ad maiorem dei gloriam

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Tuesday, 15 September 2015 : 24th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of our Lady of Sorrows (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : White

John 19 : 25-27

Near the cross of Jesus stood His mother, His mother’s sister Mary, who was the wife of Cleophas, and Mary of Magdala. When Jesus saw the mother, and the disciple whom He loved, He said to the mother, “Woman, this is your son.” Then He said to the disciples, “There is your mother.” And from that moment the disciple took her to his own home.

Alternative reading

Luke 2 : 33-35

The father and mother of Jesus wondered at what was said about the Child. Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary, His mother, “Know this : your Son is a sign, a sign established for the falling and rising of many in Israel, a sign of contradiction; and a sword will pierce your own soul, so that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.”

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Tuesday, 15 September 2015 : 24th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of our Lady of Sorrows (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : White

Psalm 30 : 2-3a, 3bc-4, 5-6, 15-16, 20

In You, o Lord, I take refuge, may I never be disgraced; deliver Me in Your justice. Give heed to My plea, and make haste to rescue Me.

Be a rock of refuge for Me, a fortress for My safety. For You are My rock and My stronghold, lead Me for Your Name’s sake.

Free Me from the snare that they have set for Me. Indeed You are my Protector. Into Your hands I commend My Spirit; You have redeemed Me, o Lord, faithful God.

But I put My trust in You, o Lord, I said : “You are My God;” My days are in Your hand. Deliver Me from the hand of My enemies, from those after My skin.

How great is the goodness which You have stored for those who fear You, which You show, for all to see, to those who take refuge in You!

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Tuesday, 15 September 2015 : 24th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of our Lady of Sorrows (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : White

Hebrews 5 : 7-9

Christ, in the days of His mortal life, offered His sacrifice with tears and cries. He prayed to Him who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His humble submission.

Although He was Son, He learnt through suffering what obedience was, and once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for those who obey Him.

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Monday, 14 September 2015 : Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Red

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day we celebrate a special solemnity in the honour of the triumph of the glorious Cross of our Saviour. Today we exalt the Holy Cross as the real symbol of triumph of good versus the forces of evil, and as a clear reminder to all of us, that our Lord had won the battle for us in a triumphant victory against the forces of Satan.

The cross was once an instrument of suffering and torture, and it was once an instrument of humiliation and ultimate defeat and surrender of all those who have been convicted and deemed guilty by the state, particularly the Romans who used them to be an instrument of fear, to show example of what would happen to those who dared to oppose their rule.

But among all the countless thousands and more who suffered on the wood of the cross, hanged and nailed for all the people to see, there was One of them who did not deserve to be punished, and yet He took up for Himself, the punishment of a slave, the scourges designed for convicts and villains, and took upon Himself the responsibility of the entire human race, so that instead of us, He took our sufferings upon Himself.

He did not have to do that, and He could just abandon us, but it was not in His nature to do that, because He is Love, and because He is love, He cannot possibly abandon us when we are in need of help. Thus, He was willing to lower Himself and empty Himself of His greatness, and assume the humble form of a Man. And in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully Man, God made Himself an example to all so that by His actions and by His example, He made us all righteous and showed us the way to go.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, in the first reading today from the Book of Numbers, we heard about how God punished His people, the Israelites for their refusal to listen to His will and walk in His ways. He punished them by sending them the fiery and poisonous serpents to bite them and bring death to them. This is the punishment for all those who disobeyed and refused to listen to God, just as the price for death is sin.

The serpents are like the angels of death, representing the judgment of God for all those who have sinned and have committed wicked things before the Lord and before men. And their destruction was seemingly assured, until Moses begged the Lord and beseeched Him to have mercy on His people, and to give them deliverance out of their great predicament.

And God instructed Moses to build up a bronze serpent and place it on a high pole, so that raising it up, it could be seen by many people who have been bitten and harassed by the fiery serpents. Those who saw the bronze serpent became well again and lived, and they did not die. This is a very clear and strong premonition to God’s own plan of salvation, where He Himself would raise Himself up for all to see, so that through Him, all who believe in Him will be saved.

As you all should see, that the fiery serpents are the punishment for the sins that caused us to all suffer death and destruction, but Christ is the new bronze serpent, raised up high even as He bore all of our sins upon Himself, all the punishment due to us, and on the cross, lifted high up between the heavens and the earth, He made Himself an example visible to all, and the testimonies of His truth were passed on to His Apostles, and from them to us.

St. Paul pointed out that just as the first Adam, our ancestor, had sinned and disobeyed the Lord, and by his actions, he had made us all condemned and fallen into sin, and if one man’s action brought all of mankind into sin and into condemnation, then it needs One Man’s action to bring all mankind back towards the Lord and towards salvation, with eternal life promised by the Lord as the goal.

And thus, Jesus Christ our Lord is the new Adam, through whom the salvation of the world was to come from. It is because of His perfect obedience to the will of His Father that had brought mankind to righteousness, because just as He is God, He is at the same time also fully Man, and by assuming the flesh of Man, by His obedience, He restored to all of us, the life and the grace of God which had been withdrawn from us when we disobeyed through sin.

And the cross He made to become a symbol of triumph and victory, and a symbol of the glory that we all are to have, if we keep our faith in the cross of Christ. But it is not just any cross, for cross by itself has no meaning, and a cross would still always be remembered for being the brutal method which the Romans used to treat those who rebelled against them. Instead, it is the Holy Cross of Jesus Christ which we commemorate, the crucifix, where our Saviour hung upon on that day in Calvary.

It was from that cross that Jesus was shown to the whole world, just as the bronze serpent was lifted up in the desert, that all who look up to Christ, believe in Him and follow Him shall not suffer the penalty of death, but live and live forever with the Lord, enjoying forever the bliss of heavenly glory, as worthy disciples, followers and children of our God.

And the empty Cross of Christ is a reminder always, that Christ had won that victory over sin and death, and nothing could hold Him, even death itself. The empty tomb is the proof of triumph together with the Holy Cross, that our Lord had won a complete, total and resounding victory forever against Satan and all of his allies and forces. And whenever Satan looks upon the Cross, he knows that his defeat is assured and his doom is at hand, and the Lord who stood by us had dealt that crushing victory against him.

Therefore, today, brothers and sisters in Christ, let us put our trust ever more in the Cross, and as Christ had at one time showed Himself to the Roman Emperor Constantine, the first to be baptised as a Christian, ‘In Hoc Signo Vinces’ or ‘In this Sign you shall conquer’, and indeed he won a resounding victory against his enemies by placing his trust and faith in the Lord, then we too should do the same.

Let us ever put our trust in the Holy Cross, the symbol of our triumph and victory against all forms of evil, the bane of Satan and the sign of our deliverance. May our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ continue to be with us and guiding us on this way, so that the Cross will be our guide, and we continue to have hope as we look on the triumphant Cross, and fear no more. May Almighty God, the Crucified Lord, be with us and bless us always. Amen.

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Monday, 14 September 2015 : Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Red

John 3 : 13-17

At that time, Jesus said to the people and to His disciples, “No one has ever gone up to heaven except the One who came from heaven, the Son of Man. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.”

“Yes, God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him may not be lost, but may have eternal life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world; instead, through Him the world is to be saved.”

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Monday, 14 September 2015 : Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Second Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Red

Philippians 2 : 6-11

Though He was in the form of God, He did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking on the nature of a Servant, made in human likeness, and in His appearance found as a Man. He humbled Himself by being obedient to death, death on the cross.

That is why God exalted Him and gave Him the Name which outshines all names, so that at the Name of Jesus all knees should bend in heaven, on earth and among the dead, and all tongues proclaim that Christ Jesus is the Lord to the glory of God the Father.

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Monday, 14 September 2015 : Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : Red

Psalm 77 : 1-2, 34-35, 36-37, 38

Give heed, o My people, to My teaching; listen to the words of My mouth! I will speak in parables, I will talk of old mysteries.

When God slew His people who sinned against Him, they repented and sought Him earnestly. They remembered that God was their Rock, the Most High, their Redeemer.

But they flattered Him with their mouths, they lied to Him with their tongues, while their hearts were unfaithful; they were untrue to His covenant.

Even then, in His compassion, He forgave their offences and did not destroy them. Many a time He restrained His anger and did not fully stir up His wrath.

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Monday, 14 September 2015 : Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Red

Numbers 21 : 4b-9

The people were discouraged by the journey and began to complain against God and Moses, “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is neither bread nor water here and we are disgusted with this tasteless manna.”

YHVH then sent fiery serpents against them. They bit the people and many of the Israelites died. Then the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, speaking against YHVH and against you. Plead with YHVH to take the serpents away.”

Moses pleaded for the people and YHVH said to him, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a standard; whoever has been bitten and then looks at it shall live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a standard. Whenever a man was bitten, he looked towards the bronze serpent and he lived.

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Sunday, 13 September 2015 : Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor of the Church (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day, the core message of the Scripture readings from both the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as from the Gospel is about the Lord who came down to this world to dwell among us, and then brought us free from the chains and the bonds of sin that have kept us enchained and enslaved to suffering and death.

It was through the willing sacrifice, the willingness to bear all the huge burdens and the mountains of our sins that had been accumulated and is accumulating through time, as every man committed sin before God, on the weight of the cross that Christ our Lord had brought with Him as He walked down that road from Jerusalem towards Calvary, where He would give Himself up for the sake of all mankind.

The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is not just the physical burden of the wood that made it up. It is filled with the entirety of mankind’s sins and the punishments that were to be due for it. Ever since mankind had first sinned against the Lord, by disobeying Him and following their own path, they have been cast out from the grace and the love God had prepared for them, and they have gotten for themselves the sufferings of the world, for they have chosen the path of suffering by disobedience, and death claimed them as its own, as their sins brought about their mortality.

Yes, because of our sins, we would have endured eternal suffering and hell, not the hell filled with fire and all the imaginable forms of suffering as how hell was often illustrated like, but the hell of suffering due to the lack of the love of God, the lack and the total absence of hope, because God’s favour is not with us, and when we look on our Lord, our Father and Creator, He would say to us, “I do not know you, begone from My presence, you wicked people!”

But this is not to be the case, as our Lord is ever merciful and ever loving. Indeed, He despises all forms of sins and wickedness, all the disobedience and rebelliousness, all the evils that had kept us away from Him. Yet, God despises not each one of us individually and without good reason, but instead it is our sins He despises, and not us as a person.

Why is this so? That is because He knew that all of us have good in each one of us, and each of us has the potential for both good and for evil. He had crafted each one of us from the earth, from the dust and the ground, fashioned us in His own image and then breathed life upon all of us, giving us His own Spirit of life. The Lord created us pure and immaculate, although the taint of original sin once overshadowed us, but we have been freed though the works of Christ.

And as all of us were created pure and clean, white as wool and immaculate as an empty slate, then all of us have to write and define what our lives would become. And we have to realise that this faith which we have through baptism, by the Sacrament of Baptism we have been made clean, freed from the taints of any sins, our original sins, our other sins big and small.

But our faith should not be just that, and our faith cannot be just a mere profession of faith or a mere proclamation or testimony. That is not enough, as faith is more than just words or profession, but it involves true and real commitment, as St. James made it clear in his epistle or letter to the faithful in the Church, that faith without good works is just the same as a dead and nonexistent faith.

For faith that benefits us and the state of the salvation of our souls is the kind of faith which Jesus had taught us all through His many parables. Faith cannot just be left by itself or else it will perish and be gone without any good. Let is look into the parable of the sower that Christ had taught His disciples, which represents all of us, the faith which we have received, and the outcome of our faith depending on our actions.

The Word of God are the seeds of faith which God, the Sower had placed in our hearts, by the life He had given us, and by the truth which God had revealed to us through the Scriptures and through the Church. And yet, if we notice in that parable, depending on where the seeds fell, be it on the roadside, on rocky ground, amongst thorny bushes or amongst rich soil, the result of the crop is very, very different.

If our faith is not strong or founded upon solid foundation built by hard work, devotion and total commitment to the Lord, then it will be like the seeds that fell on the roadside, or on the rocky ground, or on the thorny bushes, because the devil comes and then plant his seeds of evil and dissension, and the temptations which he brings us all is too much for us to bear, and without deep roots in the faith, it is very easy for us all to fall back once again into sin and darkness.

That is why, in the Gospel today, we have to pay very close attention to what the Lord Jesus spoke to His disciples, and how He rebuked Peter for refusing to believe what would happen to Him. To the feeble and easily tempted minds of men, it might indeed seem to be incoherent and impossible to hear Jesus speaking on one side, of His truth as the Messiah and Lord of all, but then on the other hand, to hear of His prophecy of His own suffering at the very hands of the people to whom He had been sent to.

Satan’s temptation is exactly that we may think that to follow the Lord is all good and easy, and when we find that it is not so, then we feel confused and vulnerable, and then Satan comes in to tempt us and to lure us back into sin, by offering us the alternative pathway that seems to be easier and without obstacle, unlike the path which we will face if we are to follow the Lord our God.

Jesus Himself had endured this when He was tempted by Satan in the desert during His forty days of fasting and preparation in the desert after His baptism by St. John the Baptist. At that moment, Satan tried to persuade Jesus to sin and to disobey the Lord without success, and He remained committed to the mission given to Him, that is the salvation of all mankind.

And when Satan saw that his temptations and attempts were thwarted, he tried yet again to persuade Jesus to abandon His ministry and works, by trying to dissuade Him from taking such a perilous task and enduring such sufferings for the sake of men, and indeed, a common argument for Satan in doing so is that mankind is not worth the great suffering which our Lord Jesus was to endure for the sake of all of us.

But to our Lord who loves us all beyond anything else, no pain or suffering is great enough to warrant Him to abandon us or to cast us out without trying to release us from the burden that had weighed us down all these while. He rebuked Satan and rejected him, and warned him that his dominion over men has come to an end, for God has come to take back His people, and He did so through the cross.

Tomorrow we shall be celebrating the feast of the exaltation of the Holy Cross, and indeed it is very timely and apt that the celebration of the triumph of the Holy Cross ties in very closely to today’s readings and theme. It is indeed through the cross that our Lord had redeemed us all from our sins and bore the punishments meant for us, and He has also turned that symbol of ultimate shame and defeat, into the ultimate symbol of triumph and victory.

Now, all that remains for us is that, if we become the followers and disciples of Christ, we take a share in the suffering which He bore, the rejection and the ridicule He endured, not because of our sins, which have been taken from us and from which we have been redeemed, but it is because of the opposition and jealousy of Satan and all of his allies that had brought about this suffering.

Let us all ask ourselves, if we are able to renew our commitment which we made at our baptism, either by ourselves or by our godparents, and which we renew yearly at Easter. If we want to be true disciples of our Lord, then we must be ready to reject Satan and all of his lies and false promises, and embrace fully the way of the Lord. And indeed, as our Lord had told us, that we all have to bear our own crosses, following the path of our Lord towards eternal life.

This means that the path ahead will be filled with challenges and difficulties for us, and there will likely be opposition ahead, even from amongst those close to us. But if we are truly committed, then I am sure that even all these should not hinder us from moving onward. Carrying our cross may be heavy for us, but that is where we should help one another, and doing the will of God by loving our brethren and helping those in need are also in fact part of what carrying our own crosses is about.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us grow ever more confident in our faith, and let us devote ourselves more and more to our loving God, and commit ourselves not just in mere words and proclamations of faith, but even more, through our own actions and deeds, so that in all the things that we do, we proclaim the glory of God, carrying the crosses of our lives, and following Jesus, may all of us attain the eternal life God has assured all of us who keep our faith in Him. God bless us all. Amen.

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Sunday, 13 September 2015 : Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor of the Church (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Mark 8 : 27-35

At that time, Jesus set out with His disciples for the villages around Caesarea Philippi : and on the way He asked them, “Who do people say I am?” And they told Him, “Some say You are John the Baptist; others say You are Elijah or one of the prophets.”

Then Jesus asked them, “But You, who do You say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” And He ordered them not to tell anyone about Him. Jesus then began to teach them that the Son of Man had to suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the Law. He would be killed, and after three days rise again.

Jesus said all this quite openly, so that Peter took Him aside and began to protest strongly. But Jesus turned around, and looking at His disciples, rebuked Peter, saying, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are thinking not as God does, but as people do.”

Then Jesus called the people and His disciples, and said, “If you want to follow Me, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me. For if you choose to save your life, you will lose it; and if you lose your life for My sake and for the sake of the Gospel, you will save it.”