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Eating is not simply an act of survival. It is an existentially social and enriching exercise for building up relationships. Within a target-focused society, the meal is frequently reduced functionally to a kind of “by the way”. It just means that the meal serves as a meeting that allows for the organisation and execution of plans. It is practical and we know it as a power or a business lunch.
With this utilitarian convenience we easily forget that the meal is also the social expression our relationships. What do I mean by this? It is true that eating together can build relationships but more importantly, our social bonds must express themselves through meals together. A good example is the Lunar New Year Reunion Dinner amongst the Chinese. And this has implications for what we do here. In fact, more than just being practical, the sharing of a meal itself can pave the path for objectives to be achieved. It does not have to be as business-like as in reducing the meal to its existential function—eat to survive.
What a meal does is to give us a perspective on how to behave socially. In other words, what needs to be completed does not need to be “planned”. Not that planning or organising is bad but we innately or instinctively know what has to be done. That is the social strength of sharing a table. A good example of knowing what to do even if unplanned would be the Apostle Judas. Of course, it is not the most positive example and yet it illustrates the point that during the meal what had to be accomplished became clearer to Judas. In any case, the sharing of food can facilitate a clearer picture of the tasks ahead that require our attention.
But more than work, the meal is also a place to know who we are. It is a perfect setting for excellence. How so? Have you ever eaten at a gathering where Darwin’s evolutionary theory is played out? By that I mean the survival of the fittest. You observe the person in front of you in the queue scooping up the choicest parts of the dish but not only that, the person takes more than his share. A person of excellence is one who knows that there are people behind and he takes what he needs or even less than he needs because the small serving has to be shared fairly amongst those who are still behind in the long queue.
The excellent person is a model of the virtue described in the Gospel. It makes sense that the virtue of humility is set within the context of a meal. This is a joke from a friend who takes great pleasure in highlighting the obvious egoism of the Jesuits. As you may know, the Jesuits are supposedly noted for their “excellence”, after all their motto scream “ad maiorem Dei gloriam”. According to him, St Ignatius conceded that the Franciscans should be recognised for their poverty. Whereas the Dominicans should celebrate their erudite prowess. But hear this: let the Jesuits boast of their humility.
It is getting harder to conceive of this virtue given that we live a go-getter world. It strikes one as a feeble invitation to be trampled underfoot. What is humility if one were not to be crushed? The humility of the Gospel is to see ourselves as God sees us. It is not a form of self-hatred. Instead it is an attitude captured by a quotation apparently attributed to C.S. Lewis, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less”.[1] It sounds like a loser’s mantra but it is not. Humility recognises that my space, physical, psychological or spiritual, is not filled with me alone. Humility makes space for others and most especially for God. Therefore it is free from narcissism.
However, it would be next to impossible to live humility if God were not present. Why, you may ask. Only when there is a God will we be assured that death is not the final stamp in life. Without that guarantee, it follows quite logically that we would be considered losers if we have not achieved anything or that nobody knows or recognises our contributions to society. The present compulsion to “virtue-signal” is symptomatic of this loss of faith in the afterlife.[2]
With regard to cultivating the virtue of humility, what complicates is that both our political and economic spheres are knowledge-based. On the one hand, a good development from Wikipedia is the democratisation of knowledge. Everyone has finger-tip access to information. On the other hand, the shadow of this ease of access to information is an arrogance—a forgetfulness of who we truly are. Is it not true that now we have the facility to fact-check almost everything, provided that Big Tech or Google has not already censored what we should or should not know. The point is, in simple conversations, even as someone is speaking, the listener can fact-check without realising that the very act of verification is based on the humility of Truth and not on the might of “being right”, as in, “I am right because I possess MORE information”. As mentioned earlier, our challenge is that without God, we will always need to be ahead of everyone because being behind is considered to be a loser. No one wants to lose. And it is not even “kiasu” to have this fear.
In terms of knowledge, humility makes us more a servant of Truth than its master, meaning that Truth is not a possession like information is. Au contraire, humility is to be possessed by Truth. The etymology of the word “enthusiasm” actually clarifies what it means to be possessed. Not by the Devil. To be “enthused” means to be taken up by God. When we are possessed by Truth, we will be humbled by the beauty of Truth. An oft-repeated remark can help us appreciate humility and how it serves the Truth. People say that with regard to paper qualification, it is not so much what you know as whom you know. Access to the corridor of power is granted by the knowledge of personage or patronage. Or better expressed, the access to greatness is through “whom” we know.
In a manner of speaking, we have come full circle to where we began. Whom do we know and encounter in the Eucharist? The lie in an age of arrogance is that our greatest encounter is the discovery of the self. The humility of truth states otherwise that the ultimate realisation of the self is found in God alone which makes the Eucharist the perfect cure to this lie. We know ourselves best only in God as expressed by St Augustine’s famous quip: “O God, my soul is restless until it rests in You”. The more we are at home with God, the more we are taken up by Him, the more will we recognise our truer self.
So each time when you attend Mass, you may think that you are here as an individual but in truth we are here to worship God together and to be known by Him. The beauty of the social setting of the Eucharistic sacrifice is that God accepts us not as condemned but redeemed sinners. That is who we truly are. It makes sense that at the beginning of Mass, we acknowledge this truth through the “Confiteor”. In this humility of our collective admission, we are kept both grounded and exalted. Grounded because we know who we are. Sinners albeit redeemed and loved. Exalted because humility lifts us up so that in our nothingness, God can fill us more with Himself. In conclusion, in the Eucharist, we have this profound opportunity to know ourselves better in the Lord and in the humility of self-awareness we are invited to be submissive servants of Truth. There is no greater discovery than to know oneself a sinner, yet saved by Jesus Christ, sanctified in His Truth and sent to serve in humility.
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[1] It is more a quote by Pastor Rick Warren from his book “The Purpose-Driven Life”, than by C.S. Lewis. The quotation by Lewis is much longer and does not sound as quoted by Pastor Rick. If interested, check out. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 8, “The Great Sin,” Kindle location 1665
[2] We are compelled to public broadcast our good works for fear that unannounced, there would be nobody to validate our goodness. Faith in God and in the afterlife is an antidote to this fear. Even if nobody knows, God knows. He alone can judge our goodness.
We have arrived at a Sunday where the Readings seem to resonate with the universalist regime that in the last few decades has fired the world’s imagination. The first reading paints a better picture of peace, love and harmony better than any United Nations’ charter can ever produce. It projects a future when God will gather all peoples to Himself. God is a Saviour who wants to save all and not just a few.
To prove His sincerity, God will send a sign to remind the Israelites of His enduring love. In fact the history of salvation has been a history of God providing sign after sign. Abraham left Ur for the land that God had promised. Noah and the rainbow at the end of the Great Deluge. Moses and the parting of the Red Sea that allowed the Israelites to enter the Land of Milk and Honey. The list goes on and when the fullness of time came, He sent His only Son to die for us.
However, the 2nd Reading and the Gospel provides a more nuanced understanding of God’s generous invitation to His banquet. In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author speaks of God’s chastisement as a sign of His love. Amongst His children, punishment was never for the sake of itself. It was never capricious. Rather, God sometimes permits bad things to happen, even to good people, because there are lessons to be learnt. It would appear that allowing misfortune to befall a person is compatible with God’s love. But we are more accustomed to thinking that God’s love and bad luck are mutually exclusive.
The Gospel gives us a Jesus who speaks not of the multitude saved. Instead we should strive to enter through the narrow door or gate. Implicit in the definition of a door or a gate is the notion of restriction. What is the purpose of the door to a house if it were wide open. Doors and gates necessarily suggest that there is a narrow aperture as opposed to a wide-open gap.
If Isaiah in the 1st Reading, began with the idea of “all”, in the sense that God invites everyone to the table, then the narrow door in the Gospel implies that not everyone invited will make it through. What gives? When the speaker in the crowd asked Jesus who will go to heaven, it was a question which brings us into the heart of the present dilemma.
Today we are urged to embrace equality, diversity and inclusivity. These qualities belong to the moral compass of any society that prides itself as being on the right side of progress and modernity. The sinister shadow of these values is that they cannot be universal in an absolute manner. It means that they cannot be applied in all instances. Take for example, making sure that everyone is treated equally. We all have an impression swirling in our heads that justice means everyone must be treated equal. In the economic sphere, what happens to our natural abilities? Not everyone has the same talents. In order to ensure an equal outcome, it implies that those who are more talented would have to have their wings clipped. You live in this country and you should know what positive discrimination means. To guarantee the delusion of “equality” how many of your children have had to migrate to other countries? How many of you have told your children not to come back?
This is just one example whereby equality is not an absolute value. The same can be said of the other two. In terms of diversity and inclusivity, we instinctively “exclude” rapists or serial killers from the diverse and warm table of brotherhood, no? What has happened to both diversity and inclusivity is that the decision of “who is in and who is out” is determined by thought police who patrols our thought highways to ensure group think. A better question that may clarify the limits of our inclusion is this: “Who are we trying to include?”. In biblical times, that question was decided by the moral integrity of the person seeking entrance. Today we are mired in the quicksand of fighting who to be included. It is no longer a moral-ethical question. Instead one’s place at the table is determined by the requirement of society fitting into the idea of progress that is proven through diversity and inclusivity, no matter how far the criteria may have strayed from our moral principles. LGB has become LGBT, then LGBTQ and the alphabets can only grow longer. I am not criticising the act of inclusion but the word by definition has to be followed to its logical conclusion. Otherwise, it fails its own description. That being so, to be inclusive, we should maybe add in “P” for paedophiles or pederasts?
Hidden in the shadow of our inclusivity is that we have always been exclusive. We necessarily exclude. From race-based exclusion to gender-exclusion and now to thought-exclusion, meaning that, anyone who fails to meet the approved thoughts will be excluded. A good example now would be those who are anti-vaxxers. Are they not labelled immediately as nutters?
Beyond the morality of self-righteousness, in answering the question with entering through the narrow gate, Christ actually takes us away from the nomenclature or classification of inclusion and exclusion. For in Him, inclusion is not a confirmation of heaven. On the other hand, exclusion is not a condemnation of hell. Just because you have not robbed, killed or murdered is not a guarantee of heaven. On the contrary, to have robbed, killed or murdered does not mean one cannot be saved.
In other words, the narrow gate is really narrow not because it is exclusive but rather because it requires first and foremost our following Him which therefore renders inclusion and exclusion relational in the sense that we become “included” when we follow Jesus. To follow necessarily translates to belonging to Him, that is, to be counted as His with not just the rights accrued to us but also the duties expected of us. These demands will exclude accordingly some thoughts and behaviours. To follow Jesus is to be good and to do good. Our challenge is that we are used to a feel-good environment. It is wonderful to feel good but that itself is no indicator of our goodness.
Goodness comes because we follow Him and in Him, there is no tension between inclusion and exclusion. Everyone is included at the table of the Lord. No one is excluded. However, the inclusion is never on our terms but under the terms of the Lord and Saviour. Check out Dismas. He was crucified with Jesus, along with the other thief. He asked for salvation. He was promised it. But still he needed to pay the price of his sins. The price of salvation included the punishment for our sins.
It sounds rather calculative but if we translate the terms of inclusion as love, then we see how love is not directed at the self. It wills the good of the other. Here itself a conversion is needed. We think that love means we must love everything and accept anything. It is a fallacy to equate love as tolerance. Instead, love that seeks the good of the other must be tied to our salvation where the canon of our inclusion and exclusion is Jesus Christ Himself. We have been created in love and we are saved by love. In His love for us, He sacrificed His life for each one of us so that we can be with Him. He is measure of what baggage we ought to leave behind in order to enter the narrow gate so that we can be with Him forever.
Jesus taught the virtue of patience last Sunday and today He sounds a little impatient to launch the programme which He came to initiate. We can draw three points from the Readings. Firstly, there is a “purgatory” that we may need to acknowledge and embrace. Secondly, the perseverance to endure the journey. Finally, to keep alive the fire of the commitment we have made to Christ.
Our earthly sojourn is called the “valley of tears” for a good reason. Life is purgatorial because of the Fall. Ever since rebellion entered Man’s experience, obstacles have been weaved into the fabric of creation tainted by sin. But somehow along the way, we seemed to have acquired the assumption that life has to be convenient.
We observe this in Jeremiah, otherwise known as the Reluctant Prophet. He was not spared this expectation. Why would he want the inconvenience of prophesying and being thrown into a well? However, this attitude has become more acute because we have unwittingly signed into the habit of crass consumption. We are consumers and as such we expect convenience at every turn in life and this entitlement is extended to the realm of the spiritual life. Everyone wants it easy because God’s function is to smoothen my paths. If we survey the Gospel, Jesus was a bit like Jeremiah too. He knew that He would be facing the exodus of His life and even up to the last minute, in the Garden, still He asked if He could avoid the awaited fate in Jerusalem.
It is human to want to avoid pain and suffering but both the examples of Jeremiah and Jesus show us that as long as we have a divine destiny, a Jerusalem to set our face to, then purification is part of the pilgrimage there. The reality is that in mortal life, there will always be a purgatory. As a spiritual reality, purgatory does not begin only after we die. Instead, for many, it begins here in the valley of darkness.
The fire that Jesus brings has to be seen in this context. Even whilst breathing, one has to die to oneself. Jesus is not bringing a fire of “destruction” and mayhem. Rather, fire refers to the conversion that He invites us to and it is, by and large, is a life-long process. To understand Jesus’ impatience to set the world aflame, it may help if we were to consider how easily we waltz ourselves to hell. The descent into the netherworld is often not the result of commission but rather the consequence of omission. Think about it. Many of us are complacent who somehow think that we are good because we have not raped, robbed or rub out anyone. We fail to realise that we can go to hell not because of what we have done but because of what we have not done. As the Confiteor acknowledges: “in what I have failed to do”.
It sounds depressingly dire but in reality, it is an encouragement for each one of us to persevere and not be discouraged by the slow and painful pace of conversion. The purification that Jesus speaks of is to loosen the shackles that have weighed us down to the point of inertia. We need to move towards the light but frankly speaking it is more comfortable to remain in the dark. Thus, in the 2nd Reading, St Paul bids us turn to the cloud of witnesses. The Protestant condemnation of Catholic sacramentality is that we seemed to have over-emphasised the veneration of saints and blessed to the point of idolatry. A glaring result of this criticism is that Catholics tend to forget this massive cloud of witnesses. For fear of this Protestant critique, we fail to recognise that in heaven these saints and blessed are praying and urging us on.
These brothers and sisters in heaven—traditionally we call them the Church Triumphant—know that the purification of our thoughts, words and deeds is by far the hardest to achieve, not just personally but also socially. On the social front, Jesus mentioned division within the family because the minute you choose Him over all else, not only will you face our interior demons but you will also face a world that resists the grace of the Gospel. Sometimes from family members who do not share our enthusiasm. You may have experienced the subtle resistance where you are expected to tone down your fervour. Otherwise, you may be judged as holier than thou.
The peace promised by Jesus is not the absence of war. Instead, peace is the consequence of conversion, the fruit of our conviction and commitment to Christ. I am reminded of the massacre in 2015 of the 21 Copts in Libya. Imagine the magnitude of their fear given the awareness that ISIL terrorists routinely and mercilessly execute their captives. It is said Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white while she awaited her beheading. Yet as the swords slid their throats, all that came from their lips was simply: “Jesus, help me”.
Stepping into their shoes, perhaps we sense the conversion from panic to peace as these men surrendered their future to the Lord. Many of us will never meet such a violent death but suffice to say, any conversion that brings us closer to God requires a death of some kind. A dying to self to begin with.
The fire that changes the world does not come from the overthrow of government or structural change. It comes from our personal conversion. We become powerful not by virtue of the strength we possess or can muster. Rather we are powerful by virtue of Christ, whose Holy Spirit and fire can do a lot more than we imagine. Last week, we celebrated St John Marie Vianney. He was merely a priest from a nondescript village of Ars. Might as well be the arse of the world where the villagers believed neither God nor the Church. But he managed to convert multitudes just by sitting in the confessional. At the end of his life, it was said that at least 100K per annum would flock to Ars just to catch a glimpse of the man, to hear him preach and to have him listen to their confession.
What this indicates is that the good we desire for the world must begin with inner conversion. In itself, this is a tough journey and if we are committed to Christ, then be prepared for purgatory on earth. It helps if we recognise that life on earth is not a bed of roses, no matter how “manufactured convenience” seems to want to promise it. When we give our lives to Christ, the Cross will cast its shadow on us: prolonged sickness, unfair treatment, loss of personal fortune or untimely death. The shadow does not refer to the price of our past sins where we may have over-indulged in food or drink and partied like mad. When we are 60 and above, the chickens of our past sins will come home to roost. No that is not the Cross. When one has led a healthy and virtuous life but has to suffer innocently, that is the Cross and the purgatory which only through perseverance and trust in Jesus as the ultimate Saviour that will win us our place in heaven.
We lingered with John the Baptist for two consecutive Sundays. At our first encounter, the Baptiser reminded us of the need for conversion and repentance. Last week, he stood as the beacon of joy, a joy that flowed from the recognition that humanity’s salvation was near. Today, we shift our attention to Mary, the Mother of Our Lord.
If John the Baptist represents the last of the Old Testament prophets, then Mary will have situated us within the age of the New Testament. The covenant with David will come to fruition in the mystery of a humble peasant girl in Nazareth. In the 1st Reading, David was ambitious to house God in a temple fitting for His divine majesty. But God could not be outdone. Instead, He gave David a house, a dynasty to last forever. The promise to remain forever with David has come true in the womb of Mary. Her “fiat” or “yes” to God has exalted her womb into the new Ark of the Covenant.
The focus of Mary might look like a devotional excess from one side of Catholicism. The modern discomfort with this Marian exuberance may stem from our deflated self-worth rather than from the fear of idolatry. This accusation of exaggerated affection emanates from the air of anti-heroism[1], meaning that, we want Our Lady to be like us—sad and sordid. You see this in the modern reinterpretation of the Marian motif. The most famous of whom is our songbird Madonna—who dresses up like a whore in some of her performances.
But the truth is that our Marian emphasis is never enough. Why? The person of Mary must be seen in the light of salvation. She stands as a symbol of our need for the Saviour. Here again, the other side of our Catholic sensibility might be offended. She is, after all, the Immaculate Conception—the woman born without Original Sin, the last person in need of salvation. How can she then symbolise our need for the Saviour?
I know, this is a terribly misleading statement. Precisely that it is paradoxical that in Mary, who played such a pivotal role in the life of Jesus, that the offer of salvation was given to the only person who appeared to have no need of a rescue. It is a false paradox.[2] Why? Not even she, whom William Wordsworth exalted as “our tainted nature’s solitary boast”, is exempted from the need for redemption proving to us that salvation is a serious business. We need the Saviour.
This need is acute even if we did not realise it. In those days of old, people were aware of God’s faithfulness as in they live more precariously—droughts, earthquakes, storms, and truly needed to depend on God to face the unknown. Today, we have our predictable and controllable modern amenities. Clap and voilà, we are lit. Practically everything we want is at the touch of our finger tips. Until now. For many are vaguely conscious of God’s presence in the sense that we have Him at a comfortable place where He is useful. Many turn to God only as a last resort because it is more reliable to depend on ourselves and our capabilities. For the intractable problems with the desirable solutions, if God answers, well and good. If not, we have not lost more than we already have.
This is our utilitarian blindness. We believe that our problems originate from a brokenness in the systems, be it in the economic, social or political realms. As such we can fix them. These various structures are good because they belong to our human ingenuity and intelligence. And they are all gifts from God. They help organise our lives. When we have poverty, we try our level best to solve it through our economic, political and social policies forgetting that there is “brokenness” that cannot be fixed no matter what. For example, we believe that if we recycled enough or use less resources or whatever they may be, then the earth will return to that green and lush planet that has a place for everyone. It may be true, but it is not the entire truth.
Our complex arrangements, good that they are, they are not our Saviours. The classical case of the communist project, with its planned economy was an attempt to recreate paradise on earth but it has instead resulted in untold misery. It is the same for people, who tired of unhappiness, escaped to another place to establish a more perfect system. They will soon find themselves entangled by the reality of sin—jealousy and greed.[3] These sins point out that human nature needs a Saviour. We cannot save ourselves. Only God can save us.
However, we are struggling to trust in God. We rather trust our machinations. In fact, this pandemic is somewhat a proof that we are still dependent on ourselves. Instead of also turning to God more fervently, we seemed to have settled into some sort of paralysis as we come to terms with the uncertainty of the new normal, so it seems. Placing our hope in the vaccine has lulled us into a kind of false security because unwittingly we are waiting eagerly, aided by the “saviour” of a vaccine, to return to the normalcy we know as if we had no need of conversion or better still, no necessity of salvation. Business as usual is our default expectations.
It is only a matter of days before Christmas. If to be saved is the natural and necessary setting for all mankind, Mary included, then Mary is truly our model. She accepted the will of God even though it carried with it risks and dangers, but she relied on the everlasting promise of God to David that He would be faithful. The significance of Mary’s "fiat" is the dawn of human salvation. From the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel, Mary now plays a prominent role in the salvific history of humanity. But, not only that.
We have a facility of separating that which should be an interior movement into a purely exterior event. What do I mean? Christmas becomes just an occasion, almost accidental (and not essential) to who we are. That way, it can become an excuse to celebrate but not really an invitation to each one of us to be “Christmas”. For the Father’s choice of Mary means each one of us is also highly favoured or blessed and chosen. Not necessarily to be the biological mother of Jesus but that we become the fertile spiritual soil for the Word to fall and germinate. As the antiphon declares “Drop down dew from above, you heavens, and let the clouds rain down the Just One; let the earth be opened and bring forth a Saviour”. The Saviour is born of a Virgin. He awaits to be born in our hearts.
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[1] Think "Suicide Squad". Every one of our heroes is a criminal…
[2] In view of her role as the Mother of God, she had been saved already by merits of Jesus Christ. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception explains it.
[3] Think any “perfect” groupings where soon enough there will be jealousy etc…
