1st Sunday of Lent Year A 2023

One of the prayers during the Rite of Anointing of the Sick pleads that the sick person be free from sin and temptation. Just picture in your head an invalid, lying in bed and totally incapacitated and the priest praying that he or she be free from sin and temptation. It feels ridiculous. But is it so?

Temptations are vexatious, burdensome and annoying. Oscar Wilde is quoted to have said, “The only way to overcome temptations is to give in to them”. There is a modicum of truth to this observation because a characteristic of temptation is that it “nags” at you until exhausted, you finally relent and give in. Throughout Lent, the Church, our Holy Mother, bids us to grow in awareness of and in sensitivity to the subtleties of the Devil’s machination who sows discord throughout God’s creation.

Even though the 1st Reading chronicles the Fall of both Adam and Eve, it is not a narrative of despair. Man’s fall is also the beginning of salvation. What the Fall simply describes is our common inheritance. Every single being, even Jesus and Mary who do not inherit the taint of Adam’s sin, is not free from the Devil’s afflictions. But more than the failure of Adam and Eve, anyone who has a relationship with God will necessarily undergo the purification of testing. This explains the sinless Son of God not being spared as the 1st Sunday of Lent opens with His temptations.

The background is quite simple. The relationship between the Father and Son is affirmed in the River Jordan. “This is my beloved Son”. Rightly after His Baptism, Jesus is driven into the desert where His affiliation or Sonship with the Father is purified and deepened. Firstly, Jesus is tempted to exercise His divinity by changing stones to bread to satisfy His human hunger. Secondly, He is tempted to test God’s promise of protection by throwing Himself off from a high point. Finally, He is tempted to embrace the worship of a false god.

Christ’s temptations speak to the heart of our human experience. Temptations belong to our postlapsarian reality. More importantly, the devil knows our weaknesses and he will exploit our vulnerability. However, overcoming every temptation hurled at Him, Jesus shows that it is possible for us to resist the Devil. The Church, through our Lenten self-denial, provides us with the means to help us overcome temptations.

In other words, the reality of temptations is actually a call to return to the life of grace. In the desert, Jesus prayed and during His earthly ministry, counselled the Disciples that “this type of evil can only be defeated by prayer and fasting”. When suggested to satisfy His hunger, He countered the Devil’s deception by insisting that man does not live on bread alone but to hang on to every word of God.

This challenges our way of doing things if we are accustomed to self-reliance. Just like the Israelites in the desert, we are also tempted to rely on our own strength and ultimately, for our salvation, we believe that we can save ourselves. Pride is not the only reason for this inward turn. Our self-reliance reveals our forgetfulness. We have forgotten that we are truly creatures dependent on God.

The temptations in the desert manifest the limitations of creatureliness. Notice how the devil enticed Eve to go beyond her creaturehood? The temptation of Jesus to exercise His power is also an inducement to rebel against His human nature. Satan offers a patently false suggestion that freedom is independence from God.

We too find ourselves in the same dilemma where we want to be someone. We forget that to be someone is really an exercise in which we are defined in terms of others. “I am me because I am not you”. In fact, relationship is the identity of creatureliness. By putting the Devil in his place, Jesus demonstrated His relationship with God the Father by not testing Him but by acknowledging and worshipping Him alone.

This Lent we are invited back to the relationship we have with God. It began at our Baptism. Even though we mature physically, some of us may be stunted in our spiritual development. If our Lenten practices are to mean anything, they re-establish our relationship with God and with others. Even though we are sinners, Lent is not designed to make us feel bad that we are sinful or prone to sin. As such, penance is not an exercise in self-loathing. Instead, they symbolise the desire to repair our relationship with God. Penitence is an exercise in the ordered love of ourselves. For example, making time for confession is part of this endeavour because it recognises that the relationship with God needs repairing.

The road to proper self-love and relationship with God will be filled with temptations. But to be tempted is never a sign that we are forsaken or abandoned. Instead the presence of temptation signals that we do have a relationship with God. Thus, the prayer for the sick person during anointing illustrates how insidious temptation can be. An ill person may be suffering excruciatingly, and yet that person is also not free from being tempted. A dying person can be seduced not to trust in God. Hence, the invocation makes much sense because an invalid, even though that person is very near to death, needs strength to continue believing in God.

In summary, the Temptations of Christ reveal a facet of Christianity which we may have forgotten or ignored. As long as we walk through this valley of death, there will be seductions, allurements and entrapments. There is an open rebellion against God and since we are made to crown God’s creation, placed higher than even celestial beings, it makes sense that some envious angels would set out to destroy the pinnacle of God’s creation. Moreover, as creatures endowed with freedom, the temptation is always to go against the rule or governance of God.[1]

Temptation is our reality. Sometimes we may lament like Job. Why? Why am I being tested so sorely? If we are entitled, naturally we will be annoyed that we are being afflicted. But if we accept that there is a cosmic battle at play, then we shall never be surprised by our testing because the path to salvation is fraught with temptations. And a tell-tale sign that you are on the right track is when you are beset by temptations. Overcoming temptations is a basic component in the passage of purification. Through the battles with temptations, our relationship with God is purified as Jesus was in the desert. If we are going to hell, Devil does not need to work hard. Therefore, temptations indicate that we are on the right path for the closer we are to God, the more the subtle the temptations. The nearer we are to salvation, the greater the seductions. Be watchful. Be prepared. The violence of our temptations is Satan’s strategy to make us lose hope. But trust in God. Christ has conquered. He has prevailed. He will provide the strength. If we fail, humbly go for confession. He is ready to forgive, He is there to grant the stamina of grace.


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[1] The problem is that our linear computational thinking has not only ignored but relativised “evil” to the point of non-existence. We have difficulty grasping the concept of evil. Evil does not exist, meaning to say that there is no such a thing as evil. Instead evil is the privation of good. Even though evil does not exist, privation does have a reality. Evil as the absence of good renders its effect as a “vacuum sucking out the good”.

1st Sunday of Advent Year A 2022

The beginning of the liturgical calendar is called Advent for a good reason. We initiate the new year with a period of preparation, all for the coming of Christ. But His coming is more than just an event in the past. St Bernard Clairvaux described it beautifully, “We know that the coming of the Lord is threefold…The first coming was in flesh and weakness, the middle coming is in spirit and power, and the final coming will be in glory and majesty”.

Yes, Advent is linked to the first Christmas in Bethlehem. But as the popular song suggests, “Christmas isn’t Christmas till it happens in your heart”, it would also mean that Christmas is a spiritual coming because Christ has to take flesh in the heart of the believer. Our entire earthly existence is essentially an exercise in enabling Him to take flesh in our hearts so that when He comes again at the “Eschaton” in His full sovereignty and splendour, those who remain, to best of their best ability and in cooperation with His grace, will greet Him joyfully. The focus of the last few Sundays before and up to the Solemnity of Christ the King, had been to remind us that this end is real and it behoves us to be prepared for it and it brings us to the next point.

We can get lost in remembering the first Christmas if our focus were on the historical commemoration. In fact, some places would already begin their remembrance as soon as the month hits “-ber”, that is, September. This country is a little more circumspect in the sense that we need to allow Deepavali to be over first before trotting out the Christmas decorations; the respectful delay has nothing to do with religious reverence. On the other hand, with regard to the future, in general, we are having a such good time that we mostly ignore the final coming because nobody expects it to come that soon. For a short while though, as Covid raged on, the world that we were familiar with appeared as if it were coming to its end and it almost felt like we were facing the “Eschaton”. Now in this presumably post-pandemic period, the idea of the end is practically off-radar as people are rushing to break free, afflicted as it were by “travel revenge”.

Nostalgia or making up for lost time notwithstanding, we cannot escape the reality that the world is truly unwell. It is not just the disrupted global supply chain or the mental health crisis triggered by an imposed isolation. It is not even the failed “Cop27” summit in which the more advanced economies accept the need to compensate poorer countries but cannot agree on the quantum. Civilisation is unwell because evil continues to rear its ugly head in the way people and countries are still exploited. Think of the recent collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX with emerging stories of sinister lies and secrets. We are never short of scandals. That evil men continue to prosper as if there were no justice in the world is instructive.

The whole idea that Christ died to save us and yet man remains stuck in the quagmire of wrongdoings should lead us to conclude that salvation is an ongoing process. The Incarnation ushered in the salvation that the world had been waiting for since the fall of our first parents. However, the manner evil shows no sign of abating just proves that salvation is awaiting completion. The Kingdom of God has been inaugurated but it is still on the pilgrimage to its fulfilment. It makes sense that Church on earth is also called the Church militant. The war has been won by Christ’s death and resurrection but the battle continues with the effort to stamp the seal of the Kingdom on creation.

The world can definitely be a better place. Isaiah in the 1st Reading paints a picture of a time when true peace will descend upon the earth. The most engaging imagery is that “they will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks or sickles”. While the legions of social-justice warriors and the army of woke-sensitive movements have been enamoured by this possibility, what is sad is the idea that such a vision could be achieved or accomplished without God.

On the other hand, St Paul exhorted the Romans to walk into the light. It is not simply the light of some humanistic principles. Instead, live like a people illuminated by the Light of Christ. With Him, even in the midst of the darkest day, we can still live as a people of hope, believing and trusting that God will never fail us. Such an attitude fits in with the Gospel. God is not playing hide and seek only to spring a surprise on us. The truth of the matter is that life is contingent; it is unpredictable this side of time. Our life is never in our control. A wisdom of the "Eschaton" is to live as if today were to be our last day here on earth.

We are future-oriented when it comes to mundane matters but not so with spiritual security. A child who shows a little musical inclination is immediately enrolled in a school for music. Yet the same child who may express a desire to be a priest is not taken seriously. He is too young, he has not experienced life yet. These are just two excuses for ignoring a child’s possible vocation. The point is, in matters spiritual, we suffer from the sickness of procrastination believing that we still have time. There is yet time to change. Try clearing out the room of a priest and you will appreciate the meaning of “unfinished business”. The same is possibly repeated with our family members.

The preparation of Advent is not just to commemorate the birth of Christ. It includes being watchful and being attentive to the different movements of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The purple of Advent is a good reminder that a regular spring cleaning of the soul is good and necessary. How can swords be hammered into ploughshares if there were no spiritual preparation made now for the future?

That future begins today. Last week, I mentioned about regularly renewing our resolve to follow Christ the King and for that singular purpose, He has not left us unaided. He gave us His Sacraments, notably Confession and Eucharist. If we give them some thoughts, Christ is already coming to us in these two great Sacraments. He comes into our hearts most especially when we receive Holy Communion which makes every Mass a Christmas.

In conclusion, preparing for Christmas should be more than an exercise in nostalgia. We recall the first Christmas by rejoicing that He came. For He is the Light that mankind had been waiting for. We also acknowledge a future when He will come again to gather all into the fullness of eternity. In reminiscing on the past, we look to that future with a readiness that at any moment He makes His appearance, we are prepared in every sense of the word. This is the vigilance that the Lord expects of us and we are watchful because we have a soul to care for.

1st Sunday of Lent Year C 2022

We could not have inaugurated Lent in a more spectacular style than the suspension of services. Perhaps there is something to be said about what happened on Ash Wednesday. Following from last Sunday, we acknowledged that everyone will one day have to stand before the judgement seat of Christ. Lent is the annual exercise that prepares us for the future to render an account of who we are either through commission or omission. It is a kind of spiritual auditing so we may stand before the Lord in black rather than in red.

We are inclined to regard Lent as spiritual spring cleaning. In itself, it is not far from the truth. But the painful cancellation of Masses on Ash Wednesday may just allow us to reflect on what this Sunday’s readings are saying to us. They suggest that we look beyond the “mea culpa” to the existential relationship that we ought to have with God. Both the readings highlight the deep connexion between the creature and His Creator.

If we fail to grasp this fundamental affinity between the Maker and the made, then Lent can stray into a season for self-recrimination focussing on the effort we need to turn ourselves around. To renew, to reform and to revitalise are crucial but they miss a point. Take the cue from the Penitential Rite of the Eucharist. We are used to thinking that the Rite is a moment of remorse for our failures. On the one hand, the admission of sin is necessary as part of the preparation before we celebrate the sacred mysteries. On the other hand, our psyche is conditioned by a “self-made or self-help” philosophy, it can imply that personal merit becomes our precondition for worship. It signifies that we want to be able to stand justified because we feel equal to God.

Nothing could be further from the truth but we are accustomed to this kind of logic and it is reflected in the way we approach the Penitential Rite. “I have been bad. Lord, have mercy”. Or, if we follow the current climate-change campaign, “We have failed to care for the environment. Christ, have mercy”. Note that the Kyrie segues or flows naturally into the Gloria hinting the Kyrie and Gloria are not two foci. Instead, they focus singularly on God alone. “Jesus, you are mighty God and Prince of Peace, Lord, have mercy”. Where is the "I" or where are the “we” in this formulation? Nothing about us. Without taking our eyes off our sinfulness, the emphasis is not even on our sins but rather on the God whose love is beyond our comprehension. The Eucharist is where, despite our utter unworthiness, we worship God because He deserves all our affection. Apart from Advent and Lent, this love which commands our entire devotion moves us to praise, bless, adore, glorify and give thanks for His great glory[1]. 

Instead of rushing into a slew of “things” to do, the cancellation of our Ash Wednesday services followed by the deep sanitisation that took place on Thursday, fits perfectly into the spirit of the Readings. While the soul of Lent resembles the physical deep-cleansing of the Cathedral, more than that, it shines a spotlight on our relationship with God. Eating fish the whole Lent is admirable or going fully vegetarian is commendable and nowhere am I criticising these devotional dietary practices. Noble as they are, these disciplines are not goals to achieve. God is.

This is exactly the point of the Gospel. Jesus driven into the desert of purification revealed to us what the substance of our relationship with God should consist of. Jesus refused food even though He could have turned stones into bread. He had no problem multiplying bread for others to eat and finally He becomes the Bread of eternal life for us. Jesus declined the power that comes with lording over others. Instead, His strength was to bear the Cross for our sins. Finally, Jesus rebuffed Satan’s temptation to “demand” God’s protection by testing the Father’s love. The Resurrection is the ultimate vindication of Jesus’ trust in the Father’s love for Him. At every turn, Jesus in His humanity rejected Satan because He recognised Satan for who he is: Not god. Satan is not god and in saying No, Jesus revealed two interconnected realities about our humanity. Our souls can be in peril because the nature of temptation is always to rob us of our true identity--called to be sons and daughters of the Father.

During Lent, we will be tempted like Jesus was, to take advantage of who we are: beloved sons and daughters of God. We will be tempted to compromise our relationship with God. Take the ordinary Friday abstinence which has become such a chore for many of us. Self-denial resembles the desert because fasting and abstinence purify our relationship with God. They are not undertaken for themselves. That would be vanity. The difficulty of our Lenten disciplines is a potent reminder that we have a relationship with God which requires our personal attention. The more intimate we are with God, the stronger will the temptations be. Never be dismayed by terrible temptations but take consolation that Satan does not need to tempt those who are already safe in the embrace of hell.

The Temptations challenge our idea of individual autonomy. The accepted principle that God has created us with inalienable rights means that self-determination is at the core of our identity. Aided by scientific progress and technological prowess, we embrace a radical autonomy that manifests itself as the ability to control our destiny. But that is self-delusional because the more militantly we insist on our sovereignty, the more delusional we are, failing to appreciate that “autonomy” is never absolute but is premised on relationship. A quarrelling couple illustrates this perfectly. “I don’t need you” shouts the husband to the wife might speak of independence but the dismissal suffers from performative contradiction. A person who claims “I don’t need you” actually “needs” an audience for the statement to be substantiated. The only way that we have no need of others is to remain silent.

Both the Credo of the Chosen People in the first reading and the Confession of Christians in the second reading are powerful articulation of our relationship with God, which in the Gospel, Christ demonstrated decisively when He resolutely rejected Satan.

Lent provides the same space for our repudiation of evil, for the renewal and the deepening of our relationship with God. There is a proverb suitable to describe a danger and it is this: "Makers of idols rarely believe in them". We can be knee-deep in keeping the rituals but forget that the rituals only make sense because of who God is. Therefore, be mindful that it is possible to mechanically pass through this penitential season detached from God. What is impossible, however, is to love God and not be willing to embrace penance and sacrifice. Lent invites us to put God in the centre so that the ash, the fasting and abstinence, the almsgiving, the prayer can become channels of grace, of conversion and renewal.

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[1] Of course, during Advent and Lent, we “fast” from the Gloria because we recognise the inauthenticity of our relationship with God. That we want to make it right. As the Psalmists lament, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”. (Ps 137: 4). To sin is to live in a strange land.

1st Sunday of Lent Year A 2020

There is a market for happy-ending movies. Reason could be that we do not need reminders of how bad the situation is. Therefore, cinematic or literary happy endings are a form of escapism because reality is more than we can handle. A good example would be the political nightmare that appears to have gripped this country. This whole debacle that has kept many a-glued to their electronic screens has also spawn an array of comic relief posted on social media as such.
 

We appear to have imported this hunky-dory expectation into our religious experiences. Today, the Gospel injects a sobering shot of reality into this fanciful fairy-some world of ours. In our relationship with God, the initial sense of affirmation must give way to a period of probation or purification. Those preparing for baptism must take note that for a meaningful and genuine relationship to flourish, there has to be adversities and hardships to overcome.

The first Sunday of Lent is dedicated to this fundamental fact. Concerning our testings and trials, both the first reading and the Gospel call our attention to the truth that human existence goes beyond the physical and the material. We get a glimpse of mankind’s experience of the spiritual realm. Both the readings acknowledge the presence of Satan—a devious force that is manipulative and which tries hard to frustrate God’s plan.

You probably know what the word “Satan” in Hebrew means. It literally spells accuser. Satan resents the exalted place that man has in the eyes of God. On Ash Wednesday, we were reminded that man had been created from dust and to dust he shall return. In the presumptuous estimation of Satan, how could the Lord have fashioned something firstly from inconsequential dust and secondly ennoble it in His own image? How can God be foolishly generous to a creature that is inferior to the angels’ spiritual stature? Ever since the creation of man, Satan has set out to prove God wrong for moulding and gracing such an undeserving creature. Man can never be worthy of God’s love and friendship.

True enough, Adam fell through his misused of freedom. Therefore, Satan has stood as the accuser against God: “I had been right all along about man’s weakness and unfaithfulness. He is not worthy of your friendship and grace. Man will never be”.

Satan’s endeavour all along has been to remind God of His “mistake”; until the Incarnation. Man may have been unfaithful but God has proven Himself otherwise. He is faithful to the point that He readily came to us in the person of His Son: Jesus Christ. In Jesus, who is fully God and fully man, we have someone who embodies a faithfulness that is worthy of God’s friendship. Through His life, death and resurrection, He has paved the way again for man to be God’s friend. Indeed, when He had made man a little less than a god, He has never lost faith in him. That is the level of God’s friendship with humanity.

We hear this emphasised in the second reading. St Paul compared and contrasted Jesus with the first Adam. The first Adam failed whereas Christ, the second Adam, remained steadfast to God’s friendship enduring Satan’s attempts to lure Him into infidelity. Jesus’ friendship is the exemplar of trust in God rather than in Himself.

Every temptation we encounter is a derivative of the tests that Jesus underwent—pleasure, power and possession. The premise of Satan’s temptation is to make us forget our dependence on God. We are lured to trust in human and material realities. For example, a sizeable swathe of this country is in depression. We promote our culinary delights as a touristic highlight. Come and taste our cultural diversity but closer to truth we all could be just comfort eating. In other words, we are eating our depression. See, we have the semblance of modernity specifically in terms of governance—a parliamentary democracy—and yet our administration is nothing but feudal in essence—a feudalism very much dependent on patronage. This is an unspoken but tolerated arrangement. Ask yourself how much of “Datuk Datuk” you need to scrape to before you get a permit approved and how many brown envelopes have to go under the table? The point being our despair is actually a temptation to power. It does not seem so, right? In a feudal society, the serfs are powerless, so how can there be any temptation to power?

Precisely. We have come to believe that we have sole control of our destiny. We alone decide how to live, where to live and when to live. Euthanasia, once restricted to helping terminal patients die has now become “humanely” re-classified with a less threatening and more user-friendly term such as assisted-dying and it is on demand. The debate surrounding death’s destiny shows that ultimately human existence is self-willed and not God-willed. To be fair, we do have relative sway over our destiny because we are not automatons, robots or machines. But this power is relative in the sense that only God has the definitive say in our destiny.

So, when Jesus was tempted by Satan to throw Himself down in order to summon the angels, His response, “I shall not put God to the test” was an acknowledgement that His human existence is predicated on the will of God. It is true that despair or depression can be clinical. Some of us might need pink pills to perk ourselves up. But depression can also be spiritual in the sense that we despair that God is in control and that God can be trusted. If you like, our national depression has a spiritual pathology.

At the end of Mass, we all kneel and recite a prayer which sounds like a relic from an era long past. We beseech St Michael to assist us in this spiritual warfare. This prayer is not a reliquary of the past. It alerts us to the reality that Satan will do his utmost best to take us away from God’s love and friendship. He continues to tempt us into the vanity of unquestionable self-determination and at the same time, he lures us to believe that he does not exist. In a way, Satan has been successful. We still believe that we are in control. Of Satan we dare not blame him because technically, he does not exist.

The present pandemic is without doubt a test. To take precaution is an act of charity, whereas fear is not. Fear is giving in to the temptation that we alone can determine how long we live. The line between precaution and fear is thin. First, no Holy Water. Then, no more Holy Communion on the tongue. After that, no more imposition of ashes—just sprinkling on the crown. Soon to come, no more individual confession during the penitential services. But, we have hand-sanitiser. In hand-sanitiser we trust.

Tell me if what we are doing is taking precaution or acting out of fear?

Apart from this pandemic, there is also the political quagmire we are stuck in that threatens to drown us in despondency. Some have already stated that they will migrate. When trials come our way, instead of turning to God we run away from Him.

Tribulations could also be God’s invitation to double our prayer especially when we are most helpless. Not that we do not need Him when things are going well. In good times and in bad, our duty is to trust and be faithful to Him. But our natural instinct is to trust ourselves first and only turn to God when we have failed. The proper attitude, in all things, is to turn to God first because we have faith and trust in Him. So, to those going for Baptism this Easter, you are joining an enterprise founded on fidelity and confidence. Learn this truth so that you can prepare yourself for the testing that is sure to come. The rest of us, instead of panicking about the Covid-19 pandemic or mourning about the hopeless predicament of our political morass, come this Friday evening for the 24-hour adoration. We have not prayed enough or make sacrifices enough for the country. The Graeco-Roman world may teach us something about this temptation to “personal” power. They called it Deus ex machina. It is a theatrical or literary device introduce into a desperate situation for the purpose of resolving a conflict and to procure an acceptable outcome; like the Great Eagles in the movie Lord of the Rings coming to the rescue most unexpectedly. Wittingly or unwittingly, the Graeco-Roman have expressed a theological truth which today’s temptations of Christ is teaching us: Only God can be trusted. No matter how hopeless, believe so that He can save us.

1st Sunday of Lent Year C 2019

We are a few days into Lent. It is a curious observation that apart from Easter and Christmas, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, two days which are non-obligatory, also attract a huge crowd of Catholics.

One of the features of Lent you would notice is that the choral arrangement is rather subdued. Apart from this, the music is muted and floral display simplified. Furthermore, we generally try to avoid conducting weddings these days. The question is, why do we submit ourselves to these penitential practices or restrictions? The answer is perhaps clarified by Diana Ross’ famous song: “Do you know where you are going to?”. Where do you think we are going to and how does Lent fit into it? To be clear, Lent is more than 40 days of not eating meat, not going to parties, not eating one’s favourite dish or any of the self-denials, self-deprivations you can come up with. Instead, these rigours of Lent are tied to salvation. God intends our salvation as we hear in the second reading—so by confessing with our lips, we are saved. But, salvation is not the end. What are we saved for? There is more to salvation and our Lenten practices are designed to keep us disciplined with our eyes focused on the finishing line: heaven.

Indeed, unless we know where we are going, then Lent will not make sense and penitential practices will remain as empty rituals we go through annually. To have a destination, it presumes that we have also a starting point. The Gospel unfolds for us where we have come from and to where we are heading. We read of how Jesus after the baptism was led by the Holy Spirit through the wilderness, being tempted there by the devil for forty days. What we do not hear in this Sunday’s passage is how after His baptism, a voice was heard: “You are my beloved Son. In you, I am well pleased”—a voice which establishes the provenance/pedigree of Jesus—where He came from. Like Jesus, we too have come from God and through baptism, we have become beloved of the Father, brothers and sisters of Jesus and Like Him, we are going back to the Father. In the context of this journey home, the Devil tempted Jesus to self-reliance, power and self-interest—in other words, the Devil wants Him to forget where He came from and where He is going. In overcoming the Devil, Jesus reversed the sins of Adam in Paradise and Israel in the desert by establishing complete trust in His Father. He never lost sight of heaven.

If heaven is our destination, then temptations are to be expected—as suggested by the Gospel’s ending—the Devil returning at the opportune time. He will do his utmost best to make us forget our destination. An important question is, “Are we convinced that heaven is our destination?”. Do we want it in the first place or are we so enamoured by our capabilities in transforming the world that heaven is almost redundant? Let us give an example of how irrelevant heaven is. Gandhi had a quote pertinent for our consideration. “There is enough on earth for everybody’s need but not enough for everybody’s greed”. Let us say that greed can be regulated in the sense that we are able to control it through legislation. In fact, an opinion editorial piece in the New York Times suggested the banning of billionaires as a possible means of balancing our tech-driven inequality.[1] Absence of greed, what is to prevent mankind from producing enough food for to fulfil everyone’s need? Indeed, mankind has come a long way in terms of food production where technology can do so much more with so little. Given our technological prowess, it would be spitting into the face of God if we did not attempt to solve the hunger problem.

If everyone’s hunger is assuaged or satisfied, what is that condition called? Without hunger, without strife and without hatred can this be heaven? Jesus was tempted by the Devil to believe that when all needs were satisfied, that would be heaven. If He were to possess absolute power so that He could kick the Romans out, that would be heaven for the Jews. If He were acclaimed a superstar, since jumping off the parapet would be a public performance. Celebrity status would be heaven. The truth is, no matter how perfect life is, still it is not heaven because everything we know of this side of death is infused or soaked through with temporality—everything will pass, for nothing can escape the corruption of time. Heaven does not exist here. The original word to describe this condition is utopia—which literally means nowhere—as in no such place exists. Interestingly, our current understanding of the word utopia is exactly the opposite as it prescribes the possibility of a “perfect” place. The numerous attempts to create heaven on earth (utopia) highlight that mankind has consistently succumbed to the temptation to settle for less and to confuse earth for heaven.

Why? It is not our disbelief in heaven as our notion of heaven has become so vague that there might as well not be. When Mariah Carey and Boyz to Men sang “One Sweet Day”—it appears that life here does not matter at all because one sweet day, willy-nilly, we will all be heaven. A seemingly merciful idea of heaven that admits all, where it does not matter how one had lived his life renders heaven somewhat worthless. When a prize is obtained through no effort on our part, it will not be something we appreciate. Like the free Tupperware container you get from buying detergent—you pack food for a potluck and it matters not if the contains returns to you. Or, your break the free plate from the purchase of two tubes of toothpaste. It does not bother you.

The challenge of Lent is therefore to clarify for ourselves what sort of heaven we believe in and what steps we are taking to get there. Scripture is replete with many imageries of heaven. As Saint Paul in the letter to the Corinthian describes: “We know that when the earthly tent in which we dwell is destroyed, we have a dwelling provided for us by God, a dwelling in the heavens, not made by hands but to last forever” (2nd Corinthians 5:1). This is the beatific vision promised to us—to see God face to face without any mediation. But, what is perhaps closer to our reality is that heaven can wait as suggested by the eponymous movie starring Warren Beatty—expressing the same reticence when St Augustine prayed, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet”. Fortunately, this aspiration of the son of so many tears, was expressed at a time when he was not fully converted.

Fully turned to Christ, St Augustine, like so many of our saints are our celestial compasses. They all live for heaven like St Paul in the Letter to the Philippians who “yearned to be freed from this life and to be with Christ, for that is the far better thing” (Ph 1:23). Our lack of enthusiasm is understandable. Earthly life is so much more excitable and exhilarating. Our pleasurable world promises us a lifetime of adrenalin rushes. Even our Mass is supposed to be more animated, the homily impressive and the singing rousing. In short uplifting. It does not help that caricatures of heaven abound and each of them portraying a lifeless kind of heaven—floating on white clouds, dressed in white gowns and doing nothing the whole day whilst aimlessly plucking the harp.

According to Archbishop Fulton Sheen the proper appreciation heaven must be understood in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity: “It is not a place where there is the mere vocal repetition of alleluias or the monotonous fingering of harps. Instead, heaven is where we find the fullness of all the fine things we enjoy on this earth.  Heaven is where we find in its plenitude those things which slake the thirst of hearts, satisfy the hunger of starving minds, and give rest to unrequited love.  Heaven is the communion with perfect Life, perfect Truth, and perfect Love” (The Divine Romance). In short, the fullness of life you have here pales in comparison to heaven.

The deprivations of Lent are meant to instil a perspective proper to deepest longings of the human heart. We deny ourselves so that we can appreciate better where we are intended for—the perfect communion of life and love with the Blessed Trinity, with Mary, all the angels and saints. Otherwise, Christ coming to us makes no sense at all. He saved us from death eternal so that we might enjoy life everlasting with Him. If you know that, God be praised. Carry on living for heaven. But, if like St Augustine before his total conversion, you find yourself not fully convinced by it, then pray that God will increase your hunger for heaven.

Mind you, all temptations you face are nothing but attempts by the Devil to thwart your desire for heaven. Lent would not be Lent if there were no allurements. Through lies, deception and pride, in other words, capitalising on your weaknesses, the Devil promises various forms of counterfeit heavens as fulfilling you, albeit temporarily. If you intend on taking the road less travelled, that is when you will feel even more acutely the seductions. Jesus Himself sweated blood in Gethsemane as He resisted the Devil's baiting. Do not be fooled because the nature of temptations is that it will always make you feel as if God were far and He has abandoned you. Realise that this itself is a suggestion from the Devil because the contrary is true. God is near for He accompanies you because you are His beloved. Hold firm. Trust in the Lord.

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[1] According to the author, “A billion dollars is wildly more than anyone needs, even accounting for life’s most excessive lavishes. It’s far more than anyone might reasonably claim to deserve, however much he believes he has contributed to society”.

1st Sunday of Advent Year C 2018

“Christmas isn’t Christmas till it happens in your heart” is definitely a lovely hymn and heart-warming enough to be included into any carollers’ Advent repertoire. But the hymn does not really tell the full story and it may even be heretical because it reduces Jesus to a tugging of one’s heartstrings as if Jesus is not real if you do not feel Him or “happens in your heart”. However, there is a grain of truth to the hymn if you believe in the 3 Comings of Christ.

Christ came first in history. About two millennia ago, He came. Incarnated and born of a Virgin in the Land of Judah. His coming has initiated the end times and we are waiting for His Second Coming. When He will come we know not of. It is a time of waiting and it is within this lacuna of knowledge, that the hymn makes sense. In fact, it was the great theologian St Bernard of Clairvaux who posited these 3 Comings as the past, the future and the present. Both the past and the future are visible—for He walked, talked, ate and rested amongst His people and when the time comes, He will return in His glory and majesty. The present is invisible and it lies between the first and the final Coming. He promised to come to those who do the will of the Father. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him”.

It is in this sense that Christmas isn’t Christmas till it happens in your heart. The prospect of Christmas taking shape in our hearts gives meaning to the joyful hope of the first reading and the apocalyptic prediction of the Gospel. Jeremiah spoke of the days where the promise of God for a true King whose mantle is justice and integrity will be fulfilled. We know that to be the first coming when the virtuous shoot of David was born in a manger in Bethlehem. In the meantime, as we await the final coming, Jesus accompanies that hope with the exhortation of vigilance. Yes, the world may continue to party like nobody’s business but our waiting should be marked by a readiness to face the Lord either when we die or when He comes with the righteous to judge the world.

The vigilance is not a kind of passive waiting in which we are obsessed with signs and portents. It is too easy to be lost in the tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, pestilence, epidemics, earthquakes, war and violence trying to equate these phenomena as the approaching final days. Instead it is a vigilance of action in which we strive to do God’s will and as the 2nd Reading suggests, the will of God consists in the increased love even for our enemies and not restricted to just family or friends.

This attentiveness is patient. It shuns the quick fix solutions the world is consumed with. Maybe, the season of Advent should be the renamed as a celebration of the Adverts. Blurbs, commercials and endorsements abound where the waiting has been banished by the wanting—truly a season of wanting minus the waiting. We are forced into Christmas cheer that we do not realise that in waiting, there is suffering to be endured. For example, if you were to wait for your loved ones to be wheeled out of a major surgery, that waiting is excruciating. Or take another example of a 40 something years old falling in love with a 12-year old girl. Forcing himself onto her would not only violate her but also shows a total lack of reverence for the gift of love which must take time to develop. And in the time taken for love to develop, one’s selfish desires are incinerated in the furnace of purification. In the end, when longing is purged of lust, what remains is a love which desires the good of the other. That is how sacrificial true love is. We know this to be true, that in all things good, there is always a price to be paid for them.

Unfortunately, this sort of waiting and vigilance is unacceptable to many. Ironically, Advent has become a season of feasting so much so that by Christmas, many are dying to fast due to excessiveness. The fasting followed by the feasting is now inverted as the feasting followed by the fasting (and New Year resolution to join a fitness centre).  If the hymn is to come true for us, that Christmas should happen in our hearts, then, take Advent for what it is meant to be—a time of waiting—a time to purify one’s love. A time of slowing down so that God can break through our defences. Waiting is hard because we have been socialised by instant gratification where everything—information, mental stimulation, recreation and even relationships must submit to the criterion of immediacy. But, patient waiting delays our gratification and puts life into perspective. Sometimes that is the only way things can develop—like a foetus in a womb whose birth cannot be rushed.

Therefore, instead of thinking of what to buy for Christmas, this Advent, give your time and presence to your family and friends. It is so much harder to be present than to give a present. For your enemies, take time to pray for them, asking that God bless them, even if they have been mean. You may not know it, blessing our enemies is the greatest gift we can present ourselves because the act of blessing smothers the hate that will eventually choke us. Then, slowly but surely, Jesus is born in our hearts so that either at our death or at His Final Coming, we dare stand with our heads held high unafraid of His judgement because He is already living in us and we in Him.

1st Sunday of Advent Year B 2017

How different is Advent from Lent when it shares a similar shade as Lent? Purple. They both omit the Gloria and some weeks into the season, the vestments also swap a hue lighter. Rose. Then, the first Reading today has a strong penitential tint to it. Thus, a question that intrudes comes from the almost seamless flow from Christ the King to the first Sunday of Advent because they share a concern for a watchfulness in the matter of the impending judgement to befall us.

A passage from Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians might aid us in discerning the subtle difference in focus between Lent and Advent, and also between Christ the King and the 1st Sunday of Advent. In the Gospel, the Lord gave an indication that the persecuted would not make the rounds of the cities of Israel before the Parousia, or Adventus, as in the Vulgate translation, that is, before the final return. Two developments resulted from this. Firstly, there was a sense of hopelessness because believers had died before the final judgement. Secondly, the result of knowing that the would-be-end-of-the-world coming soon witnessed sloth creeping in, as is common with human nature. After all, He will come, why not just wait Him out. Or simply, why bother since He is already coming?

But, Paul disabused his people of their misconception that those alive at the Second Coming would have an advantage over those who had died. Thus, it is not hopelessness for those who have passed on before the Parousia. In fact, the key phrase is to be ever watchful or attentive because the Lord’s coming is like a thief in the night. Whereas, Lent’s watchfulness is centred on taking stock of our life because we never know when He might come but more probably it is we who will go and meet Him first; Advent’s watchfulness is different. It is not really inward but rather forward looking. In other words, it is anticipatory. We are waiting to spring into action, like those 5 bridesmaid who have enough oil in their lamps waiting for the Bridegroom to arrive.

Whilst the Preface for Advent I speaks of the two comings of Christ, St Bernard, one of the doctors of the Church, speaks of the three comings of Christ. Firstly, He came. It is a historical fact. He dwelt amongst us about 2000 years ago. The Apostles and those associated with the early Church testified to His presence. He came in our weakness and in our flesh. Secondly, that is not the end of the story because He will return. This coming is eschatological and will take place in the historical future where He will return in glory and majesty. Finally, until such time when He comes in the future, the third coming takes place as we wait for Him, during Lent by focusing inwardly and in Advent by looking forward, just like faithful servants longing for the Master to return.

This is a waiting that is hopeful and it is based on the testimony of a past in which God has never failed us. Since, we live suspended between the two comings of Christ, historical and eschatological, the past and the future, hence, hope in the future means living in the present believing that what He had done for us, He will do again.

This form of waiting is hard work. It is challenging. Why?

The horizon is rather bleak and hopeless. There is a dampening despair about us which we often fail to recognise it as such. From the perspective of a family, our children appear to be in greater danger than ever before. For most parents, the fear is for the personal safety of their children. But, what about the more vulnerable exposed to trafficking and sold into slavery or the sex industry? Economics, notwithstanding, this hopelessness has given birth to a future with few children: “Why bring new life into this horrible world”?

If you look at society in general, we appear to idolise victimhood—an idea of woundedness that does not seem to heal. Last Sunday, I spoke of the innate hunger for accountability, which is a good, a bonum, a necessity in an age of eternal youthfulness or perpetual adolescence. The current viewing is titled “Inappropriate Behaviour” of our cinematic beaux mondes or political personages (and God forbid, that the Church should be out of this limelight!).

But, for every victim who alleges sexual harassment, (not that they should keep quiet), what about the nameless boat refugee raped by a gang of pirates at high sea, who has no recourse to media justice? Does it mean that she has become less of a person? What of the stories untold, unpublicised, “unexposed”? If one takes a moment to reflect, there is an unspoken despair which requires healing to be absolute before one can start living again. We fail to recognise that justice is not always to be found in this world. And because we do not get it, there is a gnawing sense of “incompleteness” that prevents life from going on.

Elevate this hopelessness to a global scale. Putting aside natural calamities, we have waves of European wannabes braving the Mediterranean but who are no longer in focus because the Rohingyas have come into the spotlight. A century of social engineering has not only left us with a trail of broken spirits but proofs that no earthly programmes can completely eradicate inequalities. Does this not suggest that hoping is hopeless? Even our prayers express this despair. We have, more or less, accepted that a situation is bad so much so that our “optimism” is a veneer for a deep “pessimism”. If there is a God, we are hoping that this God will take note of it and prevent things from getting any worse.

People lament that the spirit of Christmas has been drowned by the din of commercialism. If you set aside the prejudice against the buying and selling and think a little bit more, perhaps you might realise that all the buying is basically an attempt to drown our sorrow of despair. We naïvely believe that consuming can assuage this emptiness of hopelessness that we have inside.

In the context of watching and waiting, sin can be a kind of distraction, like an Odyssean gorging of narcotising lotus that deflects or blurs our hopeful vision. Notice so many of us are fixated on our mobile screens that our senses are numbed from staring at it. Therefore, Advent’s anticipation is definitely purifying. But unlike Lent, it is not an inward looking purification, even though there is a measure of it. Instead, it is forward looking, a training of the eyes to peer beyond what we have to a horizon where all that fails us can be rectified. As we await the Parousia, this longing is a hope that enables one to withstand the disappointments that life may dish or dump on us. Thus, it is a purification of our trust in the God who was there is a God who will be there. Come Lord Jesus, come.