great solemnity

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Sunday, 4 September 2022 : Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this Sunday all of us are reminded and called to recognise the nature of the shortness, fickleness and impermanence of life, as each one of us know and should be aware that our lives whether they be short or long, but in the timescales and span of this world history, it is but a tiny drop amidst the great ocean of time. All of us must be aware that we exist but for just a moment, and yet, in that relatively short existence, each one of us can do so many great and wonderful things should we allow the Lord to lead and guide our path in life.

In our first reading today, we heard from the author of the Book of Wisdom speaking of how the wisdom and truth of God are far beyond the ability of man to fully comprehend, even with their greatest abilities, intellect or wisdom. No one can truly understand the Lord unless they entrust themselves to Him, and allow Him to lead and guide them in their journey, allowing His Holy Spirit to enter into us and dwell within us, inspiring us with His love and truth, and allowing us to understand better the true way of the Lord, as it is only by opening ourselves, our hearts and minds to the Lord that we can know Him more and therefore serve Him better in our lives.

In our Gospel passage today, we heard of the Lord speaking to His disciples and the people on the matter of following Him and how He also mentioned the parable of a man who wanted to build a house and a king who wanted to wage a war with another kingdom. Through what we heard in that Gospel passage today, we can clearly see that the Lord told all of us how each and every actions we take, all of them should be well thought of and carefully discerned, so that we may take the correct course of actions and not be hasty in making decisions which may end up causing us to take the wrong decisions and doing the wrong things that lead us into troubles.

The Lord highlighted how following Him will mean that we have to endure sufferings and trials at times, and we have to face rejection and opposition, and hence, carrying our crosses just in the same way that the Lord Himself had to carry His Cross and suffer for the sake of all of us. Just as our Lord Himself has been rejected, oppressed and persecuted, many of us may also therefore face the same persecution and oppression by the world and by all those who disagree with the Lord and His ways, and by all those who refused and still refuse to believe in Him. Such is the reality for us being Christians, as we have to dare to be different from the world, to stand by our faith and the path of the Lord against the often corrupt and immoral ways of this world.

In our second reading today, St. Paul in his Epistle to Philemon highlighted how he was returning one called Onesimus to him and the other faithful, and mentioning himself as a prisoner for Christ, and this Onesimus was like a godson to St. Paul. Through this seemingly short passage and message from St. Paul, again we can see the reality of our faith, that we may often face trials and struggles, persecutions and hardships just as St. Paul himself had endured, being in prison and treated badly by many for so many years of his ministry as a great missionary of the Christian faith. And yet, at the same time we can also see the great dedication which this Apostle has shown us as well.

In this, brothers and sisters in Christ, after hearing the words of the Scriptures, we are presented with a clear message and reminder from the Lord, that we have to trust in Him in guiding us throughout our lives in following the right path. We should not depend only on our own human strength, judgment and abilities, or else, very soon we will realise that we face such seemingly insurmountable odds and challenges, and we then quickly tend to withdraw from the trials and choose instead to conform to what is acceptable by the world and by everyone, and essentially therefore abandoning our faith and bringing scandal both to the Lord and to His Church.

Instead, the Lord has called on all of us to carry our crosses in life together with Him. Let us remember how Christ our Lord has suffered for us, and how He willingly endured all of that so that we may be saved and may receive new hope and life, freed from the shackles and bonds of sin and evil. We must remember that while we may carry heavy burdens that is our crosses in life, the difficulties in our Christian journey, our crosses that we carry, but the Lord has done it all earlier on, and He did so for the sake of every single one of us. We have to also realise that our lives in this world, as I mentioned earlier, are short, and we should do whatever we can in this life, to glorify God through them.

The Lord as mentioned also did not leave us alone. He is carrying His Cross with us, suffering with us and strengthening us along the way. He has given to us His Holy Spirit through His Apostles and His Church that the Holy Spirit may show us the way and the wisdom of God. This means that as Christians we should truly entrust ourselves to the Lord, entrusting ourselves in His wisdom and guidance so that in all the things we say and do we will always do what is right and worthy as those called as God’s beloved people and children, namely Christians. We are called and expected to glorify God by our lives and to proclaim Him through everything we say and do, at all times.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, now that the Lord has shown us what the path forward for us look like, all of us are reminded to be like the man and the king in the parable mentioned in the Gospel passage today. Knowing what is expected of us and what hardships and trials we may have to endure based on the examples of the past and the history of the Church, we should discern well and carefully on what course of action and path that we want to take. We should resist the temptations to abandon the Lord’s path and to conform to the world and its corruptions. Instead, we should strive to remain ever more faithful in God and allow the Lord to continue to guide our lives and our actions.

Let us all renew our faith and commitment in God, brothers and sisters in Christ, that our every words, actions and deeds may be true testimony of our faith. May all of us always put ourselves in the hands of the Lord, recalling how He has always ever patiently guided us and showed us the way forward. May all of us be motivated and inspired to allow God to lead us down the path of virtue and righteousness, that through Him we may perform ever more wonderful deeds, and be filled with virtuous examples through which many more people may come to believe in the Lord as well, through our faithful testimony of our faith by our lives and actions. May God bless us always in all things, and in all of our good efforts and endeavours, now and always. Amen.

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Sunday, 4 September 2022 : Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Luke 14 : 25-33

At that time, when large crowds were walking along with Jesus, He turned and said to them, “If you come to Me, unwilling to sacrifice your love for your father and mother, your spouse and children, your brothers and sisters, and indeed yourself, you cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not follow Me, carrying his own cross, cannot be My disciple.”

“Do you build a house without first sitting down to count the cost, to see whether you have enough to complete it? Otherwise, if you, have laid the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone will make fun of you : ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.'”

“And when a king wages war against another king, does he go to fight without first sitting down to consider whether his ten thousand can stand against the twenty thousand of his opponent? And if not, while the other is still a long way off, he sends messengers for peace talks. In the same way, none of you may become My disciple, if he does not give up everything he has.”

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Sunday, 4 September 2022 : Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Second Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Philemon 9b-10, 12-17

The one talking is Paul, the old man, now prisoner for Christ. And my request is on behalf of Onesimus, whose father I have become while I was in prison.

In returning him to you, I am sending you my own heart. I would have liked to keep him at my side, to serve me on your behalf while I am in prison for the Gospel, but I did not want to do anything without your agreement, nor impose a good deed upon you without your free consent.

Perhaps Onesimus has been parted from you for a while so that you may have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave. For he is very dear brother to me, and he will be even dearer to you. And so, because of our friendship, receive him as if he were I myself.

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Sunday, 4 September 2022 : Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Psalm 89 : 3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14 and 17

You turn humans back to dust, saying, “Return, o mortals!” A thousand years in Your sight are like a day that has passed, or like a watch in the night.

You sow them in their time, a dawn they peep out. In the morning they blossom, but the flower fades and withers in the evening.

So make us know the shortness of our life, that we may gain wisdom of heart. How long will You be angry, o YHVH? Have mercy on Your servant.

Fill us at daybreak with Your goodness, that we may be glad all our days. May the sweetness of YHVH be upon us; may He prosper the work of our hands.

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Sunday, 4 September 2022 : Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Wisdom 9 : 13-18 (Greek Septuagint – Wisdom 9 : 13-18b)

Indeed, who can know the intentions of God? Who can discern the plan of the Lord? For human reasoning is timid, our notions misleading; a perishable body is a burden for the soul and our tent of clay weighs down the active mind.

We are barely able to know about the things of earth and it is a struggle to understand what is close to us; who then may hope to understand heavenly things? Who has ever known Your will unless You first gave Him Wisdom and sent down Your Holy Spirit to him? In this way You directed the human race on the right path; they learnt what pleases You and were saved by Wisdom.

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Sunday, 28 August 2022 : Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, this Sunday as we listened to the words of the Sacred Scriptures, we are all reminded of the need for all of us as Christians, as God’s people to be full of humility and virtues, and not to be prideful and arrogant. We are all called to open our hearts and minds to the Lord and allow Him to guide our path. We should not allow our ego and pride to mislead us down the wrong path. We must always remind ourselves that we exist by the grace of God and everything we do, are ultimately to glorify God and to serve Him.

In our first reading today, we heard from the Book of the prophet Sirach, on the matter of humility before God and how the faithful should act and behave in this world, with humility and obedience to God, and not to be filled with ambition or self-aggrandising attitudes. As Christians, all of us are challenged to put aside the temptations of greed and pride, of the many allures of worldly pleasures, power, glory, fame and human praises. This is of course easier said than done, as temptations will always be abound in trying to steer us away from the path of God’s righteousness and into the path of selfishness and wickedness.

In our Gospel passage today, we heard the Lord speaking to His disciples and the guests regarding how some of the Pharisees were seeking the most important places on the dinner table, as with other events and gatherings. The Lord highlighted that we should not do such things, and should not seek the pride of honour, desire renown and compete for prestige and honour with each other, or indulge on our status, our privileges and other things which can lead us down the slippery path into sin and damnation. That is because pride and ego, desire and greed can easily lead us into doing things for our own selfish aims and purposes.

Contextually, we should understand that the Pharisees and the other respected members of the community were at the apex of the Jewish society, together with the king and his nobles. The Pharisees were greatly respected as well as feared because of their great intellectual abilities, being those among the few who were educated and had the knowledge and understanding of the Torah or the Hebrew Scriptures. They were also the ones who were entrusted with the maintenance and preservation of the Law of God as passed down from the time of Moses through the generations, adopting an especially strict interpretation of the Law.

The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law often made a show of their piety and faith by praying openly and loudly in the public places, wearing their wide prayer shawls and showing their obedience to the Law, while at the same time also shunning and criticising those whom they deemed to be less than worthy than they were, which in this case was essentially everyone else besides them, and in particular, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the people who were possessed with evil spirits and who suffered from illnesses and sickness, from various conditions and maladies. Those people were viewed with disdain and even open hostility from the same Pharisees and the teachers of the Law.

While not all of the Pharisees were living their lives in that manner, but quite a number of the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law had the same attitude towards their faith. They focused more on appearances and external applications of the Law, and misused their privileged positions among the community in order to advance their own egoistic aims and ambitions. They thought that their righteousness and their piety made them to deserve the grace and salvation, honour and praise from God and man alike, but they had forgotten that everyone is equal before God, and their attitude, their boastfulness and their hardline attitude in fact turned people away from the faith and made it difficult for some to come back towards the Lord.

In our second reading today, from the Epistle to the Hebrews, we heard of the words of the author of this Epistle that all of us the faithful have been called to come into the presence of God Most High, Who through His Son, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, have formed a New Covenant with us mankind, with Christ as the Mediator of this New Covenant. It is by God’s grace that we have received His pardon, His mercy, His compassionate love and care. It is through the works of His Son, that by His suffering and death on the Cross, by which we mankind have been made partakers of the New Covenant He has established with us, that will last forever.

What this highlights is that, while all of us have to be active in living our lives with concrete actions, with efforts based on our faith, but we do not justify ourselves based on those works and deeds alone. It is God working through us, as we carry out His will and as we do our actions in this life that allow us to come to the grace of God and become worthy of Him. Without God, and without His love and providence, and without faith, then all of our actions are empty and meaningless. Like the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, while they were outwardly pious and faithful, but as the Lord Himself pointed out, that their hearts were not filled with the love for God, but with love for themselves and their pride and ego.

That is why, on this Sunday, all of us are reminded through all these passages from the Sacred Scriptures, that we should always be vigilant and be careful with the temptations of our desires, our pride and ego, all of which can mislead us down the wrong path, in causing us to do things that are contrary to the will of God. Each one of us should always strive to remain focused on the Lord and remind ourselves of what we have been called to do as God’s followers and disciples. We have to restrain the temptations of our flesh, the desire for pleasures and for false happiness and other temptations that are aplenty all around us.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us always strive to be humble and to do God’s will in each and every one of our actions, making good use of whatever opportunities that He has given each one of us so that we will not end up falling into temptation, or falter in our journey towards Him because we end up doing things to satisfy our selfish wants and desires first instead of doing what God wants us to do. And the more responsibilities we have, the greater the position we have in life, in whatever achievement we gained, in whatever honour we receive, let us not allow our pride and ego to overcome us as they had done to the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law.

Instead, as the Lord had reminded us through the Scriptures, the greater we are, the humbler we should become, and there is no greater example for that than the Lord Himself, the Mediator of the New Covenant, Who although is the Almighty, All-Powerful God, willingly humbled and emptied Himself of His infinite glory, to be stripped and to be scourged, punished and broken for our sake, as He laid suffering and dying on the Cross. The Lord’s most loving sacrifice on the Cross is truly a reminder for us, of the virtue of Christian humility which the Lord Himself had shown us. At the Last Supper, the Lord has also washed His disciples’ feet, and told them to do the same as He had done, reminding us that as Christians, as God’s followers, we have to put God and others ahead of ourselves.

Let us all therefore do our best to live our lives with Christian virtues, particularly that of humility, so that we may draw ever closer to God and also be inspiration for one another, in striving to live our lives more worthily for God and His glory. May all of us distance ourselves from the dangerous temptations of pride and greed, excise from us that pride and greed, that ego and ambition, and instead, serve the Lord humbly at all times, and do our best to glorify God by our lives at each and every opportunities. Amen.

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Sunday, 28 August 2022 : Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Luke 14 : 1, 7-14

At that time, one Sabbath Jesus had gone to eat a meal in the house of a leading Pharisee, and He was carefully watched.

Jesus then told a parable to the guests, for He had noticed how they tried to take the places of honour. And He said, “When you are invited to a wedding party, do not choose the best seat. It may happen that someone more important than you had been invited; and your host, who invited both of you, will come and say to you, ‘Please give this person your place.’ What shame is yours when you take the lowest seat!”

“Whenever you are invited, go rather to the lowest seat, so that your host may come and say to you, ‘Friend, you must come up higher.’ And this will be a great honour for you in the presence of all the other guests. For whoever makes himself out to be great will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be raised.”

Jesus also addressed the man who had invited Him, and said, “When you give a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends, or your brothers and relatives, or your wealthy neighbours. For surely they will also invite you in return, and you will be repaid.”

“When you give a feast, invite instead the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Fortunate are you then, because they cannot repay you; you will be repaid at the resurrection of the upright.”

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Sunday, 28 August 2022 : Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Second Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Hebrews 12 : 18-19, 22-24a

What you have come to, is nothing known to the senses : nor heat of a blazing fire, darkness and gloom and storms, blasts of trumpet or such a voice that the people pleaded, that no further word be spoken.

But you came near to Mount Zion, to the City of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem, with its innumerable Angels. You have come to the solemn feast, the assembly of the firstborn of God, whose names are written in heaven.

There is God, Judge of all, with the spirits of the upright, brought to perfection. There is Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant, with the sprinkled Blood that cries out more effectively than Abel’s.

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Sunday, 28 August 2022 : Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Psalm 67 : 4-5ac, 6-7ab, 10-11

But let the righteous be glad and exult before God; let them sing to God and shout for joy. Sing to God, sing praises to His Name; YHVH is His Name. Rejoice in His presence.

Father of orphans and Protector of widows – such is our God in His holy dwelling. He gives shelter to the homeless, sets the prisoners free.

Then You gave a rain of blessings, to comfort Your weary children. Your people found a dwelling, and, in Your mercy, o God, You provided for the needy.

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Sunday, 28 August 2022 : Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Sirach 3 : 19-21, 30-31

The greater you are, the more you should humble yourself and thus you will find favour with God. For great is the power of the Lord and it is the humble who give Him glory. Do not seek what is beyond your powers nor search into what is beyond your ability.

As water extinguishes the burning flames, almsgiving obtains pardon for sins. The man who responds by doing good prepares for the future, at the moment of his downfall he will find support.