discovery

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Wednesday, 12 February 2014 : 5th Week of Ordinary Time (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Wisdom comes from God, and God alone. We mankind may try our best many times to try to understand the Lord, but most likely we will not even get half of it right. Our feeble human understanding and knowledge cannot hope to comprehend the mind of the Lord, who knows everything and has His plans for everything.

It is human pride that often stands in the way of receiving true wisdom and knowledge from the Lord, and it is human arrogance that often prevent us from understanding God’s true meaning and purpose for all of us. The result being that we misinterpreted the true desire of the Lord, and in our state of misinterpretation and confusion, we fail to do the things that the Lord truly wants from each one of us.

In our pride and arrogance in our human knowledge and intellect too, we have missed the point in serving the Lord, instead of serving Him with love and making Him more available to all, we tend to limit Him and prevent Him from being known by all, through our own lacking interpretation of His will and His laws. We assumed wisdom when we actually have none, because we trust in ourselves rather than in God.

Jesus criticised one of those assumed wisdom, as He brought the people to a clearer understanding of God’s will and desire for us. That was precisely just like king Solomon sharing his wisdom with the Queen of Sheba who praised him for his great wisdom, and in Jesus, there is something greater than Solomon, for while the wisdom of Solomon came from God, Jesus is Himself God.

Jesus revealed that while the Jews followed a rather strict dietary law, today called the kosher law, and something similar was mimicked by the Muslims who followed a different yet similar set of dietary law, with its set of allowed and prohibited food items, that these laws are truly obsolete and unnecessary. And following these laws do not make anybody righteous or condemned in any way.

By common sense it is indeed true, even in terms of our own simple intelligence. Sometimes, there is more truth in simple thoughts rather than complex ones. Food that goes into our mouth indeed goes through our body and then is passed out as waster through the other end, and the same happens to whatever we drink and consume into our bodies.

In no way indeed, for us all who knows about the science of how our body works, that these food affect anything other than our body functions and our digestive system in particular. Whether the food is allowed or forbidden has no bearing on our faith or our worthiness before God, and it is indeed foolish to think that eating good and allowed food makes us righteous and eating prohibited food makes us sinful and damned.

Jesus rightly pointed out that it is what comes out of us that bear our sins rather than what we take into ourselves. Food are non-living objects, and they do not have intelligence or wisdom to think or do something. Yet, compared to things that come out of us, namely actions, words, deeds, and others, what came out of us all these while are the products of our intelligent, sentient, and living wisdom.

Yes, we have wisdom in us, but an incomplete one. How did we get it? Remember the Book of Genesis? Our ancestors, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and ever since, the knowledge of things good and evil is within us. We know what is good and what is evil, and we share that knowledge to our children, and pass it on throughout the generations.

It is the actions, words, and deeds that come out of us that either justify us or condemn us. When we do things in accordance with God’s will, that is doing things considered good, then we are justified, but if we do things not in accordance with the will of God, then we are condemned. It is as simple as that, and yet many refused to believe in the true wisdom of Christ, who as God is the source of all wisdom and revelations.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, how about us? Will we believe in Jesus, and trust in His wisdom? Or do we rather prefer to trust in our own strength and wisdom? In our own intelligence and knowledge of the things around us? Do we prefer to trust in a source that is always and completely right? Or do we prefer to trust in a source that is unreliable and changing as much as it suits us?

These are the questions that we should ask ourselves, and indeed we should no longer ask question or doubt the wisdom of our Lord. Let us entrust ourselves to the Lord and let Him decide what He wants to do with each one of us, trusting ourselves to His most divine and wonderful wisdom. Amen.

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Monday, 22 July 2013 : 16th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Mary Magdalene (Gospel Reading)

John 20 : 1-2, 11-18

Now, on the first day after the Sabbath, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning while it was still dark, and she saw that the stone blocking the tomb had been moved away. She ran to Peter, and the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and she said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid Him.”

Mary stood weeping outside the tomb; and as she wept, she bent down to look inside. She saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head, and the other at the feet. They said, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She answered, “Because they have taken my Lord and I do not know where they have put Him.”

As she said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not recognise Him. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?” She thought it was the gardener and answered Him, “Lord, if You have taken Him away, tell me where You have put Him, and I will go and remove Him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned, and said to Him, “Rabboni!” – which means Master. Jesus said to her, “Do not touch Me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to My brothers and say to them : I am ascending to My Father, who is your Father, to my God, who is your God.”

So Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord, and this is what He said to me.”

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Tuesday, 25 June 2013 : 12th Week of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Matthew 7 : 6, 12-14

Do not give what is holy to the dogs, or throw your pearls to the pigs : they might trample on them, and even turn on you and tear you to pieces.

So, do to others whatever you would that others do to you : there you have the Law and the Prophets. Enter through the narrow gate : for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many go that way. How narrow is the gate that leads to life, and how rough the road; few there are who find it.

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Wednesday, 20 February 2013 : 1st Week of Lent (Scripture Reflection)

We heard that even the sinful people of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, who destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, turned to the Lord, when confronted with God’s punishment and destruction as told by the prophet Jonah. In this we find that while God hates sins and evil, but God also loves us all, the mankind, and is ready to forgive us if only we are to turn ourselves fully back towards Him, and humbly ask for His forgiveness, just like the king and the people of Nineveh.

For we are told then that Jonah resisted the Lord and was even angry with Him, when He decided to spare the people of Nineveh, which the Lord then showed to Jonah, how He loves all, and that even He would spare and love a single lowly being, if that being also truly loves Him and turn towards Him, and such a great city of Nineveh, with its many inhabitants, who has yet to listen to the goodness of the words of the Lord, should not be judged, because these poor souls have no shepherd to guide them to the proper path. Jonah’s proclamation is one way to the deliverance of these people from their previous sinful path.

However, for all of us, let us not be like either Jonah or the people of Nineveh. Unlike Jonah, we should love all men and hope in them, that no one is to be condemned, no matter how bad they are or what terrible things they had done, even the most sinful mankind still has the light of God in them, and only if they would truly repent, they would be saved, and that light unveiled from the thick darkness of their hearts and souls. It is up to us, who has been saved in the Lord through our baptism, our faith, and good works in faith and love, to help our fellow brethren who are still lost.

Let us also not be like the people of Nineveh, not in the way that they turned to the Lord in repentance, as we too need to repent for our sins, but in that we should do our best not to sin and do what is evil in the beginning, and turn to the Lord in full sincerity and in full humility, and not just because we fear the anger and punishment of the Lord, or because we fear our destruction, just as the people of Nineveh who repented because Jonah announced to them the doom of Nineveh. It is not to say that such a thing is bad, as when we have already sinned, we ought to seek the Lord’s forgiveness and repent, but it is even better that we strive to live a good life, and avoid wickedness in the first place, in all things that we do.

Then, as the Lord mentioned, that faith in the present day, and even in our modern world today, is problematic, as increasingly mankind left the Lord whom they thought is nonexistent, and chose instead to believe in what they can see, what they can understand, and what they can interact with, which is none other than science. No, this is not to say that science is bad or evil. Science is good, but how it is used and interpreted is very important, as nowadays, increasingly many use Science as a tool to even attack the faith in God, and ridicule the faith publicly. For the Lord, who is God, is indeed beyond what Science can ever know, and His nature is beyond all our possible understanding, and no matter how advanced a scientific tool is, they can never determine the nature of God and limit Him to our own human understanding.

We are often in awe of our own abilities, and our own creations, that we began to lose our focus in God, and began instead to focus on ourselves, on our capacities, and rather than to trust God, we instead began to trust our own selves, and our own finite ability, and glorify ourselves. For Christ is there, and has always been there, and there is the Church, through which God made Himself available, and the spreading of the Word of God by His missionaries continues even to this day. But many chose to believe in their own selfish pride and reject that they have any need for God, this God who has sacrificed Himself for their sake no less.

But, brothers and sisters in Christ, today, let us not turn a blind eye towards them, and rather, embrace them, show them who Christ our Lord is, and what God’s love can do for them, and for everyone. Approach them, and through our actions, make God’s love manifest in our world, that they too can see what it is. God loves everyone, even those who had rejected Him, and those in the darkness, having lost their way in their journey towards Him. Let us help one another that indeed, especially for those working in the field of Science, that they do their marvelous works for the good of everyone, and to give glory to God, and not to themselves. For it is all possible because the Lord made it so. God be with all of us, forever, and ever. Amen.