Sacred Heart Triduum Day 3 6th June 2024

The theme for our Triduum and pretty much for the year is “The Heart of Christ, the heart of the family”. We have covered two topics central to this theme and they are the Family and the Sacrament of Marriage. Today, we want to talk about Jesus Christ. He is the key to our family and our marriage.

Firstly, the primary lens to view our relationship with Jesus is marriage. That is why the Sacrament of Marriage plays such an important role in mirroring what it means to have a relationship with the Lord. Christ’s association with the Church is described through the nuptial relationship between a man and a woman. But it does not stop there. The vocations of priests and religious too can be seen in the light of marriage. A priest is married to the people he serves. A religious nun is the spouse of Christ.

In the light of these nuptial relationships, we could perhaps begin exploring a reality crucial to our well-being. And it is happiness. How can we characterise happiness? According to St Therese de Lisieux, “true happiness on earth consists of being forgotten and in remaining completely ignorant of created things. I understood that all we accomplish, however brilliant, is worth nothing without love”. Such a spiritual notion of happiness runs counter to our understanding because our concept of happiness can be narrowly materialistic. It is largely centred on the triple criteria of success, money and power.

Such is observable in JB which in a way embodies this notion. On one level, families struggle financially. Many face the difficulty of making ends meet. From this perspective, chasing for money is not evil. Jesus said, when Satan asked Him to turn stones into bread, “Man does not live on bread alone”. That quip may be true, but man still needs bread for the strength to worship God. What is also true for many who have made a life in JB is the improvement in the quality of life. This is where the snare of materialism can catch us unawares. The constant drive to “improve” may be based on the model of “not having enough”.

Whenever we operate under the principle of inadequacy, our happiness will depend on accumulating. Enough is never secure with the result that one is left hungering for more security. The race for material sufficiency is one that many have no control over and even if they feel that it is futile, they have no power to stop running.

Perhaps we can learn the truth about “not having enough”. There is a God-gap in our heart. Even sins can be understood from the perspective of the emptiness created by this God-vacuum in our lives. By God’s intentional design we are left with this incomplete part and the only way to fill this void is with God and not with material goods.
If we do not recognise this, we will be condemned to search for God in all the wrong places. Have you ever suffer an addiction? Gaming or gambling, texting or sexting, substance abuse or shopping compulsion. Our hunger for completion is immense and any kind of disorder, physical or behavioural, that leads to sins is really a symptom of our God-search gone wrong.

Some of us struggle each day to make sense of our lives. And many despair that they can ever be saved. The usage of the words like sinner or sinful is not a condemnation that we are bad. Such words only point to the symptoms that our search for God has gone wrong. We are searching for love in all the wrong places instead of turning towards God.
But Pope Francis did say that “Tears are the lenses we need to see Jesus”. With an incomplete heart seeking fulfilment, it makes a lot of sense for us to turn to a Heart that breaks itself for us. Instead of searching desperately amongst unsuitable fulfilment, we would be better served by turning to the Lord because He is our answer.

Imagine that our names, your names and mine have been inscribed onto the Broken but Sacred Heart of Jesus. His Heart pulsates with love for each one of us, for you and for me. No one is ever unwanted by Him, not even the greatest sinner and it is never too late to turn to Him.

The greatest material well-being, psychological equilibrium and spiritual fulfilment we can think of or we can ever achieve pales in comparison to the joy of being love by Christ. The Heart of Christ speaks to the aching heart that longs for completion and that cries out to be loved. Happiness or earthly well-being can only do so much. We may be happy for a while but it is never forever because after a while, we will always feel dissatisfied. It is Jesus Christ who is the sole answer all our eternal longings.

Our family cannot do without Him. He must be at the centre of your marriage. Perhaps we can end with a prayer of consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Blessed are You Lord God, Eternal Father.
Our marriage comes from your goodness to us,
You are the one who brought us together and you lead our life.
We place the Most Sacred Heart of your Son Jesus at the centre of our marriage:
to foster a heart free from sin
to nurture a heart giving to the other
to nourish a heart burning with love
to sustain a heart open to your will.
Dispel from our marriage and our family Satan our enemy, the spirit of evil, and send your healing remedy, the ArchangelRaphael, to guide us and defend us.
Amen.

Sacred Heart Triduum Day 2 5th June 2024

Yesterday we spoke of the human family as the bedrock of civilisation. When the family disappears, civilisation will crumble. Today we will focus on the basis for our family to thrive. It is the institution of marriage.

Marriage is hard work. When spouses complain about each other and one of them feels that he or she is putting all the effort into the marriage, it is because couples forget that marriage is also team work. Today such an experience is the norm. “I know what is right” and “I am sure that I am right”. Our knowledge-based society is marked by such a high degree of self-confidence that team work becomes almost impossible. Why? Not only do I know what is right, I am always right. Those of you who are married for a long time, you know that kind of losing proposition. You can never win and conversations stop even before they are started. The trend in more affluent families is that once the children are old enough, couples whose lives are already highly individualised, will go their separate ways. If they do not divorce, then they live solitarily lives with not much connexion to each other.

What is marriage supposed to be? It is fascinating that there are no marriages in heaven. Christ Himself pointed that out in Mt 22:23ff when He was asked the question of whose wife will a woman be at the Resurrection if she had married all seven brothers who died soon after each wedding. None of the brothers was the answer provided by Jesus for at the Resurrection we are not given to marriage.

And yet, there is an important detail found in the Book of the Apocalypse. There described in Revelation 19: 7. “Let us be glad and joyful and give praise to God, because this is the time for the marriage of the Lamb. His bride is ready, and she has been able to dress herself in dazzling white linen, because her linen is made of the good deeds of the saints”.

Marriage is precisely a Sacrament because here on earth, it is a symbol of the nuptial union between Christ, the Bridegroom and the Church, His Bride. Recently, Harrison Butker, an American Footballer, a 3-time Champion Kicker gave a commencement speech in a Catholic College. He is now getting lambasted for his view. Interestingly, he is only 28 years old. He said something rather relevant to the topic we have for today. If you are interested in the whole speech, go to National Catholic Register and type in Harrison Butker’s speech. What struck me, of all the challenging topics he raised, was an unacknowledged truth. The context of this particular point he had raised was when he spoke of his wife. He said this. “She is a primary educator to our children. She is the one who ensures I never let football or my business become a distraction from that of a husband and father. She is the person that knows me best at my core, and it is through our marriage that, Lord willing, we will both attain salvation”.

Insyallah, through our marriage, we will both attain salvation.

How many people do you think stand in front of the altar and think this of their vocation. I am not referring to a priestly or a religious vocation. Rather, I am referring to the marital vocation, that is, the call to be married. Here, the vocation, the calling is our means of salvation. I enter marriage so that I can be saved. I would be brave to think that standing right before the priest during the exchange of vows, couples would be thinking, “I forgot to send the invitation to that Uncle or Aunty”. Or, “Chiaklat, the flowers we paid for look like dead”, etc. Anything can be a running commentary in your head except this, “She or he is going to be my road to salvation”.

Marriage saves. You look at me… maybe you try to steal a look at your spouse, “You must be kidding me, right?”. Nevertheless, it is true. As a Sacrament, it is pointing towards to the perennial truth of Christ’s relationship with the Church. Christ loves the Church so much that He died. He sacrificed His life so that the Church, the Bride might live.

This is the model for the discipleship of marriage. Most of the time when we hear the reading of St Paul to the Ephesians where wives are told to obey their husbands, many men stop there without realising that husbands are supposed to sacrifice themselves for the wives.

There is a mutuality of self-oblation or self-offering when one obeys and one sacrifices. I used to say this during a wedding homily. “You want your wife to obey you in everything, give her your credit card with no limit”. Couples laughed but demanding obedience has never been a one-way street.

Finally, the vocation of a Christian marriage, where husband and wife give of themselves to the relationship, is a means of salvation. Marriage is not merely a remedy for concupiscence meaning that theologians used to explain that marriage is a cure for those who cannot stand to be alone. It is not just a cure but truly it is a path to salvation. The goal of marriage is heaven and the pilgrimage there is through the family where the relationship between husband and wife flourishes in the soil of authentic and fruitful love. Marriage is not only the instrument of salvation for the couple but also for the whole of society. Husband, love your wife. Wife, love your husband. Upon your love for each other rest the future of the family, the bedrock of society and the foundation of civilisation. There may not be any marriage in heaven and yet the road there is paved with good marriages.

Sacred Heart Triduum Day 1 4th June 2024

The word Kingdom is social, more than we realise. As a word, Kingdom suggests the rule of one, coming from the word “monarchy”, that is, the “rule (arkhein) of one (monos) [monos-arkhein]. Scripture is filled with the notions like the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of heaven. Given that there are boundaries, we may just operate in a rather restrictive bi-personal matrix. Christ is the King and I am His subject. The Lord has come to establish His Kingdom, His sovereignty and rule over “individuals”.

But the word Kingdom is basically social. The first sense of its “social” setting is the familiar “Pater noster”. The prayer is addressed to “our” Father and not just “my” Father. This “social” sense is confirmed in Matthew 25. At the end of time, the flock will be gathered and there will be judgement. The King is not really the “monos-arkhein”, the monarchy. Instead, the King is revealed to be “society”. Who is the King and when have we met Him? For as long as you shelter the poor, give food to the hungry, quench the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner. As long as you perform these actions to “the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me”.

The Kingdom that Christ has come to establish is societal in its expression. It requires that society recognises His sovereignty by resembling what His rule stands for. Thus, the building blocks of the kingdom has to be more than mere individuals. Even the word “individual” cannot stand alone because it is a relational term. No one is an individual without the context of the other. The foundation of society is the individual but rather the family and in our case, the basis for the Kingdom is the Christian family.

We are focusing on the Christian family in the context of the Sacred Heart of Jesus because it is our feast day. There is an act which has fallen out of use but it is related to the family. It is the act of consecration of the family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

St John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio (1981) remarked that every person learns what it is to be loved and to love, in the bosom of the family. Family life is crucial to our social development. The Catechism calls the family “the original cell of social life” (CCC2207). Within the family, the foundations are laid for a person to be who he or she is meant to be both through the love of God and of neighbour, that is, the family. Our closest neighbours are our parents and our siblings.

The family plays such a central role in the health of any civilisation. When Malays encounter bad behaviour, what do they say? “Kurang ajar”. The Teochew refers to the family—boh kah si (meiyou jia jiao). Therefore to create a civilisation of love we need to appreciate the truth about man, the truth about the family and only then can we know the truth about society. Without these interrelated truths, "civilisation" can become a merely superficial term which describes an ordered or developed society, where people are polite to one another. We can be polite to one another but that is not necessarily a civilisation. Look at our country. Malays can exist on their own and they do not need us. Chinese can also exist on their own. The indigenous East Malaysians can be happy without us. And we polite to each other but the question is this: is that nationhood?

The core of our being is relational which in our case means that fundamentally man must stand in relation to God. Without God, man will be left adrift because God cannot be replaced by the state or even by himself. As long as God is absent, we will not be able to be who we truly are, the Imago Dei, that is, the image of God.

Man as an image of God is called to responsible and personal collaboration with creation for his good and the good of all. No man is an island. We are called to community which brings us to the basic community, the human family. According to the Pope, "Human fatherhood and motherhood contain in an essential and unique way a ‘likeness’ to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love".

The family brings us directly into the heart of the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity. As a Trinity of Persons, the inner life of God becomes a model for the family. As God the Father loves God the Son in a mutuality of “I” and “thou” or “you”, so too the relationship of a man and a woman in marriage. The mutuality between husband and wife opens itself out to life through the procreation of children. Therefore the establishment of the human family is founded the truth of who we are as persons created in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God.

This makes sense of the Act of Consecration of the Family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He commands us to do it because He had revealed the Trinitarian inner life of love. We are invited to live that love. The way to do it is to shape ourselves into that love by consecrating the family to the love revealed in the Heart of Christ.

The family is the means to deepen our love of God and neighbour. To welcome the presence of the Heart of Jesus, is to draw from Him the true love that our families need to craft a civilisation of love. According to Pope Pius XII, the consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is our way of building up the Kingdom. May the love of Jesus Christ of which His Heart is the fountain, take possession of our private and public life so that He may reign over society and home life through His law of love.