Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this Sunday, we listened to the Lord speaking to us about the matter of the Law of God being put inside our hearts and minds, that each and every one of us may know how to live our lives truly in accordance with what God has willed for us and with what He has taught us all to do. For God’s Law is not just a mere formality or law to be obeyed without understanding what the Law is all about, or else, our obedience will be without meaning and purpose.

In the first reading today, taken from the Book of Deuteronomy, we heard of the reminder from God to His people that He has given them His Law and His commandments, and He has revealed these to them so that they may come to be faithful and be obedient to the way which He has shown all of them. God showed them all how they could be righteous and upright in their words, actions and deeds.

Unfortunately, they frequently disobeyed Him and rebelled against Him, walked away from His path and turning away from His laws and commandments, preferring to follow their own volitions and obeying false gods and idols instead. And all these were because of their failure and refusal to listen to the will of God and to the Law of the Lord, which they thought as a restraint and oppressive regulations.

But they failed to understand what the Law truly means, as were their descendants, who preserved those very same laws and commandments, and failed to understand their meaning even until then. The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law preserved the Law and enforced strict obedience to them on the people. They enforced hundreds of rules and regulations, and were focused on the details of the Law, but failed to know why the Law was there in the first place.

And the Gospel passage which we have heard today put our understanding of the Law into a new understanding, as what the Lord Jesus spoke to His disciples using the famous parable of the Good Samaritan can tell us. We know this story of a good Samaritan man who helped a person robbed on his way to Jericho, while two other people, a priest and a Levite ignored him and just passed him by without helping him.

Now, we should understand deeper the symbolisms that exist in this parable, as the Lord wanted His disciples and all of us to know that it was not external piety and obedience to the Law that matter, but rather, our internal disposition, alignment, understanding and harmony with the Law that actually matter. The reality is that at that time, the society and the people of God were quite biased and had quite a bit of prejudice on the three people mentioned in the parable by Jesus.

The priest is usually a very respected person, as the priest symbolised the unity and link between God and man, as the one who is not just knowledgeable about the Law and God, but also as the one who offer the people’s sacrifices to God. Priests were also anointed by God to be His servants, and therefore, they were very essential in the livelihood of the people of God, and thus, commanded a large amount of respect.

Meanwhile, the Levite belonged to the tribe of Levi, from which priests were usually selected from. They were so important and honoured in their role, chosen by God, that they were traditionally not counted among the twelve tribes of Israel because they were supposed to be dwelling in all places, wherever there were need for priests. They were the descendants of Aaron and the priestly caste, and therefore also commanded a great deal of respect.

But the Samaritan was usually treated with disdain and prejudice, indifference and even hostility at times, just because they were seen as outsiders, pagans and people who were unworthy of God and His grace. The Samaritans were those who lived in the region of Samaria, the former site of the northern kingdom of Israel and were descended from a mixed heritage of some of the northern tribes of Israel and those pagan peoples that were brought into that place when the Israelites were exiled.

As such, the Jewish people in Judea and Galilee were often very wary, prejudiced and opposed against the Samaritans, whom they deemed to be pagans and unworthy. But yet, in what the Lord Jesus presented in the parable, it was exactly the same Samaritan who the people despised and often treated badly that was moved by the plight of a person who was robbed and left to die on the roadside.

And we should understand this with the fact that the Jews would not even touch or talk to a Samaritan, as evidenced in another part of the Gospels when the Samaritan woman of the Samaritan town of Sychar found the Lord Jesus strange for willingly talking to her, a Samaritan while He was a Jew. But that Good Samaritan not only showed pity on the injured Jew, but even took him to an inn and paid for his whole stay and mended his wound.

If we compare the behaviours and actions of the three people mentioned, the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan, it is quite obvious that the Samaritan did what the priest and the Levite did not do or refused to do. The greatest irony is that the two people who were commonly highly respected and praised for their obedience and observance of God’s laws did not do what the Lord has commanded them to do.

And on the contrary, the person everyone thought the least likely to be obedient to God, namely the Samaritan, had shown true faith and obedience to God’s commandments, by loving one of his own brethren, even though he was a Samaritan and the injured man was a Jew. That is the true essence of the Law and what God has wanted us all to do ourselves. The Law of God is about love, love that is pure and true, genuine and does not discriminate.

There is no point for us to be externally pious and appear to be good and law-abiding, if in our hearts we do not internalise and understand the meaning of those laws. That was what the priest and the Levite had done, which the Lord also used to subtly criticise the lives and the actions of the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law who have lived their lives in such a way, focusing on the external applications of the Law but not understanding why the Law was given to us.

Instead, all of us are called to love generously and be truly creatures of love, imitating the examples of none other than our beloved Father, Our Lord and God Who has loved us so generously and patiently, caring for the needs of all those who are dear to Him. God cares for each and every one of us without exception, and even we have sinned against Him and even after we have been obstinate in our rebelliousness, He continued to love us all regardless.

This is what the true essence of the Law of God is about, the love which God has for us, and which we therefore should also have for Him. And the love which we have, we should also love our fellow brethren, our brothers and sisters in our midst. Let us all be true disciples of the Lord from now on, and show love in our every words and actions from now on, so that we will be filled with true faith and love for God.

Let us all therefore not be hypocrites in our faith, but instead be sincere in our faith and in everything we do from now on. Let us all put the Law of God, the Law of His love in our hearts and minds, and make ourselves the instruments of His love. May God, our loving Father, be our guide and be our example, that each and every one of us may follow in our own lives, living our faith with dedication and conviction. Amen.

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this Sunday we listened to the Scripture passages in which we heard of the coming of God’s salvation as prophesied and spoken in the Book of the prophet Isaiah, which was fulfilled in the time of the New Testament, with the coming of the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, fulfilling all the promises which God had promised to all of His people from the beginning of time.

In our first reading from the Book of the prophet Isaiah, God spoke to His people through His prophet, speaking of the coming of a joyous and good time when God will bless Jerusalem, which represent the people of God, once again, and will give them the fullness of His grace and loving care again. And this must be understood in the context of what had happened at that time, in the land of Israel and Judah.

At that time, the kingdom of Israel and Judah, which were long separated for many centuries due to the divisions caused by the sins of the people and their kings, had been in great decline and experienced many sufferings and ruin, and in fact, right at the time of the prophet Isaiah, the northern kingdom of Israel fell into the hands of the conquering Assyrian Empire. The cities of the northerners were destroyed and many of the people were brought away to exile in far-off lands.

In their place, foreigners were brought to stay in the northern lands, lands used to be populated by the ten tribes of Israel. Over time, the people there intermingled, between the remnants of the Israelites and the foreigners who were put to take their place by the Assyrians. These were the ancestors and the origin of the people later known by the time of Jesus as the Samaritans, as those people who inhabited the land of Samaria, the ancient capital of the northern Israelite kingdom.

At that time, the remnants of Israel living in the southern kingdom of Judah would not have realised what the Lord meant in what He spoke through the prophet Isaiah, but the time would indeed come, when at the time of the coming of the Lord’s Saviour, Jesus Christ, all is revealed and God’s true intentions were made clear to everyone. And this beautiful truth is that God loves each and every one of His children, that is all mankind.

Unfortunately, by the time of the Lord Jesus, the people had become bitterly divided, in what is typical of ‘us against them’ mentality, in which the Jewish people, the descendants of mainly the old exiles from the fallen kingdom of Judah, thought that they alone out of all people that deserved God’s love and inheritance. They took great pride in themselves being the descendants of Abraham and as the inheritors of the chosen people of God.

That ended up in them looking down and despising the other people whom they thought to be unworthy of God and His love and salvation, chief of which were the Samaritans, and then also the Greeks and the Romans, as well as other non-Jewish peoples and all those who did not preserve and follow the laws of Moses under the strict interpretation of the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law.

But they failed to understand God’s true intentions and desire to love everyone, regardless of their nationalities or origins, language or background, culture or history. Each and every one of us mankind are God’s beloved creation and children, the fruits of His generous love for each and every one of us, without exception. Everyone is precious and important before the Lord, equal and without distinction.

That was what St. Paul wrote about in this day’s second reading, the part taken from his Epistle to the Church and the faithful in the region of Galatia. St. Paul spoke of how the faithful has been united by their common faith and love for God, and how there was no more distinction between the Jews and the non-Jews, as everyone has experienced the same love of God, and have been brought into a new existence in God.

They all received the same faith through the hard work of the disciples and the Apostles, whom God had sent to propagate His truth and salvation to all those who are willing to listen to the truth and those who are willing to believe in Him and follow Him. Without the dedication of those faithful servants of the Lord, many would not have heard the truth of God and not be saved.

In the Gospel passage today, we heard of the sending of the seventy-two disciples by the Lord, who were sent in addition to the Apostles to the various places that the Lord Himself was to visit, to proclaim the Good News of God before those people and to call them to believe in the Lord’s salvation through Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour. They were sent to the people with the expectation that their missions and works would not be an easy one.

Yet, the Lord also encouraged them that they would not be working alone. For the Lord Himself would guide them on their way. He told them of what they should do and what they should bring, essentially to put themselves completely in the hands of God, trusting in Him rather than in their own abilities or in whatever things they have brought with them. He sent them two-by-two to His people in order to save them all, because He loves everyone, without exception.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, today all of us are called to reflect on our own lives as Christians. Do we realise that we are the modern day successors of those disciples whom the Lord had sent? We are all called, as Christians, to be witnesses of our faith for the Lord as well, in whatever capacity we are in, in whichever community or opportunity we have, to bring forth God’s truth and love to the people He has loved so much.

Are we able to be good role models in faith as the disciples of the Lord had been in theirs? It is through our exemplary and righteous life that we become inspirations for others to follow, in reaching out to everyone and to bring them to the same faith which we now have. Let us all therefore be courageous and be inspired to follow and walk in the footsteps of the Apostles and the disciples of the Lord, and be witnesses of our faith in God.

May the Lord bless us always and may He guide us in all of our actions, so that in everything we say and do in our respective lives, we will lead more people towards God. Amen.