Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this Sunday all of us are reminded through the words of God in the Scriptures on the need for us to have true and genuine faith in God and to live righteously each and every moments of our lives in accordance with God’s laws and commandments. As Christians we are called to be role models in our faith and in our lives, to show by our actions and deeds, how we can be faithful to God.

From our first reading today, taken from the Book of the prophet Sirach, we heard of the commandments and laws that God has given us mankind, and how we have to follow and obey these laws and commandments as are our obligations as those who believe in God to walk in His path and to live our lives as how He has taught and instructed us all to live them. Otherwise, our faith is empty, meaningless and dead, and we are no better than hypocrites who believe in one thing but act in a completely different, even contradictory manner.

And that is the essence of what we have just heard in our quite lengthy Gospel passage today, in which we heard the Lord Jesus going through with the people on the importance of having genuine faith in God and not being hypocrites as He used several examples to explain to them and to make them understand that their faith was truly more than just merely a formality or as something that was to be just taken lightly.

He used the examples comparing the actions of the Pharisees as at that time, the Pharisees who were then the intellectuals and the elites within the community, were those who often looked highly upon themselves and praised themselves for their piety and adherence to the laws and customs of Moses, while looking down on others whom they deemed to be inferior, unworthy and dirty, like the tax collectors, prostitutes, people with diseases and those possessed by demons, and the Gentiles or the non-Jewish people.

But they failed to realise that in their attitude and way of living their faith, they have placed way too much emphasis on the rituals and their details right to the most minute of details. Historically, the Pharisees placed a lot of attention and focus on how the laws of Moses were practiced and emphasised the details and the way the rites were to be practiced, for example, when cleansing the hands, the Pharisees would emphasise how the cleansing ought to be done a few times and right up through the whole arms up to the elbows, otherwise the cleansing and purification were not up to standard or valid.

And the Pharisees liked to trumpet their piety and observance of the laws and customs before others, doing their prayers publicly and wanting to be praised and seen by everyone. However, the Lord pointed out that many of them did not truly have genuine faith and love for God. For they loved their laws and customs in their rituals and details much more than the Lord Himself. The Law that God gave to us mankind was meant to lead us to Him and not to end up becoming a distraction.

That was why then the Lord went to explain using some other examples of how we, God’s people must truly have faith in God and not just look at the letter of the Law. To understand the Law just by its letters alone is not enough, as it is indeed possible for someone to carry on the words of the Law and the required actions, even without love and faith for God. But do those actions then justify us or benefit us in any way? Certainly not! For such actions, done by those who do not believe in what they have acted are indeed no different from the actions of hypocrites who do not act in the way they believe in.

Therefore the Lord presented to us a different path, showing us that we must indeed seek to love God with all of our hearts, with all of our strength, and with all of our efforts and intentions, just as the very first commandment of God in the Ten Commandments have been revealed to us. If we truly love God, with all of our heart and strength, then naturally we will try our best to keep ourselves pure and away from sin, and do our best to live in accordance with the Law of God.

When the Lord mentioned how in the law, those who murdered and killed committed a great sin against God, and how in truth, if we even have the intention to murder or are angry at someone, we have actually already committed a great sin, the Lord was actually revealing to us that sin begins with a desire in our hearts, through which we are tempted, and should we give in to that temptation, we will easily fall down that slippery slope of sin, into graver and even graver form of sin.

That is why He similarly brought out the sin of adultery and infidelity against one’s own spouse, in which that when someone already has a desire for someone else in his or her hearts and minds, and indulge in that desire, the sin has already trapped that person since that moment. Similarly, if we indulge in that desire and allow ourselves to be tempted, we will end up falling deeper and deeper into sin, more and more serious with time.

Those who placed a lot of emphasis on the letter of the law will fail to realise that as the Lord Himself said, that as long as we are unable to comprehend the spirit and meaning of the Law as He revealed and taught to the people, we will continue to fall into the trap of sin, and will have difficulty to love the Lord with genuine faith and obedience. The Pharisees focused so much on the details of the Law and the regulations that they became rigid and fail to appreciate what the Lord truly wants to do with us through His Law.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God has revealed to us through Christ, His Son, that He has given us His Law and commandments because of His infinite and ever-present love for each and every one of us. And it was because of this same love that we have been so blessed for having these laws and commandments that God has given us to guide us in our path so that we may find our way to Him and be saved. God gave us His laws to show us His love and guide us to Him, and not to burden us unnecessarily, unlike what the Pharisees and some others thought.

We are truly blessed to have received this wisdom and revelation, which as St. Paul mentioned in his Epistle to the Church in Corinth, our second reading today, is part of God’s divine plan to bring us to His salvation. He has revealed to us the truth of His love through Christ, giving us this faith that we now have. Unfortunately, many of us as mentioned, did not appreciate this faith which we have, and we focus on the wrong things in life, that we end up focusing on the trivialities of rules and regulations and treating our faith as a formality rather than truly having a genuine faith and relationship with God.

It is time for us now to break free from this, brothers and sisters in Christ. It is time for us to turn once again to the Lord, Our God, with our every strength and capabilities, with our every attention and focus, that we truly live our lives from now on with a renewed spirit of faith. We are called to deepen our relationship with God and to embrace His love with all sincerity, knowing that He has loved us first so greatly that He gave us His Son, to suffer and die on the Cross for our sake, that we may live and not perish.

Let us all from now on no longer treat our Christian faith as a mere obligation or formality, and learn to live our lives with sincere desire to become ever closer to God, by our every words, actions and deeds that show that we truly belong to God, our Lord and Master. Let us all bring forth this as a witness of our faith, to spread the wonders of God’s love and truth in our respective communities and places, that many more people will be saved together with us.

May the Lord continue to bless us and guide us in our journey of faith in life, and may He strengthen us with courage and the zeal to carry on living our lives daily with faith despite all the challenges and temptations to do otherwise, that we may resist the temptation of vanity, pride and desire, so that we may truly have a genuine and living faith in us. May God bless us and our many good works, for His greater glory, now and always. Amen.

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this Sunday all of us heard the message from the Sacred Scripture, in which the core message is that of each and every one of us as disciples and followers of the Lord must be ready to do what He has taught and commanded us to do. If we call ourselves as Christians and yet we are incapable, unwilling or fail to do what we have been called to do, how can we be Christians then? Are we not like the hypocrites who believe in one thing and yet act in a different manner?

In our Gospel passage today we heard from the Lord Jesus His famous parable of the salt of the earth and the light of the world. He was using them as a tool of comparison with all of those whom He had called and taught, reminding them of all the blessings and talents that God has given to each and every one of them, and thus all of us too. All of us have been blessed with wonderful talents and abilities unique to our own, but many of us have not realised this and many of us are not using those talents and abilities for the right purpose or simply misused them.

Today, let us all first look into the two things which the Lord used to represent His teachings and thoughts. The first one is salt, an essential flavouring agent and also a preservative used from many millennia ago in many cultures and civilisations around the world. And the second one is light, something that is naturally available to us through the sun and the distant stars and its reflections from the moon. And we also have artificial forms of light source, historically using candle flames and then later on electricity-powered lighting.

In our world today we may not fully understand the significance of these two very important commodities and why the Lord chose them to represent what He wanted to deliver to the people listening to Him. And that is because we live in a world where salt and light, as well as many other things that used to be very difficult to be gained or maintained, are now abundant and plenty. Salt and light are so plenty all around us that we often do not appreciate their significance to our lives.

Salt was very important as mentioned earlier, as a flavouring for food that would otherwise be bland and tasteless. And even more importantly, salt is usually the most common form of preservation of food, by using it to kill the microorganisms present in the food and also to slow down the growth of any other microorganism by dehydrating the food due to its properties. Salt are readily available from the seas and oceans, as there are plenty of saltwater in our world, making up the vast majority of the water we have.

However, because salt is so important and necessary for many uses in life, its production, which is time and labour consuming using the traditional method of evaporating seawater, salt has always been prized and treasured by many people, especially by those who live far away from the shores of the sea. As transportation systems in the past were not as advanced as it is now, it may be difficult for many people to have a steady and sufficient access to salt.

If salt no longer has its saltiness and presumably, its useful properties, then it really becomes useless as the Lord Himself said. Without its properties, salt is useless and meaningless, and has no value at all other than to be discarded, ignored and thrown away. And by using this, God wants His people to understand that our talents and abilities that He has given us are just like the saltiness and the preservative properties of salt.

And then, on the matter of light, light is also a very important commodity for us all, as we all know that without light, we cannot see any objects around us. Our vision of the objects and our surroundings can happen because light is reflected on the object’s surface and gets into our eyes. Without light, there will then be darkness, for darkness is indeed the absence of light. With light, darkness disappears and everything become bright and visible again.

Similar with salt, we live in a world where light is so abundant and available at any time of the day that we may no longer appreciate its significance. But in the ages past, especially before the discovery of electricity and the use of electricity in providing light sources for us, people feared the dark very much as they could not see, and harm could easily occur to those who were exposed in the open, such as wild beasts and predators, and other harms like obstacles and dangers lurking all around not visible to man because of the lack of light.

During the period when light was absent such as during nighttime, candles were used, and they were so precious that if we notice, traditional candlesticks where the candles were usually placed have a flared surface that was meant to capture all the melted wax during the burn. While not all the substance of the candle can be reclaimed this way, but with that, as much melted wax as possible could be reclaimed and then reused again for either lighting or other purposes.

And we all also know that light also produces heat, and in a world where nighttime can be cold and dark, especially during winter times, light was indeed very, very important as not just a source of hope but also a source of comfort and protection. And this is why the Lord make use of light as His example, and mentioned how useless and illogical it would be for anyone to hide a light source underneath a cover that the light could not be used to enlighten the darkened places.

Such an attitude would not make sense at all considering just how precious light as a resource was, especially at the time when Jesus conducted His ministry two millennia ago, way long before electricity and any forms of readily accessible lighting were available to us mankind. In the same way as how salt was described therefore, light was used as an important comparison of how God has given us talents, abilities and gifts, and blessed us with the opportunities to be used, and we should make use of them for the greater glory of God.

But more often than not, we do not or fail to recognise these gifts and blessings from God. Or we misuse them for our own selfish desires and benefits rather than using them as how God had intended for them to be used. We seek personal happiness and pleasure, and we want to satisfy our various inner desires. This is where we are all reminded that if we do all these, essentially we are doing what the Lord had said about being senseless, by hiding the light that God has placed within us and by losing that saltiness of ours as the salt of the earth.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we are all the light of the world and the salt of the earth because we have in us the light of God, Who is the True Light of the world. We reflect His light and glory and become beacons of His light in our darkened world today. He has also given us the gifts to bless others with our distinct personalities and talents, like salt that gives flavour to the food that we eat. And if we act in ways contrary to what the Lord had taught and shown us, we are hiding this light and not making use of what God has bestowed on us.

How do we then live our lives so that we may truly reflect God’s light and become bright beacons of His light and be true and meaningful salt of the earth? It is by heeding what we have heard in our first reading today taken from the Book of the prophet Isaiah. The prophet mentioned how we all should share our joy, happiness and blessings with others, to live humbly and without excess that we may spare our joy with others who need help. We ought to reach out to the needy, those who are homeless and have none to care for them.

Essentially, we are all called to be selfless and to be willing to love one another sincerely, and we are called to live a genuine and virtuous Christian life each, so that by our lives and actions, the light of Christ will shine forth through us as the prophet Isaiah said, and be the guiding light for others who are still in the darkness of the world. Are we able to make the commitment to live our lives in an utmost Christian manner from now on?

It will not be easy for us to do so, as temptations are always aplenty trying to make us to live our lives for ourselves instead, causing harm and even hurt to others when we seek to satisfy our own selfish desires and demands. And if we do this, we are hiding the light of Christ and making ourselves useless as the salt of the earth. Our challenge is how do we keep our courage and strength to walk down the path that God has shown us, to bear witness to His truth and to share our joy in Christ with all those whom we encounter in life.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, let our lives be examples and demonstration of God’s love, and let our every words, actions and deeds speak of the glory of God, putting Him first and foremost above our own petty desires. Let us all reach out to our fellow brethren and show God’s love, and do our best within our own capacity, utilising our own talents and capabilities to touch others through our sincere and genuine show of love, care and concern, that we may bring light to illuminate the path of others who are still enshrouded by the darkness of uncertainty and sin, and bring happiness and joy to the life of others.

Let us all truly be light of the world and salt of the earth as our Lord Himself has called us to be, and let us dedicate ourselves, our time, energy and effort to serve Him ever more faithfully from now on. May the Lord bless us all and may He strengthen each and every one of us that we may always be faithful to carry out the missions which He has entrusted to us. May God bless us all and our many good works and endeavours, now and always. Amen.