5th Sunday of Easter Year B 2024

There is a natural flow from Vocation Sunday last week to this weekend’s Gospel. Jesus as the Good Shepherd blends in easily with the organic idea of the Church as the Body of Christ. This Sunday the organic theme flowers into the verdant vision of the Vine and the branches. Within the Body of Christ, the Sacrament of Holy Orders harmonises with the Gospel’s central theme of nourishment. Through the ministerial priesthood, Christ feeds His people, the Church, with His own flesh and blood.

Today, the symbol of the Vine and the branches deepens the dynamic sense of movement where we, members of the Body, the branches, draw our supernatural sustenance from the main trunk of Christ the Vine. This viticultural vignette is most vividly visible when we experience in botany how a branch begins to flourish as it draws life from the trunk it is grafted onto. In this post-Easter season, our Neophytes, those recently baptised, are now grafted into His Body where they draw life from Christ through His Church.

The 1st Reading describes that life of Christ in His Church as a fearless proclamation of the Good News. We witness that in St Paul who had just been converted at Damascus. Soon he embarked on a mission of proselytisation amongst the Gentiles. Once he had drawn new life from Christ, Saul the Slayer became Paul the Preacher. He represented the early Christians arriving at a stage where the Church must now reach out into the world and the fruits of Paul’s conversion are there for all to appreciate. He travelled near and far to proclaim Christ to the cultures and societies surrounding the Mediterranean.

Coming to us, Paul’s proclamation continues through a life of good conduct and morality. We might not be able to stand at street corners to shout the Gospel but we can definitely advertise its truth through a life animated by the love of Christ and His commandments. This bring us to the 2nd Reading.

To be connected to the Vine is to live the commandments. Whoever keeps the commandments lives in God and God lives in him. On a personal plane (level), the commandment is to believe in the name of Jesus and on a communitarian level, it is to love one another as brothers and sisters. This love is not a cosy or fuzzy get-together in which we feel like a family but as the Psalmist says, our commitment to the Lord must be expressed most especially in our love for the poor. Ever since her inception, the poor, in every sense of the word, has taken centre stage in the life of the Church. In other words, we do not only proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ but that His life flowing to us must reach out to those who are marginalised by society.

While it is not mentioned in the Gospel today, what undergirds the connexion to the Vine is a vibrant sacramental life. In order to live a life in Christ and to strengthen that connexion, we draw the greatest nourishment for our faith and our actions notably through His Sacraments of Confession and Holy Eucharist. In other words, the life of the Vine and branches is vitally animated by a rich sacramental life.

Behind this powerful symbol of the Vine and the branches is a template for the transformation of our inner spiritual life and also the enrichment of our life in the world. If you are coming here for Mass every Sunday, you begin to realise that the task in this Cathedral is to draw your attention to the truth that the key to a permanent Gospel conversion is located in deepening one’s sacramental life.

This truth is frequently forgotten especially as we navigate the world. What should ground our relationship with society should be based on this imagery of the Vine and branches. Many of us live in our heads believing that the sheer power of our programmes and our structures holds the key to human progress and freedom. We are in a hurry to shape the world according to principles of reason and enlightenment. Science is our religion and technology is our tool.

But how do we not hate people? Look at Israel and Hamas. Or now Israel and Iran. Can we enact laws to compel people not to hate each other? Have they ever helped? How do we respect people? Are they rules to enforce regard or esteem for others? And have they ever helped?

It is a deeply ironical situation. In a world that has lost its taste for mystery and the mystical, we are trying to save God’s creation while Christ is trying to save souls. We forget that the good we intend to achieve can only be done with God’s assistance. Every human project that compels goodness always ends up being tyrannical. The greatest social engineering which forced man to rise above himself ended up with enslaving him to an ideology. Communism was that failed social project. This is where the Sacraments come in.

The Sacraments are not just things or rituals we undertake. They divinise us by making us more human. Laws can only coerce that much. Beyond enforcement and punishment meted out by laws we do not rise to nobility. Fear can only do so much. Outside the fear of punishment, we will devolve into the behaviours of the jungle. Citizens of a country with strict fines for simple infraction of the laws, when travelling here, have no problem throwing rubbish outside their moving vehicles. In order to rise above ourselves, we need Christ.

He is the Vine who imparts His divinity on us so that we become more human. We need more of God and not less of Him to be ourselves. The less present He is, the more beastly we become.

A culture and a civilisation more divinised will better reflect Christ’s humanity. The Vine and the branches remind us that changing the world does not change us. Changing us changes the world. To be able to change, Christians, apart from keeping the commandments must draw their sustenance from Christ through a life of the Sacraments. That is the surest path, a time-tested witness to the power of the Sacraments to transform the world. Just ask the saints throughout the ages. They are living proofs of the power of the Sacraments for change and greater good.

4th Sunday of Easter Year B Good Shepherd Sunday

The 4th Sunday of Easter is also called Vocation Sunday. In the Gospel Jesus calls Himself the Good Shepherd which lends itself to the theme of vocations. In general, it is a chance to promote vocations but in particular, the spotlight falls on the idea of priesthood in the Catholic Church. Even though I am a Religious, it is an opportune moment to draw attention to the call to be a priest.

To better understand the Sacrament of Holy Orders and its relevance in the life of the Church, we need to ask two questions. Firstly, what is the Church? Secondly, what does Christ have in mind for His Church?

Is it the desire of Jesus that the Church be a gathering of like-minded do-gooders? To be fair, being good and doing good are taught by all religions and not just restricted to Christianity. Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam command their adherent the same too, do they not? Or should we flow with the trend that since all religions teach their followers to be and to do good, then it matters not which religion one embraces except that one should be and do good?

The idea that all religions are the same raises the question of what membership in the Church is for. After all every religion leads to the same end of being and doing good, membership is irrelevant. Thus it is essential to know what Christ has in mind for the Church. Membership has to be more than being and doing good. The famous chapter of the multiplication in John 6 is instructive.

In the subsequent conversation after feeding the 5000, Jesus invited the hearers to consider the supernatural food and drink He would offer. The attainment of eternal life is premised on eating His Body and drinking His Blood. In the exchange with the crowd, Jesus did not mince His words with regard to the necessity of consuming His Body and imbibing His Blood for eternal salvation. The crowd was so aghast because the proposal of Jesus tended towards cannibalism that everyone abandoned Him. Importantly, He made no attempts to stop them. Even though John’s Gospel carries no account of the Institution of the Eucharist, this episode leaves us without any doubt that Jesus was serious about eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood. If that be the case, then Jesus must make available the food and drink required for salvation.

He has kept His promise through His Church and very specifically through the Sacrament of Holy Orders. The Church is the ordinary instrument of salvation willed by Christ, making the priesthood the means for Him to ensure that eternal salvation can reach His Body. The Priesthood is His bloodline to the Body.

The Church is variously described of as the People of God, the Bride of Christ or the Body of Christ. The last description provides an organic sense that joins the Church to Christ. If Christ is the Head, then the Church is His Body. It is in and for this Body that the priesthood makes the greatest sense as the Sacrament of Orders is necessary for the proper functioning of the Church.

The Head looks after His Body through His priests. But there is a crisis in vocation number. This crisis challenges our understanding of the Church and the necessity of the Sacrament of Eucharist for salvation.

Do we need the Eucharist or not? We already know that eating His Body and drinking His Blood is not a figurative suggestion but a real command. We are speaking here in the context of ordinary salvation. We accept that Holy Communion is sine qua non for salvation, which means that the Lord must provide the means for the availability of the Sacrament. Thus, the lack of vocation poses a problem which highlights the problem not on God’s side but ours. If Holy Communion is Christ’s lifeline for our salvation, then God cannot have stopped calling. We have stopped responding.

The lack of response is possibly the painful reality that we do not believe Holy Communion is indispensable for the salvation of our souls. In other words, while we believe that God saves ordinarily through His Church, our practice is that God saves extraordinarily. It means that Holy Communion is not really that essential for salvation.

If we do need Holy Communion to gain eternal life, then the lack of vocation should spur the young men of the parish to give the Catholic priesthood a serious thought. To be a priest is to be another Christ so that he can give to the Catholic faithful, the Body and Blood of Christ. The priest does not need to be anything else. His only use is to confect and give the Sacrament of Sacraments only because he alone can.

We have to pray for more vocations. Get this into our heads that without the foundation of a ministerial priesthood, the whole Church will crumble. This is not clericalism at all. It is a statement of fact. Priests are sinners no doubt. Presently, our false sense of righteousness is hyper-focused on the weaknesses of the priesthood forgetting that Christ did not choose powerful men to be His apostles. He chose these weak men so that they can represent Him to the world. A priest does not have to be a great preacher, a brilliant theologian or a charismatic leader. Anybody can be those but no everyone can be a priest and only a priest can stand in the person of Christ.

The young men of the Cathedral should consider a life of service as Christ’s instrument to make sure that His Church is fed with His Body. Think about the bees. The female worker bee and the queen bee both have the same genes. The difference is the diet. A female worker larva is fed with royal jelly and it will develop into a queen bee. Likewise, eating the Body of Christ prepares us for eternal life. Who to feed the Church the Bread of Angels if not Jesus Christ Himself through His priests, the alter Christus? I leave you with two questions. 1. Where have all the young men gone to? 2. Right now, you still have the luxury of changing parishes. Do not like the priest, the politics or the liturgy, run to another parish. But how far can you run and for how long? Until you run out of priests?

3rd Sunday of Easter Year B 2024

We continue with the appearances of Jesus to His disciples. However, the post-Resurrection experiences of the disciples is reminiscence of Deborah Kerr in The King and I, singing “Getting to know you”. In each encounter with Jesus, there is a feeling as if the disciples do know Him but they are still getting to know more about Him and to know Him intimately.

Today, the Gospel is the aftermath of the encounter of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus where they, while at table, recognised Jesus at the Breaking of Bread. In these post-Resurrection experiences, they are often startled or terrified by His appearances or just plainly dumb-struck which questions what they really know of Jesus and the Resurrection.

In each and every encounter, He had to assure them that He was not a ghost but that He has come back to life and is therefore the very fulfilment of all the hopes that they had inherited from their ancestors. All those who came before them had been looking for the Messiah and Jesus was the answer to that search.

Two questions for reflection on these encounters. Firstly, what does it take for us to recognise Him? Secondly, what happens after we have recognised Him?

Food was essential or central to the interactions of Jesus with the people. He was often described as having meals with people. While He was labelled a glutton by the Pharisees, the truth is He has always shown concern for those who lack the necessities that bring joy to communal gatherings. In John’s Gospel, at the behest of His Mother, He changed water into wine to save the marrying couple of embarrassment. And on the mountain, by multiplying the loaves and fish, He made sure that the hungry crowd did not go empty stomach.

But food and drink were never for themselves. They were provided in order to enrich relationships. The context that food is primarily relational can been seen in St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. The early Christians were gathered around the Eucharist. And as such, there was food prior to Holy Communion. The scandal arose because the wealthy ate whilst the poor went hungry. The critique was not against consuming food. The issue was not that the rich ate but that they ate while neglecting the poor.

The providence of food and drink is in the context of the Eucharist as we see in John 6. Jesus had fed the hungry but they were still looking for more to satisfy their physical hunger. More than material satisfaction, Jesus proposed a food and a drink that would fulfil all their spiritual hunger and thirst.

Today the story continues from the encounter of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. These two had RECOGNISED Him at the breaking of bread. The action where Bread is broken is the other name for Holy Communion, the Blessed Sacrament and the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is the primary place to recognise Jesus. Even though the rite or the manner of celebrating Mass, as we know it today, is not recorded in detail in any of the Gospels, the outline of the Eucharist was already captured by Luke’s narrative of the Road to Emmaus. The second part of the Mass which the Church terms as the Liturgy of the Eucharist is enumerated by the four actions of Jesus as He sat down with these two Disciples after their walk where He took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them.

We hear this “retelling or recounting” from the Last Supper in a lyrical manner. “On the night He was betrayed, He took bread, said the blessing, broke it and gave it to His disciples saying”, is a formula which directs our attention to the Offertory (took), the Eucharistic Prayer (blessed), the Fractio Panis (broke), and the distribution of Holy Communion (gave).

Interestingly, notice the attention paid to the “taking, blessing and giving”. Frequently enough, the action of “breaking” is missed out, either because the priest does it rather nonchalantly or the congregation is too engrossed with exchanging peace with everyone to miss out a key component of RECOGNISING the Lord.

They recognised Him at the BREAKING of Bread. As the Host was broken, they remarked, “Did not our hearts burn within us as He had talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?”.

This is where we join the two disciples whom, “as they recognised Him, He had vanished from their sight”. Immediately, they set off returning to Jerusalem so that they could tell the story of their encounter with Jesus on the road.

This is what should happen after we have recognised Him. The message of Easter is always about one running to another. The ladies at the tomb, upon knowing that Christ had risen, ran to tell the Apostles about His Resurrection.

The Eucharist of the Resurrection is never meant for “private” consumption. It has tremendous benefits for the soul, for the person who receives it. He is the answer to our spiritual hunger but it is never meant to stop at the personal. It has always been an interpersonal reality. When we have seen the Lord, our hearts must tell of His wonders.

This is the good news of the Resurrection. When the Jesus whom we have recognised is not made known, then it begs the question of whom we have really come to recognise. To eat Jesus is always to proclaim Him in and through our lives and if we keep quiet, the rocks will cry out. Our Cathedrals, Churches and Chapels, old and new, are rocks shouting out the Gospel of the Resurrection. Better not let these stones shame us.

Divine Mercy Sunday Year B 2024

Jesus Christ is Risen and yet the Gospel describes a situation we can resonate with. It is the experience of uncertainty. Ambiguity, confusion and doubt can corrode the mind and imprison the soul in fear. Issues of health and wealth, freedom and security can sow unsettling doubts in our minds. A concrete example is the fear of the Ringgit dipping below 4.00 vis-a-vis the Singdollar which devalues one’s savings.

The same startling scenario applies to the Disciples hiding in the Upper Room. They were afraid and unsure for they had left everything behind to follow this compelling leader but now, what to make of their charismatic leader’s death. He who walked on water, multiplied loaves and raised the dead was Himself powerless against death.

Into this turmoil and fear, Christ appeared and greeted them, “Peace be with you”. The Risen Lord’s greeting is so powerful that it is manifested in the liturgy. At the beginning of every Mass, the celebrant has a choice of three salutations plus “one more” to greet the congregation. The “one more” is what you heard in the Gospel just now. “Peace be with you”. This particular greeting is personally associated with Jesus which explains its reservation for use only by Bishops when they celebrate the Eucharist.

The person of the bishop expresses the fullness of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. In the hierarchy of the Sacrament of Orders, the bishop stands for the Lord, par excellence. Thus, as the Sacrament of Jesus Christ, the bishop greets the congregation as if the Lord Himself is present to say: “Peace be with you”.

To hear the salutation, “Peace be with you”, is to recognise Christ in our midst. The context of this greeting was of a man who, having suffered death, came back to life. Bearing the wounds of our sins on His Body, He returned to greet those whom He loved and bestowed upon them His peace. Even after betrayal, denial and abandonment, He did not come back to castigate or chastise. Instead, He unreservedly poured onto them His peace and breathed upon them His Spirit. Christ in the midst of their fear revealed the quality of His mercy. He loved them even when they did not deserve Him.

Thus, it is fitting that right after the Resurrection, we celebrate Divine Mercy. However, our grasp of the notion of God’s mercy can be skewed. What we think of as God’s mercy is closer to indulgence. One of the greatest acts of mercy that Christ illustrated is seen in the woman caught in adultery. The crowd that prided itself on being on the right side of the law, paraded the adulteress to humiliate, shame and also to force Jesus to prove His religious credential. He showed mercy by not condemning her but neither did He confirm her behaviour because He told her firmly to “go and sin no more”.

Just about 10 days before, Jesus hung on the Cross between two thieves. One was repentant and the other not. Yet both suffered the same consequence of their punishment. They both had their legs broken to hasten their death and Jesus who had promised the repentant thief heaven did not come down from the Cross to relieve Dismas of the consequences of sin, judgement, punishment.

Mercy is indeed an expression of God’s generosity to us. We are undeserving but He is nevertheless excessive in His forgiveness. As the woman caught adultery has shown us, what is written into mercy is always a profound invitation to correct our lives and to enter into a deeper filial relationship with God where we are also called to be merciful like God is. Mercy joins us to God and to other human beings because it breaks down the walls separating us from God and prevents us from the peace that flows from trusting God’s infinite mercy.

In 1927, a Jesuit priest, Miguel Pro, stood in front of a firing squad. Was he fearful? Maybe. Was he at peace? Definitely. As the shot rang out, he shouted out Viva Cristo Rey. It sounded like a cry of defiance but it was more a proclamation of trust in God’s mercy because mercy flows from a heart that is at peace, a heart that is sure that beyond temporal life, there is Resurrection.

Without Christ’s peace we will struggle with mercy. Without mercy we struggle with forgiveness because our idea of justice is heavy-handed. Our sense of justice is possibly closer to revenge exacted. To give an example, there are talks and whispering that a shameless kleptocrat and his scheming rapacious wife will be pardoned royally. Many still suffer the damage that these thieves have done to this country’s economy and how the future generation will continue to pay for the price of their greed and rapacity. Our idea of justice is that they should be locked up and the keys thrown away. If they were pardoned, many who hold dear to the principles of justice would be devastated and hopes shattered.

It is true that there has to be a balance between mercy and justice. As St Thomas Aquinas rightly pointed out, “Without justice, mercy is indulgence. Without mercy, justice is cruel”. While not forgetting the necessity of justice, our hope must be tied to the Resurrection. It means that both mercy and justice do not necessarily find their resolution in this world. When we are convinced that there is Resurrection, we are at peace knowing that no evil will go unpunished and no good deed will go unrewarded in the after-life. Even if these two kleptocrats were freed, while deeply disturbing, we are at peace assured that their justice will be meted out not by us but by the Lord.

What possesses a martyr to face death peacefully or to accept the grave injustice of our kleptocracy, is a firm belief in the Resurrection. Without the peace of the Risen Christ poured into us, we will struggle to show mercy because our hearts will always be buffeted by the winds of revenge, not justice. The Resurrection gives peace to a martyr facing death and grants knowledge that beyond death both justice and mercy will always embrace. That was the reason Miguel Pro shouted “Long Live Christ the King”. He was at peace because he was convinced that the Lord’s mercy and justice extend beyond this world. Mercy flows from a heart filled with the peace of Christ because it is no longer fearful that justice will not be served in this world.