Day: November 22, 2018

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Saturday, 24 November 2018 : 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Andrew Dung-Lac, Priest and Companions, Martyrs (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Red

Revelations 11 : 4-12

These are the two olive trees and the two lamps which are before the Lord of the earth. If anyone intends to harm them, fire will come out of their mouths to devour their enemies : this is how whoever intends to harm them will perish. They have the power to close the sky and hold back the rain during the time of their prophetic mission; they also have the power to change water into blood, and punish the earth with a thousand plagues, any time they wish.

But when My witnesses have fulfilled their mission, the beast that comes up from the abyss will make war upon them, and will conquer and kill them. Their dead bodies will lie in the square of the Great City which the believers figuratively call Sodom or Egypt, where their Lord was crucified. And their dead bodies will be exposed for three days and a half to people of all tribes, races, languages and nations who will be ordered not to have them buried.

Then the inhabitants of the earth will rejoice, congratulate one another and exchange gifts among themselves because these two prophets were a torment to them. But after those three and a half days, a Spirit of life coming from God entered them. They them stood up, and those who looked at them were seized with great fear. A loud voice from heaven called them, “Come up here.” So they went up to heaven in the midst of the clouds in the sight of their enemies.

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Friday, 23 November 2018 : 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of Pope St. Clement I, Pope and Martyr and St. Columban, Abbot (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green or Red (Martyrs) or White (Abbots)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day we listened to the words of the Scripture reminding us on the importance for us to keep our faith alive in our lives, by listening to what the Lord has reminded each and every one of us today, particularly in what we heard in our Gospel passage today, on the moment when the Lord Jesus drove out the merchants and money changers from the Temple of God.

In that passage, we heard of what the Lord did when He saw all the corruptions and wickedness that were present amidst the people of God, all their corrupt dealings with money and cheating of the Temple visitors and pilgrims, for their own selfish benefits and other corrupt purposes that were totally unbecoming of the place as the location for divine worship and praise.

That is why the Lord chased them all out of the Temple for their blatant wickedness and refusal to follow the Lord’s commandments. And this is actually symbolic of what we need to do with our own lives. The Temple is referring to our own bodies, hearts, minds, and all of our whole beings. That is because God Himself is truly present in us, through His Spirit and the Body and Blood which He has given to us through the Eucharist.

And because God Himself is fully present in us, within us and in our midst, then each and every one of us must be truly exemplary as God’s Holy Temple and House. Otherwise, through our actions, by our disobedience of God’s commandments and by our failure to obey the Lord’s will, through our sins, we are putting wickedness and sin in the midst of this Temple of God, that is our body and being, much like the merchants and money changers that corrupted the Temple of God in Jerusalem.

God loves each and every one of us, brothers and sisters in Christ. And that is why, He is doing so much in order to bring us back to Himself, calling on us to change our ways and to repent from our sins. However, all of the wicked things and evil deeds we perform in our lives are things that have no place in God’s presence. For God is all good, and disobedience through sin is a great obstacle in the midst of our efforts to reach out to God.

Today, we should reflect on our every actions in life, and see if we have truly been faithful to God or whether we have veered off on the way in our journey towards Him, by the many temptations present in this life. We should think and reflect on all these things, and perhaps also take note of the examples shown by two saints, whose feast day we celebrate today, that is of Pope St. Clement I and St. Columban.

Pope St. Clement I was the Pope and leader of the Universal Church during some of its earliest years, as one of the first successors of St. Peter the Apostle, the first Pope. It was told that St. Peter himself consecrated Pope St. Clement I as bishop, and later on, the latter succeeded the second successor of St. Peter as Pope and Bishop of Rome. And Pope St. Clement I was remembered widely throughout the Church at that time and later on, as an influential Church and Apostolic father, the first among many of those who would continue the good works began by the Apostles in the building of the Church.

He wrote extensively to the various Church communities at the time, some of which were preserved as the collective writings of the Church fathers, and he helped to continue the growth and the stabilisation of the Church at the time, and many of the latter Church fathers and communities looked up to the piety and the good examples set by Pope St. Clement I in following Christ. He was martyred during the reign of the Roman Emperor Trajan, during one of the many Christian persecutions.

Today we also celebrate the feast of St. Columban, a holy man and abbot of the Church, who was an Irish missionary noted for his great many works among the regions of what is now France and Italy, establishing many monasteries and communities in those regions. At the same time, St. Columban also helped to evangelise the faith among the people, especially among those who have not followed the Lord in the right manner, affected by fallacies and heresies of the time.

St. Columban inspired many people through his works, and by his monastic rule, the Rule of St. Columban, mirroring the more famous Rule of St. Benedict, many people turned towards God and reorientate their lives towards God through prayer and upright life. Some of them joined the monasteries St. Columban founded, and many others became missionaries as how St. Columban was.

Today, by looking upon the examples set by these two holy and devoted servants of God, Pope St. Clement I and St. Columban, let us all turn towards God with a renewed love and faith for Him, and let us always be mindful, that we are all the Temples and Houses of God’s Holy and Real Presence, and as such, we should strive to be holy and free from sin, and repent from those sins if we have indeed fallen into the temptations and sins.

May God be with us all in this journey, and may we continue to devote ourselves and become ever closer to Him, day after day, in our every lives. May God bless us all and our good endeavours, now and forevermore. Amen.

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Friday, 23 November 2018 : 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of Pope St. Clement I, Pope and Martyr and St. Columban, Abbot (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green or Red (Martyrs) or White (Abbots)

Luke 19 : 45-48

At that time, Jesus entered the Temple area and began to drive out the merchants. And He said to them, “God says in the Scriptures, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have turned it into a den of robbers!'”

Jesus was teaching every day in the Temple. The chief priests and teachers of the Law wanted to kill Him, and the elders of the Jews as well, but they were unable to do anything, for all the people were listening to Him and hanging on His words.

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Friday, 23 November 2018 : 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of Pope St. Clement I, Pope and Martyr and St. Columban, Abbot (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : Green or Red (Martyrs) or White (Abbots)

Psalm 118 : 14, 24, 72, 103, 111, 131

I delight in following Your laws, more so than in all riches.

Your laws are my delight, my counsellors who uphold me.

Your law is more precious to me than heaps of silver and gold.

How sweet are Your promises to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Your statutes are my heritage forever, they are the joy of my heart.

I gasp in ardent yearning for Your commandments that I love.

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Friday, 23 November 2018 : 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of Pope St. Clement I, Pope and Martyr and St. Columban, Abbot (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green or Red (Martyrs) or White (Abbots)

Revelations 10 : 8-11

And the voice I heard from heaven spoke again, saying to me, “Go near the Angel Who stands on the sea and on the land, and take the small book open in his hand.” So I approached the Angel and asked him for the small book; he said to me, “Take it and eat; although it be sweet as honey in your mouth, it will be bitter to your stomach.”

I took the small book from the hand of the Angel, and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, it turned bitter in my stomach. Then I was told, “You must again proclaim God’s words about many peoples, nations, tongues and kings.”

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Thursday, 22 November 2018 : 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Red

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day as we continue to approach the end of the current liturgical cycle, we listen to more and more apocalyptic readings from the Scriptures that speak about the coming of the end times, from the revelations of St. John the Apostle, to the accounts of the Gospel recounting the moment when the Lord Jesus wept over Jerusalem because of all the things that would happen to that city.

First of all, the first reading today from the Book of the Revelations of St. John we heard about a vision that St. John received of the heavenly kingdom, in which, a Throne was surrounded by multitudes of Angels and elders, and a Scroll was laid on the Throne, which no one was worthy of opening. Within that scroll lies the truth of God and the salvation of all mankind. And in the end, only the Lamb of God, Who has sacrificed Himself, was worthy to open the scroll.

All of the elders and the Angels worshipped the Lamb Who came to take His rightful place at the Throne, and proclaimed His glory and majesty, by all the things and deeds He had done, through His loving and selfless sacrifice on the Cross. He is a King, Who has come into the world in order to save His beloved people, but the same people whom He wanted to save, many of them refused to believe in Him, rejected His message of truth, and in the end, put Him to death on the cross.

The reading from this Book of the Revelations, coupled with what we heard on the lamentations of the Lord for the heinous things that in therefore present us with the realities of our faith, that there would be persecutions and challenges awaiting all those who are speaking the truth and bearing what the Lord Jesus Himself has brought into this world, that is, the message of His salvation for us all.

The lamentations which Jesus made over the city of Jerusalem are linked to what the people of Israel had done to the prophets and messengers of God throughout history, in how they rejected God’s truth and revelations, persecuted the prophets and messengers of God, exiling them and even killing them for speaking the truth. The people hardened their hearts and minds, and refused to believe in the message of truth.

This presents to us how persecution and martyrdom have been part of our faith for countless years, how the faithful had to endure various challenges and difficulties in order to remain true to their faith. Throughout the history of the Church, innumerable martyrs have been made due to the persecution of Christians by various groups and authorities, including St. Cecilia, whose feast day we are celebrating today.

St. Cecilia is one of the most famous of the saints and the martyrs of the Roman persecution era, as the patron saint of musicians. St. Cecilia was a devout Christian and made a vow of virginity to the Lord. But despite that, her parents forced her to marry Valerian, a pagan nobleman. She continued to devote herself to the Lord nonetheless, and managed to persuade her husband to let her remain chaste and virgin, and showed him the proof of what she said, and an Angel appeared to her husband.

In the end, even her husband became a believer and was baptised as a Christian. But that was a particularly difficult time to live as a Christian, when Christians throughout the Empire were going through a particularly brutal and vicious persecution. That is why St. Cecilia and her family went through martyrdom for remaining faithful to the Lord despite the sufferings they had to go through.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, today we are called to reflect on our own Christian living. Have we been probably too complacent or too lax in how we live up our lives in faith? Have we been true witnesses of the Lord in how we conduct our actions and in how we lived our lives? What we heard from the Scripture passages today and from the life of St. Cecilia should inspire us to be more active in living our faith, in devoting our time, effort and attention to the Lord.

May the Lord bless us all, and may He continue to remind us to be faithful to Him, each and every single moments of our life. May God be with us all, now and always, forevermore. Amen.