Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day, we heard about the exploits and the works of Jesus our Lord, who with His disciples and followers went about from place to place, seeking people who were downtrodden, broken, sinful and filled with darkness, so that He might succour them and bring light unto them. This was what He had done, to awaken the people of God from their slumber of sin and darkness, and from all the allures of the world that kept them from becoming righteous in the sight of God.

Many of us are often distracted from our true goal in life because of the various things and obstacles which Satan had put on the way for us, so that we stumble and fall along the way, and fall back into sin and darkness, losing our way and he hoped that we might be condemned because of our failure to stick to the path towards salvation. That is what Satan wishes for us, and certainly, none of us should want him to succeed in what he had worked for us.

Thus we come to the moment when we heard about how St. Paul mentioned to Timothy how we all ought to live our lives in God, abandoning all sorts of worldliness and all temptations of evil. In that letter which St. Paul wrote to Timothy, he mentioned how there were people who took advantage of religiousity and religions to serve their own purposes and satisfy their wants and wishes.

And this is a clear reference to the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, who used and manipulated the Law of God, the laws of Moses to serve their own needs. They opened the Temple to the money changers and merchants who filled their coffers with unlawful and sinful silver and money, and they even sold their Lord and Saviour for a mere thirty pieces of silver coin to Judas Iscariot.

These people were concerned primarily about their own status and standing in the society, doing everything they could to preserve their own power and dignity, and in the process, their actions became ever more self-serving and deviating from the path that they were supposed to take. They were unable to resist the temptation of their hearts, falling into the trap of pride and ego, as well as into their greed, for more power, human praise and for more wealth.

We must learn to resist these temptations or else they will grow greater and greater, and eventually they will overcome us and swallow us, bringing us into eternal suffering and annihilation that await the wicked and all those who were not able to resist those allures of the devil. Thus, what we need to do is to heed what the Church is teaching us, that is the truth revealed to us by our Lord Jesus Christ and passed down to us through the Apostles.

The truth is that we have to learn to be content with what we have, as after all, all of us have been blessed greatly by our Lord in many things, even if we do not realise it. It is important for us to resist the temptations that will lead us into ruin if we walk in the same path that was taken by the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law. We have to learn through our faith, how to be rather humble and dedicated to the Lord through love, by loving Him with all of our hearts and then loving our brethren, all those who are around us with the same fervour and love.

This will not be easy, as all of us by our human nature enjoy to be tempted and our flesh is by nature weak against all these corruptions. We have to therefore make the effort to resist and to win over all these things that are obstacles on our way to righteousness and salvation in God. Let us all deepen our faith in the Lord and strengthen our spiritual lives, so that all of us may grow stronger in faith and be more capable to strive for righteousness just as St. Paul had mentioned in his letter that we heard today in our first reading.

May our loving God and Father be with us always in all things, and bless us that we may always remain in His grace, so that in all things, we may always live graciously and righteously in His presence and be worthy to receive His everlasting inheritance. God bless us all. Amen.