Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this Sunday as we all listened to the words of the Sacred Scriptures, we are reminded that the Lord our God is never blind to our sufferings and our predicaments, and He is always ever present by our side throughout our most difficult moments, being by our side and journeying with us through all those difficult times. He will never leave us alone or unguided throughout all those things, and even if we are to suffer, we have to always constantly keep in mind how He Himself has suffered most grievously and greatly for our sake, in all the love that He has shown us. And at the same time, we must also be careful that we do not end up giving in to the spirit of self-righteousness and pride, even if we do not intend it to be so, especially when we think that we are better than others around us in our faith and lives. God rewards the humble while brings down the proud and haughty ones.

In our first reading this Sunday, we heard from the Book of the prophet Sirach in which the Lord reassured His people by telling them all that those who have obeyed and served the Lord faithfully and wholeheartedly will be heard and helped, and all the those people had prayed for with great faith and trust in God will be heard by the Lord Himself, Who knows all that they need and all that they are going through in life. As it was said, ‘the prayer of the humble person pierces the clouds, and he is not consoled until he has beeen heard’, and this is indeed true, that as long as we continue to persevere in prayer, continuing from what we have also heard last Sunday on the power of the perseverance of prayer and hope in God, eventually God will answer and will provide us what we have asked for.

The Lord Himself also told us all ‘Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, and knock, and the door will be opened for you’, and these words are again reminders for us all how truly fortunate all of us are to have received such great grace from God, Who has always loved us so wonderfully and so patiently, that He has always cared for us and guided us through the most difficult parts of our lives’ journey. He is always there with us, both through the good and the bad times, and we should not lose hope and faith in Him even when it seems that He does not answer our prayers and fulfil our hopes immediately. God is always out there, listening to us, and He is always full of compassion towards us, knowing everything that troubled us. He wants us to trust in Him and have complete faith and hope in Him.

Then, from our second reading this Sunday, taken from the Epistle of St. Paul to his protege, St. Timothy, we heard of the Apostle speaking to him regarding the realities of being a follower of Christ, in doing God’s will and in proclaiming the truth of God. St. Paul faced a lot of hardships and oppositions in his paths and works, the rejections and persecutions from the Jewish authorities, the Sanhedrin or the Jewish High Council, as well as from the Roman authorities and the other locals, the pagans, slavers and others who were opposed to the truth and the message of the Christian faith. He had to endure a lot of obstacles and sufferings, imprisonment, exile and others, in the midst of his ministry and journey in fulfilling what he had been entrusted to do.

But he did all and endured all willingly and courageously for the Lord’s sake and for the people of God. He knew that the Lord was with him all through the sufferings and persecutions that he had to face through all those years that he spent in his missionary journeys and visits to the various communities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region, in Asia Minor and Greece, and elsewhere where God had led him to, and he was never alone in all those struggles, carrying his cross together with the Lord, Who had suffered even worse struggles and sufferings. And the Lord had helped him through many of those occasions, rescuing him and his fellow missionaries and servants of the Gospel from harm and troubles, and allowing him to continue many more good works.

Of course St. Paul also knew that the moment was coming for him to meet the end of his earthly life, as how some of the Apostles themselves by then had experienced, beginning from St. James the Greater, the first of the Apostles to be martyred, and like St. Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, who was persecuted by the Jewish authorities and was stoned to death by the angry mob. St. Paul himself knew that he would eventually face the same reckoning and martyrdom, and he surrendered it all to God, entrusting himself completely to him, knowing that whatever he would face, the Lord would be with him and He would reward him with crown everlasting, crown of glory that will never fade, with true joy that can be found in the Lord alone, and this is something that we should keep in mind as we ourselves may face hardships and struggles in our own lives.

In our Gospel passage this Sunday, we then heard of the parable that the Lord Himself told His disciples comparing the behaviours of two people who were offering their prayers to God at the Temple. And the Lord compared the attitudes of a Pharisee to a tax collector in this regard, and in order to understand and appreciate better its significance, we must first understand that both of these people depicted here belonged to two extremes in the society of the people of God at that time, especially in Judea and Galilee where the Lord and His disciples often ministered in. The Pharisees first of all belonged to the group of social elites of the community, the religious and intellectual elites and leaders of the community, particularly respected, revered, honoured and even feared for their preservation of the Law of God and its enforcement among the people.

Meanwhile, the tax collectors were on the opposite end of the spectrum, where they were generally hated and despised by much of the population because of the stigma and the prejudices against them, due to the nature of their work, collecting the taxes, which were much hated and despised, on behalf of either the Romans, or the local monarchs like Herod’s family, or both. And it did not help that some of the tax collectors were indeed corrupt and extracted even more taxes or took more money than they were supposed to in order to enrich themselves. Hence, the community’s prejudices and dislike upon the tax collectors were quite universal and severe at the same time. And yet, as we heard in the parable that the Lord mentioned, it was the honest and humble prayers of the tax collector that was heard by God, and not the proudful boastings of the Pharisee.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is an important reminder for all of us as Christians that God loves each and every one of His beloved children equally and most lovingly, and we must be careful not to end up like the Pharisee in our attitude, simply because we think that we have done what the Lord asked of us, and therefore we deserve to treat others whom we deem to be inferior or less worthy than us in a prejudiced and nasty way. That is exactly how pride and hubris became the undoing and downfall for the proud Pharisee in the parable. We are reminded that no matter what we do in our lives, especially as Christians, we must always be humble and remember that everyone around us are beloved by God all the same just as He has loved us.

Instead of putting down one another or trying to upstage each other in how worthy we are before the Lord, we should instead help one another to remain strong in faith and hope in God, even through life’s greatest challenges and difficulties. We must always bring hope in our actions, and reminding each other, our fellow brothers and sisters around us, that God is always there for us, and one way this is done, is indeed through our own actions. God often works through each one of us, in our every works, actions and deeds, and even through the words that we said to each other, words of encouragement and hope that can inspire hope and light in the hearts of those who have been in the darkness. And this, brothers and sisters in Christ, is the true essence of our Christian faith, and the way how we should live as those whom God had called and chosen to be His own. Amen.