is when we lay down our lives for someone we know not of or someone we have no relation to. This mandate makes no sense simply because the human composition is innately controlled by the principle of self-preservation. It is inherently natural as it keeps one alive. Furthermore, driven by the principle of pleasure, our attachment to creaturely comfort renders the purpose of self-immolation rather meaningless.

Self-sacrifice is a concept which we resonate with but do not fully believe in or subscribe to. Look around us. One of the pressing issues that even billionaires-turned-philanthropes are trying to resolve is the so-called environmental crisis. Some religious may have fallen over themselves trying to burnish their “Laudato si” credentials because the destruction of the environment has been billed as one of the humanitarian crisis du jour. But let us not aim that high. We need only to scour our local scene to recognise a country quite messed up. In short, we want a better world and an improved country. It is logical to desire this because we instinctively aim for the good. However, the question is, are we willing to pay for improvement or should someone else be paying for what we want? This question brings us back to reality. We dream but we are not prepared to sacrifice for the reality to come through.

We realise that there is a connexion between the good we aim for and the sacrifice we must embrace. As someone used to say, “We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give”. Love gives life. The finest token of life always involves self-extinction.

Because meaning is central to our behavioural response, the question that needs to be asked if it is possible to be joyful even when we lay down our lives? Or is it a stupid ideal? If “duty” is our standard, then the question is answered. No one is expected to sacrifice beyond the call of duty. But if our heart is filled with love, love of God and love for Jesus, then the answer is basically “No”. It is not stupid but worth giving up our breath for.

If that be the case, we need to turn to the saints. Consider the notion of sanctity, that is, of holiness. On the one hand, wholeness (sanity) is connected with holiness (sanctity). Holiness is supposed to be all encompassing (wholeness). Yet, the reverse is truer. Insanity (as opposed to sanity) or madness is also a mark of holiness. What we witness in many of our saints is a kind idiocy, a fecklessness and a recklessness which disregards the logic of comfort and self-preservation. Instead, in following Christ, they follow Him into the madness of self-giving.[2]

The grain of wheat that dies is essential to our discipleship, that is, if we want to follow Him closely. Thomas à Kempis in the Imitatio Christi said that the character of man is that he loves the feasting but dislikes the fasting. We effortlessly recall that Jesus broke bread but fail to remember that He drank the cup of passion. Today, the love of the Father invites us to follow the Son, not out of obligation or duty or even responsibility but out of love for Jesus. He came to show us how to go up to Calvary. Sacrifice, not suffering will be our companion along the way. There is a difference. We do not embrace suffering for itself for that would be masochistic. However, we know that in love, there is always sacrifice. Thus, the self-sacrifice of love always entails suffering, but it is never a self-destruction. As the Collect directs us, “Let us walk eagerly in that same charity with which, out of love for the world, Jesus handed Himself over to death” for in the glorious Kingdom of Christ the Lord, the nature of self-sacrifice is never a defeat but always an eternal victory. It is worth far more than any success we can ever dream of or achieve in this passing world.

 

---

[1] This was a belief that lasted until about 17^th century. According to a description, “The pelican lives near the Nile river and marshes in Egypt. She loves her young so much that when snakes kill them, she strikes her side until blood comes out and with her blood brings them back to life”. Because of that belief, the pelican became a major symbol of self-sacrifice and charity. Early Christians had adopted it by the 2nd century and started using it in texts and images.

[2] We live under a regime that seeks to sanitise history through woke mentality and cancel culture. Unwittingly, this movement pretends that Original Sin does not exist. But it does. This drive to sanitise history runs the danger of a canonisation of comfort and self-preservation. How so? The Saints are not perfect in a sense that each one of them has a history of grace. What a sanitised history does is pervert history into a reflexion of who we are at the moment. Look at the way political figures in the past have been “cancelled” as if the present is the perfect perspective for history. The end result of this woke/cancel culture is that the Saint’s remit will no longer be to keep us on the straight and narrow. They should not be made because their only utility is to make us feel good about ourselves. Saints are merely a narcissistic reflexion of who we are. But these imperfect but graced saints show us that sanctity must always involve more than a modicum of self-sacrifice.

Laetare Sunday Year B 2021

Today is Laetare Sunday and the experiences of Nicodemus is central to our Lenten journey. How so?

Firstly, do you remember the two dicta used during the Imposition of Ashes?

1. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”.

2. “Repent and believe in the Gospel”.

In keeping with the established etiquette, we appear to have ditched the former in favour of the latter. The exhortation to “repent and believe” surely sounds less pessimistic and more promising as it matches a culture which leans heavily on optimism. In other words, we have been socialised into a kind of thinking that is more optimistic rather than hopeful.[1]

The timely appearance of Nicodemus might give us a chance to explore further the idea of conversion and a second look into our Lenten practices and their places in this journey of hope.

Last week, I pointed out that God’s proximity is our salvation and that there is a cohesiveness between the Creator and His creatures that sees both reaching out for each other. But it is never an exchange between two equals because humanity’s enthusiasm can never match God’s steadfast quest for humanity.

Look at the 1^st Reading. Israel’s constant infidelity has only been met by God’s covenantal faithfulness as, in this instant, He overturned their exile. In other words, God was tenacious despite Israel’s rebuff. He sent prophet after prophet and finally, through the human instrument of King Cyrus, God allowed Israel to return to her homeland.

When it comes to God, punishment is never retaliatory. His justice is never punitive even though the descriptions sound vindictive. Instead, rehabilitation belong to God’s merciful ways. He is ever so gracious towards sinners as we are reminded in the 2^nd Reading. God reaches out to us even though we falter in our fervour for Him.

It is in the Gospel that we get to the heart of a love that leapt from the infinite to the finite. God gave us His Son in order to save us. Soon, we shall fathom the breadth of that sacrificial love but for now, the premise for this penetrating insight has come from our most unexpected source—one considered despicable—a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin.

True to his description, Nicodemus, in darkness, came to consort with Jesus. Later, there will be two other occasions for Nicodemus to make his appearances. In this first meeting, we decipher the depth of man’s desire for Truth. Interestingly, the darkness merely confirms this existential reality because no matter how lost we are in the labyrinthine maze of our condemned state, the thirst for Truth cannot be doused. While we search for the Truth that saves, it is an indubitable fact that we often look for It in the wrong places.

Nearness to the Truth has a liberating effect as we shall see in the 2^nd appearance of Nicodemus. Having encountered the Light, he now stands on the side of justice fighting to give Jesus a fair chance because the Sanhedrin, as a body, had no qualms executing Jesus without a trial. Nicodemus’ final appearance came after the Crucifixion. Touched by the Truth, he became a man of compassion. So, assisting Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus provided the embalming spices for the proper burial of Jesus—his actions are proof of a heart set free by the Truth and it becomes for each one of us, a hopeful journey because God is not finished with us yet.

And so, we rejoice for we have established that God is always faithful. His fidelity is the basis for our virtue of hope. Sadly, in some ways, our present optimism blinds us from looking at things as they are.[2] In a sense, the first dictum “Remember you are dust” is not to scare the “Bejaysus” out of us despite its somewhat “infernal” inference. The ash on the forehead with the atomic reference to our “dustiness” is a meaningful memento that prevents us from being “overly optimistic”. It is an aid to remember that we have a supernatural destiny that requires cooperation on our part. As such Nicodemus’ search for the Truth not only makes him a model of hope for us but also sheds light on the different practices we engage in during Lent.

In our Lenten practices especially around the areas of fasting and abstinence, self-restraint is not the sole objective even though Aristotle was supposed to have said “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self”. We do not engage in these exercises for themselves as if there were a prize at the end. We know that both the acts of fasting from nourishment and abstinence from meat are good because they develop the muscles of self-control.

The moderations of self-discipline do have spiritual and social consequences. But the end or the goal is not self-control but rather the freedom that comes with the encounter with Christ, as Nicodemus showed us. In other words, our spiritual exercises are to train the heart to follow the Lord more faithfully. Hence, the freedom from greed, in Christ, is transformed into a freedom for generosity. Look at Nicodemus. It was he who provided the embalming spices for Christ’s burial. Also, earlier, after his encounter with the light of Christ, he was freed from cowardice to be free for courage. He stood against the Sanhedrin’s arbitrary definition of justice without a trial.

This is a good time to check for fruits. Have our Lenten practices made us more patient in bearing ours and others’ Crosses? Are we more ready to help others or are we more selfish, irritable and impatient? Recall that our spiritual exercises are not engaged for themselves but must help us gain a greater interior freedom to follow the Lord because the pace in the coming weeks will quicken as the forces against Jesus will coalesce. Finally, “Laetare” is joy for two reasons. Firstly, love. Through Nicodemus, we come to know the love that does not count the cost of sacrifice. Secondly, hope. We discover this love as the illumination for those who are seeking to leave the darkness of sin so as to live in the light of Truth. “Laetare” joy is also a stop before the climb. We take a breath as we search for the Nicodemus in us so that we can reach out for the light, gain our inner freedom so as to follow Christ faithfully in this journey of our salvation.

---

[1] In normal conversations, we use hope and optimism interchangeably. But the former is a theological virtue whilst the latter is not. Optimism can be said to be an illusion that life’s journey ahead is simply a progression of improvement. That means, we can only get better in the future. On the other hand, hope describes an encounter with Jesus Christ. It is a theological virtue on account of our experience of God’s nearness, that neither blinds us to the immensity of our difficulties nor gives in to the despair of the future, no matter what. As Pope Benedict says, “One who has hope lives differently”.

[2] The prolonged pandemic has definitely thrown a spanner into our works. I suppose we all (namely, our economic czars, the industrial complex for production and consumption and the travel trade etc) are just waiting to return back to a normality that is markedly “consumptive” without a corresponding stop to think of the true meaning of life. Is there more to life than a series of consumption?

3rd Sunday of Lent Year B 2021

A word that best characterises the behaviour of Jesus today is not “violent”. It is not even righteous anger. Rather, the action of Jesus is profoundly “symbolic”. It may sound odd as if we were trying to downplay this rather atypical conduct of Jesus. Perhaps, context can justify what is being asserted here. For example, what we hear during the period of Advent is how salvation is described in one word, “imminent”. When God is near, we are saved. So, in today’s Gospel, Jesus entrance into the Temple is a gesture “evocative” of God’s “proximity”.

However, our notion of the Temple is very much coloured by a prejudice that the two Testaments basically represent two disparate concepts of God at odds with each other. The “deity” of the OT is abhorrently unreasonable when contrasted to the therapeutic “divinity” of the NT who is more in keeping with our present-day sentiment. We may have unwittingly imposed this duality into the Temple when in reality it was simply a powerful landmark of God’s “nearness”. After all the Temple was fundamentally the Ark of the Covenant “immobilised” that subsequently was transformed into the central site for Jewish religious activities.

What we perceive to be an emphatic rigidity of the Law only came about after the Temple had been destroyed. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman conquerors in AD70, what was left for the Jewish nation as the remembrance of God was the Law. Rabbinic Judaism sought comfort in God’s presence through the Law. It is only natural that when one has lost everything, one becomes conservative and this explains their rigidity.

It is said that during the era of the Schoolmen, speculation being the spare change of the day, these leisurely scholars were interested in divining how many angels could possibly stand on the head of a pin. Their obsession will not seem that antiquated if you consider our fascination with how many bytes can dance on a hard-disc.This allure with measuring the infinite is basically a human attempt to bridge the gap between man and God—as we observe in the effort to construct the Tower of Babel. There is a cohesiveness between the Creator and His creatures in the sense that God is near to us as much as we are fascinated by the Infinite. We crave to be near God. Therefore, Abraham’s sacrifice from last week’s 1^st Reading can be read in the light his desire to get closer to God.

Why is God’s nearness to us or our proximity to Him important? The simple answer is salvation. In fact, the basis for sacramental efficacy is “proximity” as illustrated by the faith of the woman with a haemorrhage, “If only I could touch the fringe of His cloak, I would be healed”. Nearness to God is salvific.

God is closer to us that we realise. In cleansing of Temple, Jesus set the stage for an even more dramatic closeness that God will have with humanity. Sadly, the act of claiming His space brought Jesus into direct conflict with the authorities—both religious and secular. It would lead to His arrest and this incident was presented as key evidence at His trial based on the claim that He would destroy the Temple and would rebuild it in 3 days.

The unfortunate situation was that the Jews, for whom the concrete Temple was the focal point of their relationship with God, did not recognise the “Temple’s true Temple”. At the beginning, it was brought up that violence is not the right word to describe Jesus’ action, but symbolic nearness is. The question now remains why did the Jews fail to realise that?

According to the Catechism, following the analogy of faith[1], Sacred Scripture should in totality, be read both literally and spiritually. Our spiritual exegesis will recognise that this brazen behaviour of Jesus should be understood allegorically, morally and anagogically.[2]

Entering the Temple to reclaim its sacred space was an epiphany whereby Jesus was replacing the Temple with His Body. Hence, the Temple was an allegory of Christ’s Body. In the Incarnation, God the Father has become so much nearer to us than both the Temple and the Law can ever be for now He is with us through His Son. As Jesus spoke of the destruction and the rebuilding of the Temple, we catch a glimpse of the anagogical sense of our destiny. He was speaking of the Resurrection and our salvation is modelled upon His Rising from the dead. Jesus is destination, our goal or our objective and where He has gone, we hope to follow.

This brings us to the moral sense of Jesus’ symbolic action. It is found in the clearing out of the traders. Jesus was not interested in challenging the Temple or Roman authorities for sake of it. He was highlighting the corruption that had entered into the Temple system. This is pertinent to us because through our baptism and confirmation, our souls have been configured to Christ, transforming our bodies into temples of the Holy Spirit. Now, we are not halfway through Lent, Jesus cleansing the Temple becomes for us a pause and an exercise of taking stock of how much space we give to God or how much we have crowded God out. Thus, these questions “What corrupts us?” and “What areas in our lives need purification?” are relevant in our spiritual search for salvation.

The point is, in seeking God, in longing to be saved by Him, we encounter also a corresponding desire of God to be near us. In these days of enforced distancing, we console ourselves that we are close to our loved ones. FaceTime or Skype or Zoom. All it takes is a death of a loved one to disabuse us of this myth that virtual vicinity can ever take the place of physical proximity. In cleansing the Temple, God has shown us that He does not care to establish a covenant from a distance. Thus, the only appropriate response is to enlarge the space of our hearts for the Him. The devout practices of Lent—prayer, fasting and almsgiving—are specifically tailored for the purpose of getting close to Jesus. As the true Temple of God’s proximity, He is our destiny. He is our everything. Do not tarry. Let us move closer to Him.

---

[1] Rom. 12.6. According to the Catechism (cf CCC114), the analogy of faith is defined as the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.

[2] Basically, there are two senses when one reads Sacred Scripture, that is, the literal and the spiritual senses. The spiritual sense is further subdivided allegorically, morally and anagogically (CCC115). Further down, the same Catechism uses a mediaeval couplet to explain all these four senses. The letter speaks of deeds. Allegory to faith. The Moral how to act. Anagogy our destiny (CCC118).