Month: February 2017

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Thursday, 9 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day, all of us ought to reflect on what we heard from the Sacred Scriptures, which are none other than the proof that God, throughout all of history, had loved each and every one of us, caring for us and providing for us out of His love. He has created us all man and woman, so that we may procreate with each other and be merry, filling up this world with our own kind.

He has blessed us all with many things, with all sorts of animals and plants to accompany us, all kinds of living things to enrich the beautiful and wonderful world that He had created. He has given all of these in the world to us, so that we become the stewards of creation, and become the one in charge over all that God had created, because all of us are special to Him.

He has also shown mercy and love for His people, by sending none other than His own Son, Jesus Christ, to be our Saviour and Liberator, the One with the power to rescue us from the suffering and damnation of hell. He gives His blessings upon those who have walked in His ways and obeyed Him, as shown in how He healed the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman, by the faith which she had shown all before the Lord.

At that time, there was a great prejudice which the people of Israel had against the people of pagan and Gentile origins. This means that the Israelites often saw themselves as the special people who alone among all the other races and peoples in this world, was chosen by God to be His own beloved people. But in time, this became a great pride among them, and they became stubborn and exclusive, looking down on all those who supposedly did not belong to the community of Israel.

But God created each and every man and woman equal, equal in love and stature before God. If God does not love anyone except the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, then He would have had no reason to create all the other races of men. God would not have created other people, if not because of His love for each and every one of His creations, especially in particular all of us mankind.

He has given so much to us, and blessed us all with many good things, and yet, it was many of us who have not been faithful to Him, being distracted by the temptations of this world, and all the things that had separated us from Him. We have wandered off on our journey towards God, and as a result, we became lost from the Lord, and we were unable to find our way back to Him.

We ended up becoming proud and arrogant, and we closed our hearts to the Lord and to our fellow brethren, and we became like those who refused to listen to the truth because they thought that they could not be wrong, and that they were always right no matter what. This was what had brought down many people, the sin of pride, the refusal to accept the fact that we have erred and made mistakes, and that there was a need for conversion and change in one’s attitude so that we may be forgiven our sins.

The people of Israel might have looked down on their neighbours, but it was indeed ironic that while they refused to listen to the truth of God passed on to them through Jesus, their promised Lord and Saviour, it was a humble and simple Syro-Phoenician woman, a pagan and a Gentile, who have shown them a faith that greatly surpassed their own.

She has humbled herself greatly before the Lord, knowing that she was a sinner and an unworthy servant of God. And she endured even when the Lord apparently mocked her, by saying that one should not take the bread and pass it on to the dogs to eat. We might think that Jesus was doing something not appropriate by mocking a poor woman who asked Him for help, but in fact, Jesus knew her faith and the steadfastness of her belief, and wanted to show to all of His disciples, that great faith could be found even among the people not counted among the sons and daughters of Israel.

For ultimately, God had made us all to be His own sons and daughters through His Son, by bringing all of us together all who believe in Him and His salvation, as Christians, all those whom He had chosen from the world to be His own. And therefore it is important for all of us to take note of the examples and the action of the Syro-Phoenician woman, and reflect on what she had done. She is an inspiration to all of us.

As Christians, all of us must open our hearts to the Lord, be humble and be cognisant of the sins that we have committed in our lives, that these are stumbling blocks and obstacles that prevented us from reaching out to God and attaining His salvation. We must be like the woman who showed her faith even amidst challenges and difficulties, and even when others seemed to reject her, she pushed on nonetheless.

In our faith, we must be sincere and be strong as she had shown, and be filled with the desire to be forgiven and to be healed by God, because all of us are sinners, and by the grace of God, we can be healed and made whole again. May the Lord bless us all and our works, and may He forgive us our sins, and bring us all into His glory and grant us eternal life. Amen.

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Thursday, 9 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green
Mark 7 : 24-30

At that time, when Jesus left the place where He rebuked the Pharisees, He went to the border of the Tyrian country. There He entered a house, and did not want anyone to know He was there, but He could not remain hidden. A woman, whose small daughter had an evil spirit, heard of Him, and came and fell at His feet. Now this woman was a pagan, a Syro-Phoenician by birth, and she begged Him to drive the demon out of her daughter.

Jesus told her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to puppies.” But she replied, “Sir, even the puppies under the table eat the crumbs from the children’s bread.” Then Jesus said to her, “You may go your way; because of such a response, the demon has gone out of your daughter.”

And when the woman went home, she found her child lying in bed, and the demon gone.

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Thursday, 9 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : Green
Psalm 127 : 1-2, 3, 4-5

Blessed are you who fear the Lord and walk in His ways. You will ear the fruit of your toil; you will be blessed and favoured.

Your wife, like a vine, will bear fruits in your home; your children, like olive shoots will stand around your table.

Such are the blessings bestowed upon the man who fears the Lord. May the Lord bless you from Zion. May you see Jerusalem prosperous all the days of your life.

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Thursday, 9 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green
Genesis 2 : 18-25

YHVH God said, “It is not good for Man to be alone; I will give him a helper who will be like him.” Then YHVH God formed from the earth all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air and brought them to Man to see what he would call them; and whatever Man called every living creature, that was its name.

So Man gave names to all the cattle, the birds of the air and to every beast of the field. But he did not find among them a helper like himself. Then YHVH God caused a deep sleep to come over Man and he fell asleep. He took one of his ribs and filled its place with flesh. The rib which YHVH God had taken from Man He formed into a woman and brought her to the man.

The man then said, “Now this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken from man.” That is why man leaves his father and mother and is attached to his wife, and with her becomes one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked and were not ashamed.

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Wednesday, 8 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Jerome Emiliani and St. Josephine Bakhita, Virgin (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Saints or Virgins)
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in today’s Scripture readings, all of us heard about the account of the creation of Man, how God created the first of our kind and gave him life. He blessed them and gave them many things, and also the command and stewardship over the earth. It was also mentioned that God laid an important commandment to man, that he must not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a story which we are surely well acquainted with.

In that story we heard of how the first man, Adam and the first woman, Eve disobeyed God, when Satan disguised as a serpent tempted them to eat a fruit from the tree, and therefore gaining knowledge over good and evil to become like God their Creator. That was how mankind sinned and therefore were cast out of the Gardens of Eden, and were forced to endure sufferings on earth as a result of their disobedience.

But now let us ask this question to ourselves. Was it the forbidden fruit from the tree that had caused mankind to sin and to become wicked? Or was it because they themselves were unable to restrain their greed and failed to resist the temptations of the devil? This would become significant if we look into the Gospel passage today, where Jesus mentioned to the Pharisees and to the teachers of the Law, in their dispute about the rules of the laws that the latter tried to impose on the people of God.

We have to understand the dynamics and the historical developments of that time if we are to understand why Jesus struggled with these people, who refused to budge and adamantly tried to advance their own thinking against the truth revealed to all by God through Jesus. At that time, the Pharisees strictly enforced the rule of food prohibitions, or what is now known as the kosher rule.

They followed the old rule of Moses, which the Lord passed down to the people in the guidelines of what they ought to eat and not to eat. But at that time, the people of Israel were travelling in the desert, and they were truly rebellious and refused to obey the Lord and His ways. That was why God imposed on them the set of laws, rules and regulations that He had put in place so as to help them to control themselves and to help guide them on the way towards righteousness.

But God never intended for the laws to become a burden for His people, or as a tool to make people to lord it over others just because they conform to the rules, and while others did not. It was never God’s intention for His people to misunderstand the real meaning of His laws. Yet, that was precisely what the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law had done.

These people were too focused on the external applications of the Law, to the point that they were blinded to their own shortcomings and failures. They were so focused on the purity of their externals and all the observations of the laws they so carefully guarded, they had forgotten the most important commandment of all, that is to love and serve the Lord with all of their might and strength.

Many of the things which they had done, they did them in order to be seen and to be praised by the people who saw them. Many might have seen how they have observed fully the entirety of the laws of Moses, all of its rules and tenets, but on the other hand, as just mentioned, their intention for doing all these were wrong. God did not have the place of honour in their hearts as He should have.

It was just as how it was at the time of Adam and Eve. At that time, they disobeyed God and therefore sinned. It was not because of the fruit they ate that they have sinned, but because from their own hearts, wickedness had arisen, the inability to restrain their greed and desires which Satan used in order to bring about our downfall. In the same manner therefore, what Jesus said was very true, that what made someone impure is not something that we eat and bring in from the outside, but rather what came out from ourselves.

God created all things good and perfect, and therefore it is not right indeed to say that anything is impure or unclean. Rather, it was what had come out from our hearts that had led us into sin. It was our vulnerabilities and our tendency to fall into the temptations of worldliness which had brought us into sin, rather than anything else outside ourselves.

It is often that we, like the Pharisees and the elders, refused to see this truth because we are proud, and we do not want to lose our face, knowing that we are not perfect inside us, but dirty and wicked. And therefore, we put on masks of purity and piety, in order to hide the fact that we are sinners and delinquent rebels before God and men. But what we are doing is that we are just running away from the problem, and often, we end up in denial, which leads us all into an even greater sin, that is the refusal to repent from our sins.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is where perhaps we should look up to the examples of the holy saints we venerate and glorify today, namely St. Jerome Emiliani and St. Josephine Bakhita. St. Jerome Emiliani was an Italian priest whose deeds among the orphans and those who were suffering then, was greatly noted by his contemporaries, as he worked hard to ensure that these people were properly taken care of and not abandoned.

St. Jerome Emiliani established places for these people to settle in, renting houses for this purpose, and increasingly, there were more and more pious and loving people who followed in his footsteps and stepped in to help the orphans and the poor people to be able to have a decent living. Eventually a religious society founded upon the ideals and the works of St. Jerome Emiliani was established, through which many people would go on to follow in the footsteps of this great and holy saint.

Meanwhile, St. Josephine Bakhita was a former slave turned a pious nun, born in Sudan in northern Africa, and was sold to slavery at a very young age, when she was kidnapped by slave traders who sold her to the slave market. She was also sold and resold a few times between slave owners, which experiences troubled and traumatised her greatly.

Eventually she was bought by an Italian vice-consul, and through difficult moments, managed to make her way to Italy, where she received the faith and became one of the converts. She also managed to gain her freedom, and upon baptism, she chose to join the convent of religious sisters, becoming one of the Canossian sisters.

She eventually continued to serve God and His people dutifully, renowned for her great piety and faith, in her zeal in the service of God, and in how her holiness shone through her actions in life. She never forgot her experiences in life, how she had suffered through slavery and all the other injustices, and yet, as the perfect example of Christian love and virtue, it was told that when one youth asked her if she would forgive her captors and slavers, she immediately said without hesitation that she would forgive them, for without them, she would not be a Christian, a religious, and indeed, later a saint.

The examples of these two venerable saints can be our inspiration in life, brothers and sisters in Christ. We must follow in their footsteps, doing good in our lives, and not be trapped by our pride, our folly and our stubbornness to accept God’s grace, forgiveness and love. We must learn to be faithful as St. Jerome Emiliani and St. Josephine Bakhita had been faithful, and learn to love as they have loved.

May the Lord help us all, so that we may emulate the lives of His wonderful saints, and practice what they themselves had done, in our own lives. May the Lord bless us all and our works, so that they will bring much good to this world, and bring righteousness and justice upon ourselves, that we will be worthy of the Lord, and worthy to receive His promise of eternal life, purified from all of our sins. May God bless us all. Amen.

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Wednesday, 8 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Jerome Emiliani and St. Josephine Bakhita, Virgin (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Saints or Virgins)
Mark 7 : 14-23

At that time, Jesus then called the people to Him again and said to them, “Listen to Me, all of you, and try to understand. Nothing that enters a person from the outside can make that person unclean. It is what comes from within that makes a person unclean. Let everyone who has ears listen.”

When Jesus got home and was away from the crowd, His disciples asked Him about this saying, and He replied, “So even you are dull? Do you not see that whatever comes from outside cannot make a person unclean, since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and is finally passed out?” Thus Jesus declared that all foods are clean.

And He went on, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him, for evil designs come out of the heart : theft, murder, adultery, jealousy, greed, maliciousness, deceit, indecency, slander, pride and folly. All these evil things come from within and make a person unclean.”

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Wednesday, 8 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Jerome Emiliani and St. Josephine Bakhita, Virgin (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Saints or Virgins)
Psalm 103 : 1-2a, 27-28, 29bc-30

Bless the Lord my soul! Clothed in majesty and splendour; o Lord, my God, how great You are! You are wrapped in light as with a garment.

They all look to You for their food in due time. You give it to them, and they gather it up; You open Your hand, they are filled with good things.

You take away their breath, they expire and return to dust. When You send forth Your Spirit, they are created, and the face of the earth is renewed.

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Wednesday, 8 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Jerome Emiliani and St. Josephine Bakhita, Virgin (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Saints or Virgins)
Genesis 2 : 4b-9, 15-17

On the day that YHVH God made the earth and the heavens, there was not yet on earth any shrub on the fields, nor had any plant yet sprung up, for YHVH God had not made it rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the earth, but a mist went up from the earth and watered the surface of the earth.

Then YHVH God formed Man, dust drawn from the clay, and breathed into his nostrils a breath of life and Man became alive with breath. God planted a garden in Eden in the east and there He placed Man whom He had created. YHVH God caused to grow from the ground every kind of tree that is pleasing to see and good to eat, also the tree of life on the middle of the garden and the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

YHVH God took Man and placed him in the garden of Eden to till it and to take care of it. Then YHVH God gave an order to Man saying, “You may eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you will not eat, for on the day you eat of it, you will die.”

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Tuesday, 7 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day we continue to hear the discourse on the creation of the world, in which we heard how in the Book of Genesis it was describe, the process involved when God created this world with all of its living creatures, from plants to animals, from the smallest to the greatest of living things, just as He had created all the non-living objects, and the crowning moment in which that He created above all things in this world, He created mankind.

Man has been created as the last of God’s creation, as the crowning glory of all of His wondrous creations, because no one and nothing else was created in the very image of God Himself. All of us have been created in God’s own image, and in our faces, we bear within ourselves, the very Image of God. God Himself breathed life into us, turning mere dust and earth into a living being, namely Man.

But why God created all of us in the first place? It was because of His love. God is perfectly fine with Himself, a perfect being with a perfect love, needing nothing else. But He wants to share the love He has inside Him, and that was why, He created all of us. He loves all that He has created, and in particular He loves each and every one of us mankind, whom He had made to be even His own children.

Indeed, He has not intended for us to suffer in this world, or to suffer the pain of death. If we read through the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, we would realise just how wonderful and perfect was the world that was before the entry of sin into our hearts. Before sin came into mankind’s hearts, all things were good, and indeed were very good because God created all things perfect and good. All that men ever needed were there, and our first ancestors Adam and Eve had been given great privileges, having been given command over all other things on earth.

But mankind disobeyed the Lord, following rather their own greed and desire, tempted by the devil, instead of listening to God’s ways. And when we sinned, that was when we were sundered and separated from God’s love and grace. And by right, we would have been doomed to destruction, as a result of our own folly. But God did not give up on us, and He continued to love us all nonetheless, even as He punished our ancestors and banished them from the Garden of Eden.

To that extent of His great love, that God had given us all His laws and commandments, His precepts and ways to be followed and to be obeyed. That was what the Ten Commandments and all the laws given to Moses was about. The Law of God was meant to be a guide for us to find our way back to Him, and to repent our sins and be saved in the state of grace, having been reconciled with Him.

Yet, the reason why in the Gospel today Jesus was very angry at the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, as He also did in various other parts of the four Holy Gospels was that, the Law which God had given to men, had been misinterpreted, misunderstood, and worst of all, misused, that in the end, instead of helping to bring mankind closer to God, they ended up being used otherwise, either as means to bring glory instead to man, or to shut people out from salvation.

What do I mean, brothers and sisters in Christ? I mean that those elders and leaders of the Israelites had not been faithful in their duties and responsibilities. They had not been using the Law of God in the right manner, but instead, continued the mistakes of their ancestors. The laws which God had given to Moses had become a formality, and they had been twisted in meaning and purpose, becoming instead a series of laws that were done without understanding of its real purpose, that is for mankind to know God, to love God and to find their way to Him.

Instead, they became a burden to the people, for the Pharisees and the elders insisted that all of the people must obey the commandments and laws in its entirety, in its application, from the smallest details to the greatest. And they themselves did obey the laws, but not because they loved God, but because they were concerned about their own image, enjoying being praised and lauded for their obedience and adherence to the laws of God.

This was what Jesus meant when He criticised the Pharisees because they first criticised Him and His disciples for not washing their hands in the manner prescribed in the laws they had formulated, where the people ought to wash their hands in a certain manner, that is to wash thoroughly the entire hand and arms before they could eat or drink. But in doing so, if they did so without having God in all the things they did, then whatever they were doing would not benefit them at all.

They were also arbitrary in their judgments, allowing people to contravene the laws and commandments where they liked it, as long as they were able to benefit from it. It was just like how they allowed the Temple of God to be defiled with the presence of merchants and money changers, selling goods and even tricking people, many of them honest people and indeed poor, in order to gain profits, not just for the merchants but also for themselves.

In all that we had heard today, brothers and sisters in Christ, we are all reminded that all the things we do, we must do it with the love of God in everything. God must be the reason that we do every single thing and action in our lives, or else we are bound to do things as the Pharisees had done. Instead of bringing us closer to God, we would end up doing things that keeping us further away from Him.

We must remember always that God created us all out of love, and all that He had done for us is because of His love. He does not need anything else from us except for our obedience, and most importantly for our love. We ought to love Him in the same manner and intensity just as He had first loved us all. We must not see what God had done unto us as a matter of punishment, that God ought to be feared and obeyed without understanding that all He had done, He did it out of love for us.

Therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ, let us all strive that each and every one of us will be able to appreciate the grace of life that all of us have received from God, the love which He had showered us with, so that we may come to the realisation that we need to repent from our sinful and wicked ways, and draw closer to God’s mercy and love. God wants to forgive us, brethren, but do we realise that we need to do something in order to be forgiven?

And that is by opening the doors of our hearts to welcome His love and His mercy. Let us all let the Lord enter into our hearts, and destroy the pride, greed, apathy, hatred, and all the things that had kept us away from being able to love God with all of our strength. May the Lord help us in this journey and strengthen our faith that we will persevere through the challenges and the difficulties that will come our way, that in the end, we will be found righteous and worthy to receive the inheritance promised to us by the Lord, but once lost because of our sins. God bless us all. Amen.

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Tuesday, 7 February 2017 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green
Mark 7 : 1-13

One day the Pharisees gathered around Jesus, and with them were some teachers of the Law who had just come from Jerusalem. They noticed that some of His disciples were eating their meal with unclean hands, that is, without washing them.

Now the Pharisees, and in fact all the Jews never eat without washing their hands, for they follow the tradition received from their ancestors. Nor do they eat anything, when they come from the market, without first washing themselves. And there are many other traditions they observe; for example, the ritual washing of cups, pots and plates.

So the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders, but eat with unclean hands?” Jesus answered, “You shallow people! How well Isaiah prophesied of you when he wrote : This people honours Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. The worship they offer Me is worthless, for what they teach are only human rules. You even put aside the commandment of God to hold fast to human tradition.”

And Jesus commented, “You have a fine way of disregarding the commandments of God in order to enforce your own traditions! For example, Moses said : Do your duty to your father and your mother, and : Whoever curses his father or his mother is to be put to death. But according to you, someone could say to his father or mother, ‘I already declared Corban (which means “offered to God”) what you could have expected from me.'”

“In this case you no longer require him to do anything for his father or mother, and so you nullify the word of God through the tradition you have handed on. And you do many other things like that.”