5th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 2019

The 4th Sunday of Easter dedicated to vocations but sometimes it feels like there are more than one Vocation Sunday as the readings today fit perfectly into this theme of calling. The truth is, there should be more “calling” stories because salvation history is nothing but a prolonged call by God beginning with creation. 

Ex nihilo, that is, from nothing, God called creation to be and He continues to call it forth whilst sustaining it. A watch-maker God would presumably have created something and then leave it to run on its own. Not this God of ours. He is actively involved in His creation. (If we have a complaint that creation is not behaving well—like global warming—do not blame God. Blame us).

Earlier we heard the calling of a man with unclean lips—Isaiah. Presumably, in a culture which values ritual purity, his defilement may mean a questionable religious observance—like eating pork? Yet, God overlooked his iniquities as He called him. In the Second Reading, we encounter another man who was anxious about his religion’s integrity. Saul saw the early Christians as an aberration of the belief system he knew and loved and set himself up to purge the religion of such deviant behaviours. Christians were heretical Jews. In God’s vocation, Saul became Paul and through his deep knowledge of Judaism, he became the preacher and teacher to the Gentiles that God has invited into the fold. Finally, we have a sinner to whom God revealed the divinity of His Son as well as upon whom He chose to establish the early Church from the remnant of Israel.

What glorious calls that God made through Isaiah, Paul and Peter’s lives. Since God is not a watch-maker, the vocation continues. When we read St Augustine’s famous Confession, that is, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you”—this human longing for God is no more than our response to God who continues to call us to Himself.

God calls in a manner that no one is excluded. Vatican II reads this as the universal call to holiness. Whatever station we find ourselves, God is calling us to praise, to revere and to serve Him.

Today I would like to speak of a special calling and it might involve laying down one’s life for others. Firstly, we all speak of meaning a lot. It is important. For example, whenever we do not understand something, we tend to relegate it to the margin of uselessness and we mutter, “It is meaningless”. But, if one were to reflect on meaningfulness, one begins to realise how “self-referential” it is. Meaningful is basically about “I, me and myself”. We all enter into relationship and unwittingly we might be calculating on what we can get out of it. The usual measure of our gain is meaning. Thus, relationship falls apart whenever we can no longer derive “meaning” from it. Think in terms of pre-nuptial agreements. People might term it as “prudence, safeguard” etc but the bottomline is purely “What will I get out of it, should the relationship fail?

There are two callings in life which are not self-referential but they are not less meaningful. In essence these callings are directed to service of the Church and the community. The Church has seven Sacrament and two of them are called the Sacraments of service—marriage and priesthood. Both these callings are not alien to us. I could be wrong because one them is an option people rarely give much consideration to. And it is this option that I would like to talk about.

Yesterday, after Mass there was supposed to be an anointing for the sick and elderly. The organisers had asked that those who wanted to be anointed should register themselves. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, only a baptised can be anointed. Just like Holy Communion can only be given to a baptised and practising Catholic, the Sacrament of Anointing is not an open invitation to all and sundry. Registration allowed us to respect the integrity of the Sacrament because we would have ascertained from the registration that the person is a Catholic. Secondly, only a priest or a Bishop can administer this sacrament. Thankfully there were two of us and the registration helped tremendously in crowd control. There have been instances when the whole congregation would walk up to be anointed and there was only one priest available. Visualise that.

The shortage of the ordinary ministers of the Sacrament might not seem urgent. At Mass we have no shortage of volunteers for extra-ordinary ministers and also the other ministries. In normal English usage, the word extra-ordinary connotes something which is remarkable, amazing, astounding and definitely out of this world. However, in Church terminology, the ordinary is preferred over the extraordinary as it pertains to the ordered or standard arrangement of things. Ordinary means this is how things are supposed to be. Whilst the presence of so many extra-ordinary ministers might be taken or read as a wonderful sign of ecclesial participation, it is more likely an indication that there is a failure somewhere, a failure to provide.

What do I mean by the failure to provide? When there are no priests, what is the point of the extra-ordinary Ministers? Here I am not denigrating them because they do provide a valuable service. When there are no priests, who will provide us with the Sacraments? The Church stands on the Eucharist. Without the Eucharist there is no Church. But, without the priesthood there is no Eucharist. We may have a crisis of confidence in the people in the priesthood considering that we seem to hog the limelight for the wrong reasons—priests are paedophiles or nun-rapists. But, whatever the outcome of our crisis of confidence, the Eucharist will always be needed if we heed Christ’s teaching on the necessity of eating His Body and drinking His Blood for us to go to heaven. Thus, the Church exists to provide the Eucharist, the food for the journey heavenward. If that be the case, there will always be a need for the priesthood of Jesus Christ.

One of the reasons for scarcity of vocation to priestly life and by extension to religious life is because our “factories” run on the basis of two—meaning, if the first one is boy, pray the second one is a girl or vice versa and voila the factory shuts down.

Moreover, parents these days try to protect their children from danger to the point that they may just over-compensate. What their generation never had, they make sure that the young have plenty and more. What their generation suffered, they make sure that the young do not have to endure it. This over-compensation has not generated greater meaning in the lives of our young. Instead, without struggles, without challenges, life does not become more meaningful. Thus, there is a compelling demand to challenge the youth to rise above themselves and even to the point of laying down their lives for others. The essence of nobility is the giving of oneself to an endeavour much bigger than oneself and it this which gives meaning to life. Meaning is never found in selfishness. It is gained through selflessness. As someone rightly remarked that the next evolutionary step for mankind is to move from man to kind. From selfishness to selflessness. As Martin Luther King Jr rightly pointed out, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity”. When we lament about the selfishness of society, that is because we have not taught the young to look at the horizon beyond the self.

God has not stopped calling Christians to a life of service, in particular, a life of service to both Church and community as a priest (and by extension a religious)—a life which places others ahead of one’s own advantage. If the Church is necessary for salvation, then the Eucharist will always be needed. For that the priesthood must go on. The vocation crisis is no indication that the priesthood is irrelevant but more because we have stopped listening. To all the young men (and not so young) present here, is God is calling you? If you even have a faint inkling that He is, be brave. Respond to Him.

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2018

The theme for this Sunday’s Mass is the Eucharist as the Bread of Life. In saying so, we might have missed out a component without which the Eucharist can never be the Bread of Eternal Life. This is not Good Shepherd Sunday but it might as well be because the Gospel appears to lend itself to thinking about the priesthood and vocation. In general, this is a vocation losing its appeal as the priesthood is held up in contempt simply because of the sins of some us. 

If this can be described as re-branding, I assure you it is not. It is, if at all, to re-vision what it means to be a priest, why it is necessary that we have the priesthood and what goes into the priesthood of Jesus Christ.

As Church, we cannot run away from what is happening in the world because the Church and the world do not inhabit different spaces but are in fact sharing the same space. What we find in the world and perhaps detest, we find it in the Church as well. How many of you follow the Britain’s Got Talent franchise? America’s Got Talent, India’s Got Talent, Asia’s Got Talent. Hell, even Tg Pengerang’s Got Talent. Under a diversity and non-discriminatory narrative, there is a strong belief that such talent hunting is truly an exercise of democratic equalisation? Under the rule of the common, it is believed that everyone can be talented, or have access to showcase it. If you watched Ratatouille, you would know that everyone can cook. Talent scouting has uncovered some hitherto hidden talents—Susan Boyle for example? But behind this noble quest hides an insatiable chase for celebrity status. Celebrity is, as Hugh Jackman sings in the Greatest Showman, “... for years and years, I chased their cheers, the crazy speed of always needing more...”  And the step-sister of celebrity status is the personality cult. In a rugged-identity era, what are these but the search for individuality. Is the cult of personality not a reason for our fascination with the talents of our priests? Father X can sing like Josh Groban. Father Y can cook and curse like Gordon Ramsay. Fr Z can dance like Michael Jackson.

We want our priests to have pizzaz... holy pizzaz, hopefully. But what was a genius of the Tridentine Mass, the missa ad orientem, a Mass disparagingly described as priest with his backside to the people? Firstly, the missa versus populus which has been described to be more people-friendly has the disrespectful corollary in that it is 100% all right for the priest to show his backside to God. If it is not alright to show my backside to you, it is definitely alright to show it to God? Secondly, the priest weighed down by the heavy vestments finds his so-called personality in a manner of speaking shrouded in order than the faithful may perceive that truly Jesus Christ is present in the alter Christus and the only duty worth the priest’s salt is to do the one thing which Christ depends on him to and no one in the congregation can do—confect the Blessed Sacrament. No one in the crowd unless one is a priest. The bulkiness of the vestments is not because we like flowing robes. It is so that the personality of the priest might disappear under the vestments in order that Christ may become visible—He must increase, I must decrease.

Is that important? Through the fallible instrument of the priest, Christ gives us Himself so that we may avail of His strength to continue the work of salvation. St Paul in the 2nd Reading speaks of changing the world. Be the change you want the world to be. Redeem the world and in order that the work of redemption started by Christ can continue, we need the Eucharist and this mission cannot be done without the Catholic priesthood. 

Hence, either God is stupid or we are missing the bigger picture. The bigger picture is how can Jesus insist on the necessity of the Eucharist if He cannot find a way to provide it? If there are no vocations, it is not because God has stopped calling. We may have stopped listening.

The priesthood is not a club of the meritorious. It is not a reward of those who are saved. In the early 70s, the Society of Jesus asked this question “Who is a Jesuit”? The answer given was “A Jesuit is a sinner, yet called by God”. A Jesuit is a sinner because many a Jesuit come from broken families and chances are, people who are from broken families can be manipulative or sick. Is it any surprise that those who hold our trust fall prey to sin? Yes, one should expect that those who are in charge of the kitty do not steal. But Judas did and there have been Judases all through the centuries. In the same manner, we do not pick our priests from the tree of purity. A priest is definitely not your saviour, only Jesus is. But, despite the priest being a sinner, he stands alter Christus, as another Christ, so that ex opere operato, he can confect the Eucharist. 

Does the priesthood then need purification? Yes, it does. But so does society at large. If you want good priests, widen and deepen the pool of good families. But, for now, we need to understand that without the priesthood, there is no Eucharist, without the Eucharist, there is no Church. Without the Church, there is no salvation. That is ex opere operato.

A little clarification is needed. There is no guarantee that good family equates to good priests. The general rule we follow is that a good tree produces good fruits. Thus, the portraits of many of our priest are also testimonies of God’s grace. He takes the weak and make them strong to bear witness to Him.

Nevertheless, judging from sad state we are in, the Devil is laughing all the way down in hell because the destruction of the priesthood falls within his nefarious plans against God and humanity. Whilst there should be vigilance against clerical abuse—of all kinds—financial, sexual and even liturgical, we must be on guard not to sin against the priesthood. Not in the sense that priests should be put up for adulation, but rather in the sense that we must not lose faith in the necessity of the priesthood for the salvation of souls.

The best priest is not one who can cook or sing or dance or even do “great things”. The best priest is one who knows how to provide the sacraments when needed—especially the forgiveness of sins and the confection of the Eucharist. He is at his best when performing these actions because his priestly anointing sets him apart for this sublime duty—to make Christ present through the sacraments, especially through the Sacrament of sacraments—the Eucharist. For after all is said and done, when all scandals are exposed as they should be, when every wound is healed but the end result is that the laity has lost faith in the priesthood of Christ, the question to ask is, what is to become of the Body of Christ? I ask this question not to stifle whatever that needs to be done. (This might have been the same question asked by those who covered up the abuses, which explained the culture of silence). 

I ask it because in seeking to reform the culture associated with our priesthood, we need to recognise that priests are not plucked from the tree of perfect families. It calls for a conversion of the whole culture that provides for vocation. For example, the more divorces we have, chances are the more broken the priesthood will be. Ex opere operato, we will get the Eucharist even though it is celebrated by the most sinful priest because the priest is merely an instrument and it is Jesus Christ Himself who guarantees the “reality” of the sacrament. But ex opere operantis, we will have a credibility deficit—whereby faith is challenged not so much by the message but rather by the medium, that is, the Eucharist may be real but the priest who confects it makes it hard for people to believe that Christ can be present at all. In short, without a reform of family life and our culture, we will have shot ourselves in the foot!

The Church needs more holy priests. It must begin with holy families.

  

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

This Sunday, concludes the series of John’s Discourse on the Bread of Life. The conclusion of the chapter draws our attention to a topic which we do not hear so much of these days: Virtue.

However, there is a connexion between last week’s discussion on the rubrics and this Sunday’s topic on virtue. Last week, I elaborated on the importance of rubrics, meaning the Church’s prescription for how the Mass is to be celebrated. In the previous part of John’s Gospel, the accent was expressly on the Real Presence. The Magisterium rightly emphasises clerical faithfulness to the rubrics because we are dealing with a mystery so profoundly divine. The Church needs to guarantee that what you are getting is the Real Thing¹ and since it concerns a matter of eternal life, there is a need to protect the people in the pew from abuse arising from the arbitrary whims of the priests.²

Since Vatican II’s so-called “renewal”, the laity has been subjected to a barrage of liturgical abuses, from as subtle as a seductive suggestion of a warm welcome³ to the blatantly destructive in the name of progressive novelty and inculturation. Such a negative development should not come as a surprise because rubrics are cloaked in a certain rigidity that runs counter to the spirit of spontaneity. In fact, faithful adherence to the rubrics runs diametrically opposed to freedom loving spontaneity.⁴

It is said that since the inception of Modernity, there has been an obsession to occupy the mind.⁵ An obsession fuelled by our loss of place amongst reality. Since we can no longer grasp reality in itself, we necessarily turn out attention to subjective meaning.⁶ Thus, as long as the “mind” is not involved, rubrics belong to the category of mindless repetition of meaningless gestures.

Finally, an aversion to rubrics is undoubtedly influenced by a myth of the pristine past (Protestant in origin) whereby the rubrics are viewed as expressions of the centuries-old encrustation of the true celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Christ was rather informal and rubrics just made His “meal” so stiflingly formal.

Now the rubrics direct our attention to how John Chapter 6 ends this Sunday. Firstly, the conclusion turns out to be an anti-climax. It certainly was not the ending that Jesus would have hoped for. But, I suspect the Lord was not at all surprised. He knew that He was at a point of no return. He resolutely did not back down. Joshua in the first reading provides the key to understanding what it means that we face a Saviour who does not back down. According to Joshua, it is time for the people to choose either to serve or to abandon God. The same scenario is re-enacted in the this Sunday where Peter must answer for the Eleven: “Lord to whom shall we, go for you have the words of eternal life”? The same is now presented to us.

It is about choosing God and of course, there is no suggestion that strict adherence to the rubrics should be equated as choosing God.⁷ Choosing is more than choices. For if choosing were merely choices, all of us would qualify as experts because our supermarkets and shopping malls are temples of choices. Instead, the Lord challenges Peter and the Eleven tochoose.⁸

The second reading gives us a clue about this choosing as it speaks of the relationship between a man and woman in the context marriage. We all know that a wedding does not a marriage makes. Instead, daily one chooses to be a married man. Your vows do not make you a husband. Your daily choosing makes it so. Usually, the choosing does not feel good especially after a quarrel or a strong disagreement.

To choose leads us into the territory of virtue. According to St Thomas, virtue is defined as good habit bearing on activity. Essential to the notion of virtue is habit. Not every habit is a virtue but every virtue will involve some form of habitual activity. According to the Catechism, a virtue is a habitual and firm disposition to do the good. It allows the person not only to perform good acts, but to give the best of himself, in other words, to excel. The virtuous person tends toward the good with all his sensory and spiritual powers; he pursues the good and chooses it in concrete actions. For the goal of a virtuous life is to become like God.

How do rubrics come into play with regard to the formation of virtue? Firstly spontaneity is over-rated. Granted that some of the best times we ever had may have come from the times we acted spontaneously.⁹ But, by and large our lives are organised according set repetitive rituals. And yet, that does not mean that our lives are meaningless. In this context, the “dull repetitive” Mass we celebrate reminds us that there is an asceticism involved because life’s purpose is not restricted to searching for self-fulfilment only but through self-examination, self-correction, self-mastery and penance as both physical mortification and spiritual reparation, we trudge towards heaven. However, when we forget heaven, then we will forget that there is a difference between feeling good and being good. Spontaneity appeals to our sense and need to feel good, whereas, a virtuous life stresses the need to be good. We sometimes mistake goodwill as the need to be good, as if goodwill is good enough.¹⁰ Goodwill is not enough because the language we use for the Eucharist is sacrificial and it challenges our comfort zone.

Faithfulness to the rubrics of the Eucharist resembles the practice of virtue in the sense that they call us to mortify this need to feel good. This asceticism fits in with the requirement of truth because it involves a humility of obedience and also the application of moral virtues to the irregularity of Man’s fallen nature. As such, virtue has a lot to do with the faculty of choosing to the point that we become habitual in our choices for good. The first time you get up to give your seat to an elderly person, it is tough because you would be thinking, “What would people say”? But if you persist, even if you feel it against your nature, you will soon find yourself doing it without even thinking of it. That is the power of good habits.

All of us want to go to heaven, I presume. Or as the case may be, for many of us, heaven can wait because we are uncertain about the quality of heaven—we have not seen it nor have we tasted it and we have never had it so good in this life. But, seriously, if we want to go heaven, then virtues are the steps we need to bring us there. In that way, slow and steady, through regular practice, just like we observe the rubrics, we forge a road, that by habit will bring us to the gates of heaven and to reach there, the only Bread and only the Real Thing that can carry us there and through the gates is the Bread of Eternal Life.

¹ The import of this insistence is gleaned through the principle of ecclesia supplet meaning that the Church provides out of h er treasure of grace, the proper remedy for the defect of the minister’s action. It is a theological and canonical principle which holds that even if there is some common error, such as in the jurisprudence or the performance of a sacrament [see 1983 CIC 144.1], as long as the minister intends to do what the Church intends in that action, the nature of the Church “makes up” for any insufficiency or error on the priest’s part. It is a helpful pastoral principle to guard against scrupulosity. A good example of the Church supplying jurisdiction for an act would be a penitent going to a priest, not knowing that the priest lacks the necessary faculty to hear confession. His sins would be forgiven. However this principle rests upon the “intent” of the priest. It cannot be applied willy-nilly if a priest deviates from what is prescribed by the Church… for example when the “formula” necessary for the forgiveness of sins is not used or the formula for the consecration is changed —words necessary for the validity of a sacrament. It follows from ecclesia non supplet quod ecclesia non habet—the Church cannot supply what the Church does not have.
² Each time a priest deviates from the norm of the celebration, the congregation would be left wondering what he would do next. Is that not a form of distraction where the celebrant draws attention to himself rather than to the worship of God?
³ For example, in the name of community building, the “Sign of Peace” is moved to the beginning of Mass so that we can enter into the feel of the Mass more easily.
⁴ Rubrics suggest of staid, lifeless and automatic following of rules and regulation. In its opposite, we have spontaneity. Tied in spontaneity with adrenalin and you have a fun-filled cocktail. However, spontaneity may also be a sign of disrespect. A good example would be an invitation we want to send to a person of importance. Even though the intention might be noble to invite someone however, the leaving it to spontaneous chance highlights a disrespect which says, “I would like you to come to my party but then it does not matter whether you can make it or not”. Thus, anything that is important, we circle it with a certain respect that can only come if we delineate it properly. Otherwise, it is too chancey and ultimately demeans what we intend to do. Spontaneity is also superficial and shallow.
⁵ The present stress on child-development may just be symptomatic of this obsession with occupying the mind. Kumon or kindergartens, pre-school or playschool all are geared to give the child a head-start. You must have seen how a child goes for his “family” dinners (accent is on family) carrying an iPad. We care about their prowess in all sorts of talents but what about socialising them into a life of virtue? We do not see the need for the body (yes, the hand-coordination etc etc) to be educated into a posture of “relationality”—a child sitting and conscious of his surrounding, not being able to take part in the conversation but nevertheless he is there. No. Instead, we enable a child to enter into his little self-enclosed world oblivious of the body’s relation to others who are present.
⁶ The brain is constantly trying to excite itself so that it knows that it exists. This is corollary of the Cartesian, Je pense donc que je suis. I think therefore I am. If I do not think, do I exist? A certain compulsion to engage the mind has not set us free but that instead it has imprisoned us in a solipsistic loop of self-validating ennui.
⁷ You would have heard of the Irish saying “Paddy goes to Church on Sunday but Paddy goes to Hell for what he did.

⁸ If price is a function of supply and demand in economics, then choosing is a function of freedom. In order to be, we need to choose. And here, set before us are not just choices but hard decisions to make for in our choosing, there will be life threatening consequences.

⁹ Like the time you decided to up and go to Bali where you met the most beautiful girl who has since become your wife. It may be true for some but certainly it is the stuff for Hollywood movies.
¹⁰ All of us possess goodwill and that is where it resides… at the level of intent. Many of us like help but it is never convenient like during an accident. If at all we slow down, it is hoping to catch a glimpse of the blood-splattered victim of accident to see if he or she is alive. And we move on.

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Once, at a retreat, I attended Mass celebrated by a renowned Jesuit priest. It was peculiar Mass in that it did not follow the prescribed rubrics we all recognise. It took place in an open field and it moved according to the rhythm of the Stations of the Cross to culminate at the grotto of our Lady where there was an altar to celebrate the second part of the Mass, that is, the Liturgy of the Eucharist. It started to rain just as we were about to conclude the Liturgy of the Word. We were blessed enough to be able to take shade in the grotto where we stood behind the celebrant for the “Liturgy of the Eucharist”. At Communion time, I abstained and was consciously uncomfortable that I was sending a message of rejection. In the end, I found out that two other priests also did not receive. Not by any stretch of imagination could what we had be considered a valid Eucharist.

This Sunday we continue to linger on the topic of what the Eucharist is. It is the Body of Christ sacrificed and the Blood of Christ poured out. Ritual¹ thus plays an important role in how the Eucharist ought to be celebrated. The recently introduced new translation of the Roman Missal highlighted a post-Vatican II phenomenon, the effect of which we are still experiencing today. In the process of updating the language and the rubrics of the celebration, we had unwittingly embraced a process which led to a desacralisation² of the liturgy.

This Sunday, as Jesus insisted that His Body and Blood are real food and drink, a pertinent question for us to ask is whether the Eucharist should be emphasised more as a memorial of the Cenacle or should its focus be a re-presentation of Calvary.

According the Pope Benedict, an over-emphasis on Cenacle runs counter to scriptural witness but not only that. An over-emphasis on the Eucharist as meal has had implications that are far reaching. First, it opened the way to many a manipulation of the Eucharist. As noted before, the process of desacralisation included the embrace of popular music, the removal of communion rail, communion by hand and the adoption of the versus populum posture of the priest. In other words, the process of dumbing down saw to it that the form or the shape of the Mass became nothing more than a communal meal rather than it being what it was supposed to be: a sacrifice. In some cases, one cannot tell the difference between what is sung at a Senior Nite Party³ and what is sung in Church. I am sure you remember those days where so-called hymns were sung to the tune of “Blowing in the wind”.

Second, an over-emphasis on a meal setting has also desensitised us to the reality of Christ presence in the Eucharist to the point that our practices are not from a Protestant setting. For some, the Eucharist has become nothing more than symbolic sham. Observe how Communion is received. Many do not prepare before Mass, or they pay scant attention to the liturgy during Mass proper and the moment of reception, the posture indicates that they have no consciousness of What they are consuming. In fact, there may be no correlation between Whom⁴and What they receive simply because many understand that they are receiving merely a symbol; albeit, a powerful symbol.

But, the Gospel begs to differ. A check on the language will show that Jesus was very literal in His description of the Eucharist as being His Body and His Blood. Over the multitude’s objection, Christ did not mince His words. Instead, there was an insistence that bordered on vehemence. “Indeed” or “truly” or “certainly” are some of the translations to the Greek “Alethos” or truth. As a result, the Church believes that, Whatever and not just Whoever, walked the earth 2000 years ago, is What we consume. We eat the Body of Christ—His substance and His entirety.

Why do we need to eat His flesh and drink His blood? Protestants would argue that Christ spoke metaphorically as He did when He claimed Himself to be the gate, the way, thelight or the true vine. Would Catholics not be cannibalistic then? From the beginning of Christianity itself, the charge had been made against Christians that they were nothing but cannibals. In a culture of “personal” morality, an inculcated abhorrence that we may be cannibalistic is enough to drive us to embrace the relative comfort of Christ speaking, not the truth about His flesh and blood, but metaphorically or symbolically. But, there must be a reason why the Church never considered the Eucharist as merely symbolic but is truly the Flesh and Blood of her Lord and Saviour.

At the Incarnation, the physical Body of Christ came into existence. At His death on the Cross, the Mystical Body came into existence. At the moment of His death what had been only the physical Christ has now added members with whom He has united Himself as their head. The added members form the Mystical Body of Christ, otherwise known as the Church, and it is to this Body that He the head must tend.

Christ gave us Himself so that we might get His strength to be His Body. In the Eucharist, we become what we eat. In this context, on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the carrying of a Monstrance and processing through the streets speaks volume to each one of us: members of the Mystical Body of Christ carrying the Body of Christ signifying the intent of every member to become more Christ-like and best way to do it is to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood.⁵

We are not cannibals⁶ for desiring to consume the very Flesh and Blood of Christ because they are life. The Christ present in the Eucharist is not Christ dead but alive and resurrected. Furthermore we do not eat a part of Christ but we consume the whole of Christ—His divinity and His humanity, His body and soul. It follows that at Communion, it does not matter whether we receive a big piece of bread or small piece of host. They both contain the same essence of Christ. This also explains why we do not need to give communion under two species.⁷ Eating the bread already means we have consumed the whole of Christ.

In summary, to receive the Eucharist is a profound act because it is as close as one will ever get to Christ our Lord in this life. Christ Himself wants us to have His life and so, in the delivery of so precious a gift, the Church our Mother must do all she can, through the proper celebration of her rituals, to ensure that her children are fed with nothing less than the very Bread of eternal life; the Bread that can guarantee eternal life.

¹ Rituals provide certainty over the outcome of what we are celebrating. Two points can be noted here. Firstly, note that there is a thin line that separates magic from mystery. Magic—incantations, symbolic actions, mantras—attempts at manipulating the “divine” in order to accomplish one’s will. But, in the case of the Church’s liturgy, rubric is not the attempt to control the divine. Instead, it becomes the only guarantee we have that what the pew receives is no less than what Christ and His Church intended for the recipient. In today’s world where the accent is on the expression of “individuality”, faithfulness to the rubrics expresses a humble desire to submit to the Divine will. Thus, if magic is defined by the will of the magician, then true worship expressed by through the rubrics is defined by the will of the One worshipped – in this case, the Lord Jesus. Secondly, insistence on adherence to rubrics is not a sign of intolerance. Instead, the more something is important, the more “rules” are needed for us to be certain. For example, the more a person is allergic to say, peanuts, the more we need to be “certain” that the food cooked and served should contain absolutely no trace of nuts in it. The Church’s insistence on liturgical rectitude is indicative of her high regard for the Body of her Lord and Saviour.
² By no means was the process restricted to the Eucharist. For example, the Sacrament of Baptism de-emphasised Original Sin and was re-visioned as a sacrament of community.
³ This is not a commentary on the Senior Nite Party but rather of the liturgy. Liturgy was no longer Divine Liturgy but a communitarian liturgy simple because its focus was on us rather than on God to whom we owe honour, worship and glory.
⁴ Is it any wonder why Jesus Christ “cannot” be the Saviour of the world? He is anything but God made man—a social worker, a psychologist and better still, a revolutionary leader. He liberates more than He can save.
⁵ The necessary caveats apply. We prepare ourselves to receive Him worthily. It does not denote perfection on our part.

⁶ An experience of the past might illustrate how we can understand our distaste at the suggestion of cannibalism. Those of Chinese ethnic background and old enough may remember how parents introduce solid food to a baby. I remember watching my aunty chewing the rice in her mouth before giving the masticated food to the baby. At that time, there was no suggestion of germs or bacteria. Certainly we would not get the Americanism we are accustomed to coming from children “Ewww”. The change in how we perceive the practice suggests that our distaste is perhaps an expression of a psychological barrier rather than a real objection to cannibalism. But, to put to rest the ghost of cannibalism, it must be reiterated that Catholics do not eat the “dead” flesh or drink the “dead” blood of Jesus. Instead, consuming the Eucharist is union with Life itself, which every act of cannibalism so intends but can never be achieved.

⁷ From Eucharisticum mysterium, Instruction on Eucharistic worship and repeated in GIRM #281:  Holy Communion, considered as a sign, has a more complete form when it is received under both kinds. For under this form (leaving intact the principles of the Council of Trent, 84 by which under either species there is received the true sacrament and Christ whole and entire ), the sign of the Eucharistic banquet appears more perfectly. Moreover, it shows more clearly how the new and eternal Covenant is ratified in the Blood of the Lord, as it also expresses the relation of the Eucharistic banquet to the eschatological banquet in the Kingdom of the Father (cf. Matt. 26: 27-29). Here complete form refers more to the theological aesthetics than to the “content” of What we are receiving.

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Last week, the suggested military motif in the Gospel gave us a chance to reflect on what it meant for the Church on earth to be classified as “militant”. Whilst the word “militant” might sound politically incorrect, we explored the idea of militancy in the context of Christ’s mission and the conclusion we drew was that the term Church Militant aptly described Christians in the world, for we have been and still are engaged in the crucial struggles of our time, a struggle characterised by Evil attempting to distract Man’s search for Him Who is Truth, Beauty and Good.

This Sunday’s Gospel reveals an on-going demand for nutrition that the crowd had of Christ. Away from their military ambition for Christ, the people on seeing what Jesus could do, would not let up in their pursuit, if not to make Him King, as least, to be someone who could on a whim conjure up a feast to satisfy the pangs of hunger. This subsistent demand on Christ brings us face to face with the question of who Jesus Christ really is. How do we perceive Him and what are the implications of our perception.

Firstly, our perception of reality is perhaps much more complicated simply because we are no longer at “home” with reality. Prior to the advent of modernity, Western Philosophy simply accepted that the mind could know reality as it is. In other words, physics [ie, science] and metaphysics [ie religion and that which cannot be proven scientifically] co-existed. But, the advent of modernity made the process of knowing more complicated meaning that what cannot be proven scientifically, for example, religious, was relegated to the personal, the superstitious and the unknowable. Even in the area of science’s expertise a thing could be “known” via our theories, hypotheses or models. Or, a thing we knew could also be merely our sense impressions, according to Hume and causality was explained as a connexion of what we have been accustomed to seeing of events flowing from to another. The complication brought about by modernity was located within the process of knowing. Thus, instead of knowing a thing in itself, we began a transforming migration towards what a thing could mean for us. It was an inevitable shift and in summary, because we could no longer know the thing in itself, we began to understand reality in its relation to us. Galileo did not just inaugurate the shift from geocentricism to heliocentricism, Descartes also initiated the paradigm shift from our focus on the object to the preoccupation with the subject. Thus, the question of who Jesus Christ was (objectively), had become the question of who Jesus Christ was to us (subjectively).

This shift was quite utilitarian in its expression, much like the crowds’ intent for Jesus. But, the truth is, we are by and large utilitarian and therefore meaning does play a great emphasis in the way we understand reality. And today the crowd in the Gospel is led to understand who Jesus is rather than what Jesus can do for them.¹

Like the crowd, we are challenged to rethink that meaning is not the ultimate focus of life. For if it were, then we need to explain why a world organised along the line of meaningful existence has left trail of “empty” destruction. In the face of a formidable might to create meaning, why are we still so empty and shallow? Meaning must draw its reference not only from us but from reality itself.

Today the reality that confronts us is Jesus Christ. In the multiplication of the loaves and fish, our attention is directed not only to the nutrition we consume but to the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist we celebrate. The transubstantiation is only possible, not by science but by His power as God. Is He really God or do we just consider Him meaningful in our lives? Let me clarify that Who He is and what He means are not mutually exclusive but, sadly, the prevailing wisdom about Jesus Christ is that He can be anything except God. He scores better as a superstar. He teaches better as a guru. He saves better as a liberator. In all things, He is no better than an exemplar, the best of all human beings, the most capable of all teachers and perhaps the most competent deliverer.

The man who fed the crowd is God, no less. Acknowledging Who He is has life-changing implications. We cling to Him not only because He is meaningful but because He is life. Make no mistake that the world is not saved by meaning. The “meaningful” lives of many rich and famous and many of us are nothing but vacuous and that hollow which we want fill with adventures and fun and consumption can only be filled and satisfied by the truth who is Jesus Christ. Ultimately, who Jesus is will lead to what Jesus can do for us and how much He means to us. What begins with every human search for meaning must lead to a search for God Himself. On His part, He answers our search giving us what truly will satisfy: the Bread of Life, the Bread of Eternal Life.

^FOOTNOTE:   

¹ Meaning is a crucial component in our interaction with reality. In fact, modernity, by and large, is organised according to this one simple principle that whatever we encounter, it has to be meaningful. And meaning is often reduced to merely the palpable surge of elation we feel. A good example of how much meaning is central to our experience is the abhorrence for rituals as repetitive and therefore meaningless. Youths often lament how meaningless Mass is to them because they do not experience any palpable pleasing sensation that Catholic rituals as such do not evoke. On another matter, Catholic rituals have become “dead” and therefore unable to reach out to us because we have subjected rituals to the dictates of the “mind”—that they have to be understood in order to be meaningful. It is an emasculation of the power of rituals to give meaning.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

The next few Sunday Masses, we shall have the company of John for our Gospel. This Sunday, we kick it off with a miracle stunning in scale and stupendous in scope. John’s Gospel does not have what we traditionally call the Institution Narrative. Instead, its place is taken by the Washing of Feet ritualised annually in our Maundy Thursday liturgy. What we would consider in John to be Eucharistic in motif is supplied through chapter 6 of his Gospel. All 4 Gospels record the miracle of the loaves and fish but only John sets his in the context of the Passover. Thus, the link to the Institution Narrative of the other 3 Gospels may be gleaned through the actions of Jesus who took bread and gave thanks before distributing it to those sitting down. The vocabulary is strongly evocative of the Last Supper.

What lessons may we draw from this feeding feast? Firstly, we are given a definitive figure of 5000 men which can also mean, depending on how you estimate the average size of a family, between 10 and 20 thousand who were satiated if women and children were included. This was a miracle of God’s generosity. Hence, the first lesson is we are invited to trust Him. Secondly, the 12 basketful remaining not only attest to God’s abundant generosity but they also challenge us to become more aware of the reality of physical hunger. The continued presence of hunger in the world is not an indictment against God’s providence but rather a conviction of our selfishness. The second lesson is we are asked to be as generous as God is.

Thirdly, and this is the lesson which I want to highlight today. The exact figure 5000 opens up another horizon for a reflexion of grave importance for the future of Christianity and also of humanity.

In a lunch meeting between the Pope and some cardinals, he used a description for the Church on earth, which admittedly sounded out of fashion. The Church on earth is aptly called “Ecclesia militans” meaning Church militant. In times Roman, here I mean not the word processor typeface or font, a legion consisted of, give or take, 5000 fighting men. Today, Jesus feeding 5000 men merits a second look at what this figure of 5000 really stands for each one of us.

First of all, it is an uncomfortable comparison to think the 5000 men Jesus fed could be considered a Roman legion. Jesus Himself was uneasy with the idea. He escaped into the hills because they wanted Him to be a leader of an earthly kind. Why a disquiet with a martial imagery of Christ? Since humanity has witnessed two great wars in the last century, and countless genocide in between and after, the latest being the civil unrest in Syria, a pertinent question to ask is if humanity needs to have such an aggressive reminder? After all, the face of militancy is also worn, amongst others, by suicide bombers and so, a term like Church militant, is suggestive of a Catholic crusade or a Catholic wing of the Hezbollah. I would think that many of us would have preferred a more peaceful, and in an era more tolerant, a less belligerent term to describe the Church. In the face of massive institutional failure, of governments, not only here but in many countries, of financial bodies like the UK banks fixing the Libor rates, should we not democratise the institution of the Church and thus prevent or pre-empt any hierarchical abuse of power? There is a movement called “We are Church” which advocates a democratic and a more egalitarian form of Church by dissolving the distinction between hierarchy and laity. Such a scheme is surely seductive as it suggests of common ownership and thus equal responsibility for the management of Church.

The Pope would think otherwise. An attempt to humanise the Church, to level the ground and to make it mirror more our social set up can only impair its divine mission. We are “Ecclesia militans”¹ not because we are strident, not because we want to fight but because we are engaged in the crucial struggles of our times. Evil, and by evil, I do not mean Hollywood’s grotesque portrayal with great cinematic effect. Instead, the evil that wishes to dominate the world, in its many forms, is subtly masked as goodness, beauty and truth. Caught unawares Christians will be tossed in the swirling pool of relativism where choice itself becomes the good, where novelty usurps beauty and where subjective experience displaces truth. The authentic exercise of freedom is specifically directed towards the search for what is good, beautiful and true; which is none other than the human search for Jesus Christ, who is Truth, Beauty and Goodness incarnate.² It is a demanding exercise which is humanly impossible and therefore in need of divine help.

Christ by His life, death and resurrection has prevailed against the Evil one. He may have won for us eternal life but still, we need to choose. Thus, the exercise of freedom means that battle for the heart and soul of humanity continues. Today that battle rages under the dictatorship of relativism, a tyranny which does not recognise anything as definitive except one’s ego and one’s desires. The future of Christianity is dependent on Christian soldiers continuing the mission of their Lord and Master in drawing humanity to Himself. It is in this endeavour that the miracle today becomes relevant as it challenges whatever philosophy of life we cling to. The term ecclesia militans does not make sense if one’s philosophy were “I live to eat”. Our society has enough disposable income to easily slip into this kind of philosophy of life. But, if your philosophy were “I eat to live”, then the term makes sense. Why? We need food and therefore strength for the good fight.

It is in relation to this good fight, so aptly described by St Paul, that the familiar word sacrament may be applied to John’s Gospel. Why? The explanation lies in the event which we call the Incarnation because the Incarnation is the sacrament par excellence. As such, the Eucharist was called the “medicine of immortality” by St Ignatius of Antioch. Why? Note that in chapter 6 of the Gospel, the people who had eaten the manna in the desert died. The same fate would meet the 5000 who ate the very bread that Jesus multiplied. It is only at Mass, the Eucharist which is not only a token but is indeed made possible by the Incarnation, that we can eat the Bread of Eternal Life to draw the supernatural strength needed so that we, as soldiers of Christ, as Ecclesia militans, may continue the good fight in order that we may merit a life that is eternal.

FOOTNOTES:
¹ For the Pope, the Church is a communion (koinonia) founded on the Eucharist which is at once vertical with God in Christ and horizontal, amongst believers themselves. The Church’s “permanent structure is not democratic, but sacramental, consequently hierarchical” since each particular Church is presided over by a Bishop who maintains its unity with the Bishop of Rome and thus with the universal Church.
² In the Catholic tradition, beauty is a metaphysical and ultimately theological notion. The search of beauty has nothing to do with mere aesthetic sensibility or a flight from reason, because, from the divine perspective, beauty, together with truth and goodness, is a manifestation of being. God, the origin and sustainer of all being is truth, beauty and goodness itself. In the language of metaphysics, truth, beauty and goodness are the “transcendentals.” In other words, to the degree that any reality participates in being and ultimately in the being of God, that reality is true, beautiful and good.

1st Sunday of Advent Year B

For some people this is the moment they have been waiting for, for the last forty years. We are entering a new liturgical year and it corresponds to the liturgical changes that we have been preparing ourselves for. In feel, the quality of Advent is perhaps no different from the last couple of weeks. The focus towards the end of the liturgical year is appropriately the reckoning or the judgement at the end of time. This Sunday, the Gospel seems to continue along the same vein but now it is of wakefulness as we wait for the Lord’s coming. It is signalled by the change in colour making this the other season where violet, purple or lavender is featured. However, the shift is subtle because the mood is not as penitential as it is of expectation. Advent’s “penance” is associated with the air of joyful preparation for Christ’s coming at His birth but with the proviso that we keep in mind at all time His second coming.

As we embrace Advent, this spirit of joyful preparation is captured in the prayer of the new Collect which at the same time also gives us the shape of how we ought to prepare ourselves for the Christmas to come. To help us appreciate it, we need to contrast the new translation with the old.

But, before we do that, let me make a small digression with regard to the reception of the new translation. Part of our difficulty in appreciating the new translation may be found in its repetitiveness. The original translators, when they set out to translate Latin into English, took a stance that repetition was somewhat redundant. It was as if we should never say, “I love you”, twice. To praise God, to bless Him, to adore Him and to glorify Him, were all considered to be a tad over the top, to the point of mouthfulness. The criteria they adopted were greater accessibility and less formality and yet, our experience bears testimony otherwise as when we are in love, whispering sweet nothing into the ear of our beloved is considered the norm and we never tire of saying, “I love you”.

Does the profusion of words, in short the language used, make a difference in our approach to God? Listen to the “Opening Prayer”, which we now call, the Collect, of the previous translation of 1973/1975.

“All powerful God, increase our strength of will for doing good that Christ may find an eager welcome at His coming and call us to His side in the kingdom of heaven”.

The manner by which we address God is important. A philosopher, Martin Heidegger, said, “Language is the house of being”. Moreover, we ought to remember that the Word became flesh. Therefore, the language used is important and here, you will note that the prayer is straightforward. It speaks directly to God. However, prayers in the original Latin are often premised on a word of request, “quaesumus”, which can be translated into “beg, implore, beseech and pray”. When formal request is removed in our address to God, then the inevitable “right” [it’s my right kind of "right"] is presumed as the phrasing of the old translation seemed to assume that we already have the strength of will and God merely adds a little more to what we already possess. Imagine the hubris. The truth is we have none and this is reflected in the new translation.

“Grant Your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet Your Christ with righteous deeds at His coming, so that gathered at His right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom”.

What is the difference?

There is a strong resonance of scripture and this is important to note. Firstly, the Collect reminds us of the Gospel of the Ten Virgins. We are praying that our lamps will be filled with righteous deeds.

Secondly, to be gathered at His right hand is reminiscent of Christ who will come as the judge of the world. Here, we pray that, with God’s grace, we will be the sheep invited to sit at the right hand of Christ so as to inherit the kingdom prepared for those found to be rich in righteous deeds.

Thirdly, the poetry of the words leads us to imagine our running with resolve to meet the Lord. It is not that we just wait passively, in a manner of speaking, for the Lord’s coming but to remember that as He comes, we may, like the Virgins run, not aggressively, but eagerly forth to meet Him. Not passively, not aggressively but eagerly. The possessive pronoun “Your Christ” in the prayer also suggests the tenderness of our encounter with the Christ of the Father.

The prayer expresses the crux of Advent—how it is supposed to be shaped is encapsulated in this Collect. The preparation for Christ’s coming is intense because it makes the connexion between our faithful love for Him and neighbour: for as much as you do to the least of these, you do it to Me (Matt 25). You might begin to appreciate that the term “Collect” does justice to the prayer before we enter the Liturgy of the Word because it collects all our intentions so as to channel them in the direction of our resolve.

Finally you will always hear this repeated ad nauseam, and perhaps unwittingly, by Protestant-pleasing Catholics, that we do not know the Bible. It is true that we may not know the Bible the way our separated brothers and sisters quote it but we breathe, eat and drink sacred scripture. The Eucharist is the privileged place when and where we have always lived the Bible and now the new translation restores this living principle into our worship. The language of the new translation seeks to uncover the beauty of our faith by removing the grime of poor translation that has shrouded the splendour of truth that Catholicism has always been scriptural in her teaching, in her practice and in her worship.

3rd Sunday of Easter Year A

This Sunday I would like to speak on three interconnected topics. The first topic is pride but not of the sinful kind. By pride, I mean a sense of self-confidence and not, colloquially speaking, of the ‘action’ sort. Second topic revolves around the promise of Christ to be present to us and final topic centres on the Eucharist as the fulfilment of a promise.

Firstly, the gospel today is one which should give Catholics a sense of pride. Sadly, the contrary may be true. Many of us acknowledge our ignorance, meaning, we accept what we have often been told by others and sometimes, this charge of ignorance is echoed by some enlightened Catholics themselves that many Catholics do not know the bible. They may be a spectre of truth in such a statement but let us go beyond merely “knowing” the Bible. For example, let us venture beyond just an ability to quote biblical verses.

Catholics should humbly say, “We may not know the Bible the ‘restrictive and narrow’ way we are expected to but we certainly live and celebrate the Bible”. The Catholic Church is even more faithful to sacred scripture than accepted prejudice would allow. For Catholics, the Bible is not just a “book” but it is a part of what we know and accept to be a sacred and living tradition. Only a living tradition can guarantee and safeguard the handing over [paradosis] of God’s word in its entirety [1] which explains why the Eucharistic Prayer I is worded this way: “We offer them [“them” refers to the gifts of bread and wine] for Benedict, our Pope, for Murphy, our Bishop and for all who hold and teach the catholic faith that comes to us from the apostles”.

We live and celebrate sacred scripture and the description of the two disciples’ experience on the way to Emmaus is a perfect expression of how we do it. Their journey is a panorama of what we are doing right now. Simply put, their journey was the narrative (story) form of what we are ritualising. The narrative is a snapshot of the Eucharist. The part where Christ was elucidating the scripture passages about Himself corresponds to our Liturgy of the Word. The Liturgy of the Word, which includes the homily, is Christ speaking to you.

The four verbs where Christ took the bread, said the blessing, broke it and handed it to the disciples correspond to our offertory, the Eucharistic Prayer with the Institution Narrative, the Fractio Panis when the Agnus Dei is sung and finally the giving and receiving of Holy Communion. Now you know why the Mass is also called the “breaking of bread”—the disciples recognised Him at the breaking of bread. It is plausible to say that before the Gospels were written, and even before the 1st Letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians was written, the ritualised celebration of the Eucharist was already taking place and that this story of the two disciples on to Emmaus was a stylised story to convey the message that the Eucharist [breaking of bread] is really Christ’s presence which brings me to the 2nd topic.

Do you remember the last scene at the Mount of Olive in Matthew’s Gospel, before Christ ascended? The Lord gave a command but He also made a promise. The command was to go and baptise all the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And the promise was that He would be with them till the end of time. He has kept His promise through Apostolic Succession. It is perhaps stating the obvious but Apostolic Succession is not apostolic ancestry or nostalgia in the sense that we are trying to trace back the lineage of succession. It is not a static act of looking backward. Rather, it is forward looking because Apostolic Succession provides the possibility for the Eucharist to be celebrated. Apostolic Succession is dynamically alive and in practice at this very moment even as I am speaking to you.

Imagine if all the priests were killed, nobody here would dare walk up to say to the congregation, “Let me celebrate Mass for you”. We instinctively know that a priest’s power to confect the Eucharist is derived from a power which is transmitted by Apostolic Succession through the laying on of hands. Through Apostolic Succession, each time we celebrate the Eucharist, the bread and wine is transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ. Transubstantiation is a technical word but it describes the result that when we receive Holy Communion we eat of the same substance Who walked 2000 years ago. It is the same Body but only in different modes. That is why we call the Blessed Sacrament the True Presence and this brings me to my final point.

There is a connexion here between the Two Disciples and the Eucharist which we might miss in this post-Easter celebration. What is it? The Eucharist is a source of strength when we most want to give up. In life, there are always reasons to give up. At a time when we feel most abandoned, Christ is there. Look at the two disciples. In Luke’s theological perspective, Christ was always heading towards Jerusalem—the city symbolised God’s plan of salvation. We are told that He resolutely set his face for Jerusalem. The two disciples were so blinded by their despair that they abandoned the place where salvation was to be found. Christ entered their desolation to draw them out through the Liturgy of the Word and He sustained and strengthened them with the breaking of bread. Often we give up because we cannot see, feel, hear and sense God but Christ walking with the two disciples has shown us that He is never far from our despair. He has never given up on us even when we have give up on Him.

So, at the moment of our greatest sorrows, the Eucharist should be the first place to go to, not the last. Here, at the breaking of bread, He keeps His promise to be with us till the end of time.

In summary, the Road to Emmaus may feel like any other post-Resurrection appearances but its impact is far-reaching. It shows how sacred scripture is steeped into the very life and practice of the Church [2]. So, if you are proud to be a Catholic, may this deepened awareness now inspire you to live even more faithfully your vocation. It would be the best expression of your pride and your gratitude for Christ’s continued presence in your life.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Petrine ministry is an important cornerstone in this process of handing over. It stands as guarantor for continuity.
[2] Let me give illustrate how “present” Christ is to us and how unaware we may be of it. There was a time when Catholics upon meeting the Bishop would ask to kiss the ring of the Bishop. Nowadays, when a Catholic asks the Bishop for permission to kiss his ring, apparently, some Bishops would reply: “The ring is in my back pocket”. It illustrates the confusion many priests and some bishops have of their priesthood. They have confused their “priesthood” with the Priesthood of Christ. Catholics venerate the person of the bishop or the priest not because they are “holy” but because they represent the Priesthood of Christ. Last week I mentioned the principle of “ex opere operato”. It is a principle which shows the extent and power of Christ’s presence. His presence can never be constrained by human frailty. When a priest is ordained, his palms are anointed and if he fell sick and required the Sacrament of Anointing, he would never be anointed on the palms. Instead, the anointing is at the back of the hands. According to Bishop Fulton Sheen, this is on account of his anointing for Holy Orders. See ]. This custom reveals how powerful the anointing at ordination is… that no matter how sinful a priest or a bishop may be, it can never take away the power of Christ to confect the Eucharist. Christ’s promise to be present to us can never be thwarted by human weakness. Furthermore, do you know a priest who is laicised, meaning that he has returned to lay state, can still grant absolution of sins in danger of death? The confusion especially amongst priests to shy away from the Priesthood of Christ, citing always that they are unworthy is perhaps a reason why we have lost the sense of Christ’s True Presence. By citing their “unworthiness” they are saying that Christ’s power is tagged onto their holiness. That would be “ex opere operantis”.

5th Sunday of Lent Year A

At first glance, we are taken up by the account of Lazarus and his raising. In fact, the shortest verse in the bible consists of two words: “Jesus wept”. Weeping is a common sight at every funeral where because of great love, people wrench their hearts out for their beloved. [It seemed that raising Lazarus was not really a miracle because Jesus cried so loud that He woke Lazarus].

Anyway, a closer scrutiny will reveal that the raising of Lazarus actually points to the mystery of the resurrection. At the heart of the resurrection we find the sacrament of eternal life. The question is: “How is the Eucharist linked to the Resurrection?”.

The Resurrection is a funny sort of belief. Why? We profess a belief in the resurrection but it seems like we believe it for others because, at the time of death, many of us will behave as if there is no Resurrection. Alternatively, you can say that we profess it at the head but not at the heart. This is not at all a negative judgement of people who grieve. Perhaps this fact can be explained by love. For those whom we ought to love—for example, a second in a room with an enemy whose eyes you want to gorge out feels like an excruciating lifetime. But, for those whom we love—a lifetime is but a second. There is never enough time for those whom we love. Whilst love may explain why we set aside our belief in the Resurrection during moments of grief, it is also love which founds our hope in the Resurrection.
This hope is expressed through the Eucharist because the Eucharist is the food for and of the Resurrection. How?

You remember John’s Gospel where Christ had a conversation with the Jews, right after He had multiplied bread and fish to feed 5000. The people who later came looking for Him were looking for physical nourishment. But, Christ told them to look for the kind of bread that will sustain them for eternal life. He offered Himself as that bread and He told them unambiguously, “If you want eternal life, eat My Flesh”. The result was confusion and practically all left Him. He turned to the Twelve: “What about you, do you want to go away too?” Simon Peter answered for all of us, “Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life.”

Christ did not mince His words with regard to eating His Flesh in order to gain eternal life. The Body of Christ is food necessary for eternal life. Therefore, in the context of His unambiguous declaration, it would be ridiculous of Him not to provide us with the means for eternal life. Christ cannot make that statement without making sure that He supplies us with this Bread. This is what I mean by the Eucharist is at the heart of the Resurrection.

When we die we enter another plane of existence not constrained by time and space. Another plane of existence simply means that since time and space do not apply, the person may be dead with the body still in a coffin, yet he could already be purified. [1]

This is awesome implication for those who are baptised. The Church is at her best in the Eucharist because this is where the dead and the living are gathered as one to praise God. The altar is where the ecclesia militans, ecclesia triumphans, ecclesia penitens gather. And in order to be here, to enjoy the fruit of Christ’s Resurrection, the ecclecia triumphans and ecclesia penitens must have eaten the bread of eternal life when they were here on earth.

Let me tell you a real story to illustrate how important the Eucharist is to the Resurrection and here I want to reach out to those who are entering into a relationship that might lead to marriage.

I was called to the hospital the other day. It was an urgent call and I brought two important elements: oil for anointing and Holy Communion. I asked the usual question: “Can receive Holy Communion ah?”. The person said “No”. “Why?”. “Not married in Church”. It was an honest but painful answer. I discovered the reason which in the past may have made sense but here in the moment of life and dead, the reason no longer held. So I heard her confession and gave Holy Communion. She has since died.

It was a tragic funeral. She was not that old. In the room of the hospital where I had gone to, minus the pain of the so-called excommunication, I could sense that I was in the presence of a loving couple. At the funeral, I asked the husband if he loved her. It was a rhetorical question because the answer was obvious. Then I asked the reverse if he knew how much she had loved him. She had loved him that much to give up Christ. For more than 20 years, she deprived herself of Holy Communion for the man she loved. But all was not lost because at the moment of death, she regained everything and the Holy Communion she received was truly a “Viaticum”. It was really the Bread for the journey to eternal life. She received Christ who became her companion from this life to the next. And so, at the funeral, even as her body lay in decay, but freed from time, space and pain, and taking into consideration that she might already have been purified since we can only measure purgatory according to our time and space, she could already be present at the altar with the saints and the angels. Finally, I told the husband if he wanted to be close to her, the best physical location to be, where earth was joined to heaven, was to be at the Eucharist. This is an implication of the Eucharist at the heart of the Resurrection.

Those of you who are falling in love with non-Catholics. This is what you ought to remember: the Eucharist is our ticket to the Resurrection—it is the only Bread for and of Eternal Life. So, even at the beginning of your dating, this must be raised by you that you need Christ for your eternal life. It is perfectly alright to marry a non-Catholic. It is perfectly alright that your spouse does not convert. However, the rule that applies to children is different.

Why is it different? They need to be brought up and baptised as Catholics. Sometimes people will say, “Why cannot wait until they are old enough to think for themselves? In the matter of religion we should not force”. The answer lies in your children’s nutrition, education, health etc. What do I mean? In the case of dengue fever, you would never think of waiting until your child is 21 years old before deciding to seek medical help. Routinely you make decisions for your children. Baptism is a matter of eternal life because it opens the door to the Bread of Life.

And, you should be careful not to introduce a logical contradiction into your life. How? Each time you “communicate” [receive Holy Communion], you are assenting to the belief that the Bread you eat will lead you to eternal life. By refusing to baptise your child, you also saying: “I only believe it for myself but not for my child”. It is almost like saying, “I shall keep what is best for me but not for my child”. What type of mother or father are you? In the Gospel, Jesus Himself asked: “Would a father hand a scorpion to his child who asked for bread?”. But, if you can live with that, it just says quite clearly you do not know what you are receiving.

This is the 5th Sunday and we are inching closer to the mystery of our salvation. The raising of Lazarus is not really about him. Lazarus is just the side dish. What is at centre of this seventh sign is the Resurrection. The Resurrection is logically the promise of the Eucharist as St. Irenaeus (died 202) once said, "when our bodies partake of the Eucharist, they are no longer corruptible as they have the hope of eternal Resurrection" (Against the Heresies, IV, 18,5).

FOOTNOTE:
[1] All his sins, big or small, need to be purified before he worthy to join the angels and saints at the altar praising God. If a person dies and is not constrained by time and space, it means that funerals are for the living, never for the dead.