Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Saturday Mass of Our Lady)
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day the Scripture passages reminds us of the love which God had given us generously and willingly, that He has blessed us beyond all other beings in creations, far surpassing even the Angels and other creatures. We are all reminded of the kindness of our Lord, Who treated us not as slaves and servants, but instead as children, and as He is our Father, He blesses us and treats us in the best way that is possible for us.

He has created us in His own image and blessed us so abundantly, that no one else could have hoped to compare with us. For we mankind have been made to be God’s very own children, to partake in His inheritance and in His glory, and to enjoy forever the blessed fruits of the glorious kingdom of God. That was what God intended for us mankind, certainly not to see us suffer and perish in the darkness and sin, but instead to have us enjoy the fullness of His love for us.

Yet, we all know that we have spurned the love of God and rejected the grace which He had offered us. We have disobeyed Him as those who have lost their way and chose to follow their own paths, and although God had revealed His glory and might in various occasions throughout history, we mankind often always tried to find reasons and excuses for not following Him and fall deep into the wickedness of our sins.

This is when all of us should heed what the Lord Jesus said to His disciples in today’s Gospel reading, that all of His people ought to welcome the children and allow them to come to the Lord, and embrace Him, and follow the examples of these children in their own faith. And there is indeed a very good reason in this, and this requires us to understand what the faith of a child is like.

A child is a very innocent person, whose heart and mind is still pure and unburdened by the many concerns of the world. Unlike many of us, a child is still pure at heart, and the faith of a child is a pure faith. The children look towards the Lord and desire to be with Him, because that is our true human nature, who have been created out of love by God, and in that love, we receive the grace and the desire to love Him back.

Unfortunately, we have often been distracted by the many worldly concerns and temptations. Yes, all the things that have distracted us and kept us away from being able to truly be able to love the Lord with all our hearts. We have been burdened by monetary concerns, by the temptations of worldly pleasures, the sinful pleasures of the flesh, the temptation of desire, lust, the pull of pride, ambition and human greed. These are all the things that have kept us away from God.

We need to spend some time to think about this, brothers and sisters in Christ. Have we been so occupied and distracted by our worldly living and concerns that we have failed to see the real purpose and aim of our life, that is our God, and to love Him with all of our heart and with all of our strength just as He Himself had loved us first? This is what we all need to do, and we need to begin from now if we have not done so yet.

Let us all seek to purify ourselves from all forms of sins and wickedness, that all of us will be like children in our faith, genuine and true, unmasked by all the ugliness of our sins, desires, human greed and all the other things that have kept us away from God. Let us show the Lord our God, that we are truly worthy of being the ones to receive the inheritance which He had intended for us when He created us. Let us prove that we want to be with Him, and desire to be reconciled and be reunited with Him.

May the Lord continue to love us, and may He continue to be merciful towards us, that in all of our daily lives and daily works, we may gradually be more and more attuned to His ways and learn to be more like Him in all our ways, actions, words and deeds. May the Lord help us on this journey to return to Him, that all of us may be filled with joy. God bless us all. Amen.