4th Sunday of Advent Year B 2023

Last Sunday the focus was still on John the Baptist. Today the spotlight lands on Mary. Later in the evening and much later into the night, the stage belongs to Jesus. What can be said about Mary in the drama surrounding the incarnation and the birth of Christ? Since Mary is at the centre of the Annunciation, the Gospel is rightly taken from Luke.

Both John and Mary prepare for the coming of the Messiah. Through the figure of John the Baptiser, we are reminded that we can be so jaded as to be unawares that Christ is already amongst us. Through Mary, we are shown what our response should be to the Lord when He comes.

In the 1st Reading, King David felt that he needed to remedy a situation. Moved with devotion, David intended to render to his Lord God an abode befitting His honour. The Lord did not reject David’s good intentions. Instead, He furthered David’s response through a promise. In other words, David, rather than rushing off to prove his love for God was given a promise of the future, one which would be time-proof. A temple can surely decay or be destroyed but God’s promised future will stand the test of time. David’s great temple would be a living Ark of the Covenant.

David’s desire and God’s promise remind us that there exists an unequal relationship between God and man but it is definitely one which opens up to great possibilities. Therefore, when the angel appeared to Mary to announce the birth of God’s Son, Mary’s question was unlike Zechariah’s. The old man had asked for proof of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Whereas Mary’s “How can it be since I am a Virgin?”, was a question that opened up the possible.

Mary’s question actually furthered her desire to cooperate fully with God. In the first place, children should naturally be expected in any marriage, meaning that when one enters into marriage, the children should come as part of the package. Mary’s dialogue with the Archangel makes no sense unless her question can be rephrased as “How can it be since I intend to remain a Virgin?”. Here, virginity should be seen as an expression of self-donation to God and understood within the context of desiring to do God’s will.

Mary’s total self-giving to God now takes on a new expression. Giving herself entirely to the Lord, He elevates her virginity through the Incarnation and the birth of Jesus the Son of God. In a way, Mary shatters the idea of freedom centred on autonomy. We define freedom as self-fulfilment, meaning that we want to be able to live according to our desires. Whereas Mary defined freedom as the will of God to be done in her life. Indeed, Mary’s fiat challenges our modern mentality where the more we try to define freedom as absolute autonomy, the less free we become. But the more we embrace God’s will, the freer we become.

At the cusp of Christmas, both David and Mary are symbols of humanity. While both figures stand for the possibilities of love for God, Mary’s total love gave us the fullest expression of God’s love for us—God’s only Son. Christmas is the fruit of the Incarnation of God’s love for Man. You may know of how a parent and a child play the game of love. One says, “I love you”. The other replies, “I love you more”. Well, whenever we desire to love God, He responds by loving us more. Naïvely or innocently, we believe that we can love God by performing great feats for Him. Our example was David through his temple. But in the Annunciation to Mary, our greatest achievements pale in comparison to God’s gift to us.

Today’s focus on Mary at the Annunciation reveals not only the possibility of Man’s response to God but it also represents the depth of God’s love for us. In Mary’s “fiat”, she became the bearer of God, the true Ark of the Covenant. She alone carried God in her womb making her the only Theotokos. But Mary is not alone. In her response, she invites us also be the bearer of Christ her Son. Her “yes” to God gives us to the courage to say yes to God.

Christmas is later tonight when all our Advent preparations will come to their conclusion. At this 4th Sunday of Advent, we stand alongside Mary, the Theotokos, praying that our preparations can pave the way for Christ, her Son to be born in our hearts, both through our thoughts and actions. That way, we can become truly Christotokos[1] in the world and for the world.


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[1] Theotokos and Christotokos belong the controversy that gave rise to the Nestorian heresy. The original discussion centred on Mary and who she is in relation to Jesus. Is she the bearer of God or the bearer of Christ (the man)? The Council of Ephesus settled on Mary’s title as the bearer of God. Mary is Theotokos because the divine person of Jesus Christ has two natures—human and divine. As such Mary is rightfully the mother of God. The usage of the terms here respects Mary as truly the Mother of God for she alone bore God physically in her womb. Whereas we are not bearers of God physically. We bear Him morally and so we can be called the bearers of Christ in and to the world. The use of the term Christotokos here does not carry the same baggage of the Nestorian heresy. We are truly bearers of Christ (Christotokos) who is both human and divine.

4th Sunday of Advent Year C

The 4th Sunday continues with the customary message of Advent hope but it is really a Sunday that belongs to Mary as is suggested by the theme: Mary’s Child: The Prince of Peace. His coming which fulfils Micah’s prophecy requires Mary’s cooperation. The birth of Christ is also the motherhood of Mary and so this Sunday we take a closer look at the blessedness of her faith; the impact of belief in the ordinariness of life.

In today’s Gospel, right after the Annunciation where Mary had put her life into God’s hands, we find her responding to the needs of others. As such, it is appropriate that Mary became the first disciple of the promised Saviour who was to come because she believed and acted on her faith.

As we approach Christmas and are taken in by the grandeur associated with it, we might forget that the relationship between belief and action is not always easy. In the case of Mary, she had to set out for the hill country of Judah, a journey by foot that might take some time. Women of her time would never travel alone. But she, believing the angel’s description of her child as holy, may have set out with the certainty that she would be protected by the holy child in her womb.

But, you do not get this in a straight-forward re-telling of the episode. Instead, we might labour under the impression that faith makes everything easy. In truth, faith does not guarantee the absence of hardship. Faith makes it possible for us to overcome hardship. In the case of Mary, she set out alone without a thought of her safety, relying on the protection of her faith. In summary, we see a correlation between faith and action where one must lead to the other. The implication of faith is action but we know that belief does not always flow into action.

The blessedness of Mary’s faith becomes an inspiration for those who are discouraged either by the futility of their faith or failure of their actions. Many of us may be failed idealists at best or plainly cynical at worst. Either way, a failed idealist or a cynic, both are crying out for faith. As such, Mary is so much more relevant as an icon of faith simply because in a “faithless world” or a “failed world”, the complication is when the “individual” is reduced to “nothingness”. No matter what station in life, almost everyone here knows the powerlessness of being small, marginalised and treated indifferently.

Part of our frustration is somewhat of our own making, meaning that we have all come to believe that all we want we can achieve on our own. In many cases, we sell the myth that faith in our dreams rests simply upon sheer strength. We have come to believe in the invincibility of our efforts or endeavours. Our faith is not in God but in our ability.

If our faith is fundamentally our strength, then Mary as the icon of faith does not make sense. A description of her powerlessness and her faith may essentially be reduced to a description of “Deus ex machina”; that moment in story telling which allows for “divine” intervention of an insolvable difficulty. Just like Cinderella’s fairy godmother appearing at a time when she had no other way to go for the ball. This formula is mostly acted out in our “feel good” movies of the “happy-ending” kind.

But, precisely, the faith of Mary is God’s strength. What she does makes sense only because she believes. Her faith seems “ridiculous” only because we have become more disbelieving or we have come to rely on ourselves. The faith of Mary will always stand out sharply as naïve against the backdrop of a technologically-driven self-sufficient scientific culture or mentality. For example, at Copenhagen, as world leaders engage in useless semantics on climate change, the polar ice-caps are melting faster than the curbing of greenhouse gas emission. To speak of faith other than of our capability suggests “inaction” bordering on a dereliction of duty. Closer to our home-front, even as we hope for the Herald’s outcome, we are left with a sinking feeling that we will lose out anyway because we have not “done” enough. You can discern how faith is related to what we do but often our action is not because we have faith. In fact, our action flows not from believing in God but in ourselves. Faith necessarily leads to action. For us, action is taken to be proof of faith and we know that is not necessarily the case.

Mary teaches us that our faith is God’s strength. She beckons us today not to give up hope because God can be relied upon and the only way we can be sure that God can be relied upon is that we, like Mary, say yes to God and like her, we act believing that God will help us because we allow Him to. Christmas is not that God needs to come but we need God to come. Faith is our call to God and faith is the reason for our actions in the world. Mary’s generous faith gave the Father the permission to send the Son into the world. In these next few days, may Mary’s example encourage us to do likewise: be generous in our faith. We will never be confounded and only then will our actions confirm that.

Solemnity of Mary Mother of God Year B

In the next few days traffic will pick up as students return to schools and warrior-mothers take to the road of sending children to school. The year end and the beginning of the year are marked by a return to school and in a way, the Liturgy is no different. As we continue to deepen our appreciation of the Incarnation, we herald in the new year with close attention to the Mother of Christ.

The 2nd Reading serves as an invitation to enter the school of Mary—this Mary whom Paul spoke of as the Woman through whom the Son of God came to be born. Luke’s Gospel not only tells us that she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart but points out to us that Mary is also the great Theotokos because she is the bearer of God our Saviour. To celebrate Mary at the beginning of the year is to enter the school of her discipleship.

What does it mean to enter the school of Mary?

The theme of the World Day for Peace is Fighting Poverty to Build Peace. Peace is the desired goal of our struggles. The abolishment of poverty is the means to attain that goal. If we understand poverty to be material deprivation, then the creation of wealth is as an exercise in the abolishment of poverty.

But, from the school of Mary, we learn that wealth or its possession is not the end poverty. Benedict XVI in his Message for the World Day of Peace speaks of the conditions of moral under-development or the negative consequences of super-development in wealthy country. A country may be wealthy but suffers from poor moral or spiritual health, that is, moral or spiritual poverty. Hence, poverty is not always material deprivation. But, what is significant is that wherever you encounter any form of externally imposed poverty, you will find that it has as its root a lack of respect for the transcendent dignity of the human person.

And, from Mary we learn that the transcendent dignity of the human person is to be found in the acknowledgement of who we really are before God. We are nothing and if at all we can boast of any possession, then we can boast of only one thing: our nothingness. This nothingness is the basis for Mary putting her entire trust in the Lord.

Mary’s posture before God teaches us that we will never win the fight against poverty out there if we do not, in the first place, acknowledge not so much the poverty that is imposed upon us but the poverty that is us. Poverty is the condition of the human person before God.

The acknowledgement of our nothingness is the basis for overcoming our selfishness—the selfishness which is an attributable cause for the current systemic failure in the world’s economic system. There is something lacking in our fight against “material” poverty when we think that the change of structure is going to solve our problems. At present there are talks that governments in the world are trying to reform the international financial system. Reform may just offer a temporary relief before the next wave of greed overwhelms the economic system again. This country, we all know, is awashed in natural resources. It has all ingredients for a truly amazing economy. But, no matter how much we have, it is never enough to withstand the rapacious or the systematic pillage of a few greedy people.

Reform must begin with the human heart. Greed is not what people do but rather an attitude which denies our true state of being as nothing before God. What we have witnessed as the unbridled amassing of wealth beyond an individual’s, a family’s or country’s need is not proof of greed but a sad confirmation that we have failed to address our poverty before God.

God created us poor not because He wants us to be poor but because He wants us to acknowledge our dependence on Him alone. He created us poor so that we may share His riches. Unless and until we acknowledge our nothingness, we cannot hope to arrive at peace. This is important as we enter a period of economic downturn that will affect everyone.

Only when we begin to acknowledge our nothing and that our being or our salvation comes from God alone that we will begin to acknowledge the other as brother or sister. In Mary, we learn that poverty is the expression of who we truly are. “He looks on His servant in her nothingness” became Mary’s impetus to visit Elizabeth her cousin. When we acknowledge our nothingness, then everything we have is a blessing from God and can be a blessing to others. Otherwise, material abundance becomes the curse of division and disunity.

So, as we enter the New Year, with hearts desiring peace for ourselves, our family and our nation, we ask Mary to teach us how to be true disciples who with faith and prayer accepts our nothingness and place our trust in God who alone can grant salvation and who desires to give to those who trust in Him.

4th Sunday of Advent Year B

It’s too good to be true. We hear people say this. The reason may be because we live in desperate times that we have acquired the natural suspicion that what is good may be too good to be true. Our conception of truth is “reality” and “reality” is measured by proximity, that is, the closer we are to whatever the phenomenon may be, the closer we are to truth. Could this be one of the reasons why people of this country love to stop and check out the goriness of a car accident? We subscribe to an unquestioned assumption about truth that may account for the growth and popularity of the genre, otherwise known as Reality TV. Truth is “Reality TV”. It follows that our conception of truth is basically what we can see.

Unfortunately, what we have seen hasn’t been entirely edifying. We have seen two great wars and many more in the last 100 years. In the last 25 years of political and economic upheavals, what we have witnessed has made us fearful for our security be it what we eat, where we live and what we do. No doubt, the fear we have is fuelled by what we see as the breaking down of law and order in the country as we witness the impotence of the individual citizen. Pregnant women are not safe from snatch thieves. ATMs are blown out of their safe enclosures. Recently, we are told that luxury cars are stolen with “inside help”. People are scammed left and right by quick get-rich programmes. The brazenness with which people exploit even the dead paints a rather dismal and bleak picture of reality. There are more reasons to be pessimistic than optimistic. Thus, when something is good, it is often too good to be true.

This pessimistic world view does have an effect on how we want to understand the 4th Sunday of Advent and consequently what Christmas may truly represent. We dedicate this Sunday to Mary. The birth of Christ must necessarily involve the motherhood of Mary. Is she too good to be true? It would seem so. First of all, she’s so “unreal”. We want a “real” Mary but we want a “real” Mary who actually represents our human limitation. If you think about it, this “real” Mary may actually mask our pessimism’s desire to limit her capacity to respond to God. It is true that we feel more at home with a Mary who is pregnant out of wedlock. She has more affinity with us when we think of her as an “unwed teenage mother”. Furthermore, Mary seals her “being so much like us” when we conceive of her as not just the mother of Jesus but also the biological mother of the brothers of Jesus. Underlying our wanting Mary to be so much like us is our inability to deal with someone whose calling is directed beyond this world. [As an aside, is it not true that people are often mean to those who are “holy”?]

When we are unable to deal with Mary’s other directedness or we perceive her as being too good to be true, then we may be struggling with at least two fundamental beliefs. The first struggle is the difficulty in dealing with a good God. In the First Reading, David wanted to build God a house, a temple worthy of Him. In reality, it was the reverse for it was God who built David a dynasty, the House of David that will last forever. This is how good God is, for every attempt of ours to please Him will be met by His returning generosity. But, our human limitation often thinks of God as one whose measure is circumscribed by our generosity. For example, the more we pray, the more God ought to answer our prayers. That is often the way we calculate God’s generosity. For those who have experienced God’s benevolence, they know that God’s generosity is always beyond what they had expected. Thus, Mary’s yes to God is premised on believing that God would never be outdone by her generosity. Even in the face of the seeming defeat of her Son who died on the Cross, she dared to remain ever faithful to His Cross because she knew in faith this God who is generous. And this leads me to the second struggle.

This struggle betrays a crisis of belief in who we can really be and what we can really do. People, and Catholics included, have derided Mary’s perpetual virginity. On the one hand, are we dealing here with stuff or matter which belongs to the realm, at best, of theological construct or at worst, of legends and both having no connexion to reality? Or, on the other hand, what lies behind the rejection of Mary’s virginity is also a rejection of our capacity to live a life which is not self-centred. We do not believe that we can be God-centred.

Mary represents the best of who we can be. Thus, desiring her to be like us is to abdicate our calling to cooperate with God. Yes, it is true that all of us are affected by the division of Original Sin but when we look at Mary, we recognise the true capacity of the human spirit—its ability to be taken up by God like Mary was.

It is right that the 4th Sunday of Advent be given over to Mary. The Catholic belief in Mary’s greatness is not idolatrous. However, let me qualify that: some people’s behaviour may be idolatrous. But the belief in Mary’s greatness is not idolatrous because it is first and foremost a firm belief in God’s goodness and secondly she represents humanity’s capacity to respond totally to God.

Solemnity of the Blessed Trinity Year A

Last week, I raised a point that the Church fears no “extravagance” with regard to the celebration of the Eucharist. However, the word itself is problematic. It suggests of “wastage” which is nothing but scandalous especially in the midst of hunger. However, extravagance is definitely relevant to Judas’ concern for the poor. A calculative mentality with regard to God will lead to a calculative mentality with humanity. Loving God with a measure beyond this world allows or opens our heart to embrace the poor with the same generous measure. Furthermore, the idea of “extravagance” is not alien to Pentecost. We are used to thinking of Pentecost as the descent of the Holy Spirit. But the descent of the Holy Spirit actually marks an ascent into the life of the Trinity as it drew the Apostles and consequently the Church into the life and vision of God.

This Sunday, our attention is directed to Mary. JPII believes that when we ponder the mystery of the Eucharist, we are led to take a closer look at Mary. But, according to our Liturgical Calendar, this Sunday is also Trinity Sunday. Hence, how are we to speak of Mary in the context of the Solemnity of Blessed Trinity?

The answer is found in Mary’s “Fiat”, Mary’s “Yes”. When Mary said “Yes” at the Annunciation, her “Yes” at once links her to the Eucharist and the Trinity. How is that so?

Firstly, with regard to the Eucharist, the Gospel may be silent on the subject of Mary’s presence at the Last Supper. However, as she was present with the Apostles in prayer, as they waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit, we can be certain that she would also be present at the celebration of the Eucharist of the first generation of Christians (Acts 2:42). But surprisingly, Mary is linked to the Eucharist not because she was present in those celebrations. Instead, Mary is linked to the Eucharist because her interior disposition allowed her to abandon herself to the mystery of the Eucharist. As a mystery, the Eucharist calls for faith and Mary, in giving herself over totally to God at the Annunciation, made an act of faith. That act of faith earned her the title “Woman of the Eucharist” because she was already living the spirit of the Eucharist even before its Institution at the Last Supper.28 As Woman of the Eucharist, Mary is never far from the actions of Christ. Mary’s “do whatever He tells you” at Cana becomes Christ’s “Do this in memory of me” at the Last Supper. She who leads us to the Son will also lead us to the Blessed Sacrament, the true Body and Blood of her Son.

Secondly, you can also discern that Mary’s Fiat at the Annunciation is at the same time, a “yes” of total abandonment to the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. In saying yes, she believed that Christ whom she conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit was the Son of God the Father. Consequently, there is a profound link between the Fiat of Mary at the Annunciation and the Amen of each Catholic who receives Holy Communion. Mary’s “Yes” brought her into the life of the Trinity. Our “Amen” also draws us into the life of the Trinity.

In trying to live the mystery of the Eucharist, Mary is our Mother as well as our Model. Christ on the Cross at Calvary allowed the future and the past to be brought into the present. Therefore, whatever Christ did would, through the Eucharist, become present to us. He gave John to Mary and so through the Eucharist, we gain a Mother. He gave Mary to John and so in the Eucharist, Mary becomes our model.29 In that way, you can say that Mary always accompanies us in the “Amen” we make at Holy Communion. Mary is ever present in our commitment to be conformed into the image of Christ.

Finally, JPII asks us to look at the Magnificat as it mirrors the praise and thanksgiving of the Eucharist. With Mary, we praise God in the Eucharist through Christ our Saviour, even as we hope for and anticipate “the new heavens” and “the new earth” at the 2nd Coming. But, our desire for a better world is not to be found in programmes. Instead, our vision of a better world begins with the Person of Christ. We are made perfect in knowing, loving and imitating Christ. As Mary leads us to Christ, she will also lead us to find Him in the Eucharist. JPII says: “In the Eucharist, we have Jesus, we have his redemptive sacrifice, we have his resurrection, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, and we have adoration, obedience and love of the Father”—the Blessed Trinity.

Our eyes are tuned today to Mary our Mother and Model as we endeavour to embrace fully the mystery of the Eucharist and enter the life of the Trinity whom we love and celebrate. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Year C

The human person sees in perspective—he needs to see things in perspective in order to make sense of it. For example, looking out into the horizon, we scan a wide panorama of things. What happens is that our faculty of sight needs to lock onto some familiar things so as to give us a measure of what is before us.

The Assumption of Mary is one such measure for the human race. In the immensity, the grandeur and the majesty of who God is, Mary assumed body and soul into heaven becomes such a figure that is familiar to us; a figure that allows us to see how we are to fit into the larger picture. I particularly like very much the quote by a Poet that Mary is our tainted nature’s solitary boast.

She is the foundation for the reasonability of faith. Her fiat, “let it be done according to your word”, represents an utter and unqualified trust in a God who never fails to satisfy our inmost or deepest expectation. God is the only one who can satisfy us completely and as such, He never fails to keep his promise. Unfortunately, many of us believe that our faith will shield us from pains and sufferings. The foundation of our faith is rather contingent and is based upon the principle of reciprocity: “God, we do this and you keep your promise”. The basis of our relationship with God is at the level of “You scratch my back, I scratch your back”. If that were not the case, then, why the many questionings that come after a tragedy? “I have done my part and yet I feel so betrayed by my God”.

For Mary, “Let it be done” does not take away the pains which she has to undergo—an uncertain pregnancy of a woman out of wedlock and its attendant punishment if found out; the indignity of giving birth in a stable; the frightful losing of her only son, not to mention, the son of God, and the anxious searching for him in Jerusalem; the leaving of Jesus from home for an active ministry that saw him with nowhere to lay his head; and the death of Jesus at an age where he was beginning to flourish in his ministry. Her faith, instead of shielding her, propels her into the heart of living. Life is full of vicissitudes and in her own life we know that Mary’s faith brought her into the fullness of life. It is in life that she finds her God. Mary became our pillar of faith not because she was shielded from the bomb blast of belief in God but because she took the risk of standing by and upon the promise of God. People might argue that because she was sinless, immaculately conceived and therefore she could not have felt the toils or the troubles of temptations that we all, “mere mortals” feel. But judging by what she went through, one can surmise that precisely because of the immaculate conception that God our Lord subjected her to the test beyond what many of us can bear. The Immaculate Conception was a gift given to Mary in view of her role as the Mother of the Son of God. The Immaculate Conception was never given so that Mary could be free from the trials that we are subjected to. Thus, rightly she becomes the measure of our vision of heaven.

According to the Preface written for the Solemnity, Mary is taken up to be the beginning and the pattern of the Church in its perfection… As such, the Assumption is like a mirror of Easter Sunday. The empty tomb of Jesus is also the empty tomb of Mary for the Church has never venerated the mortal remains of Mary. Since Mary is closely associated with Jesus, she participates fully in his resurrection. Mary's assumption strengthens our faith just as the transfiguration on the mountain strengthened the faith of the three apostles.

Today we gather in joyous celebration because all Marian doctrine and devotion, properly understood and practised, does not lead believers away from, but rather more deeply into, the mystery of Christ. Therefore, let us look at Mary, our pillar of faith, to ask her to strengthen us in our journey amidst the joys and sorrows of life. What we all undergo will all be transformed by Christ's victory. Mary knows it already, and today she confirms our faith and hope.