heart of mercy

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Tuesday, 14 October 2014 : 28th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of Pope St. Callistus I, Pope and Martyr (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green or Red (Martyrs)

Brothers and sisters in Christ, today we heard in the Holy Scriptures and the Gospel about the nature of the Law of God, and how we ought to keep it in faith, and how important it is to understand what the Law is all about, and how to best apply it in our lives. It also highlighted the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, who kept a superficial vigil and observance over the Law, but not understanding the true intent and meaning of the Law.

As is with any forms of laws, the Law of God is often bound to be misinterpreted and misused, especially when its meaning and purpose are not fully understood by those who enforce these laws. It is imperative that the people of God understand what the Law is all about, that is about love, and not just any forms of love, but the love which comes from the source of all love itself, that is God.

The Law is meant as the symbol and representation of love of God for us mankind, by giving us this set of guidance and pointers to help us to orientate ourselves in this world filled with temptations, darkness, evils, and impurities. The ultimate aim of the Law is indeed ultimately to keep us in God’s grace, and to bring us back to His love all of us who have sinned and walked away from Him.

But when those who were tasked to safeguard and apply the Law erred in their judgments and refused to listen to what the Lord had to say about them, then the Law lost its purpose, and ended up becoming a chore and a tedious thing for the people of God to maintain and keep. As a result, that was why Jesus criticised the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law who were obsessed with the external applications of the Law rather than the holistic applications of the Law.

Being too engrossed in the external and superficial application of the Law is dangerous, as this ended up in the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law adopting an excessively strict and burdensome interpretation of the Law, which brought a great burden on the people of God, and sadly that this is done not in the spirit of true understanding of the purpose of the Law, ending in the observance of the Law just for the sake of observing it, which will bring no benefit but instead condemnation.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, therefore today we are all urged to turn deep into the Law of God, all the rules and observances which we have known in the Church, and begin to appreciate them in complete fullness and find the true meaning and purpose of the Law, that is the love of God for us, and His great desire to reunite us with Himself, so that we may be free from sin and unworthiness, and gain the eternal inheritance He had planned for us.

Today we celebrate together as the Church, the feast of Pope St. Callistus I, also known as Pope St. Callixtus I, the leader of the early Church and a martyr of the faith under the persecution of the Roman authorities at the time. Pope St. Callistus I was once a slave, who managed to escape his slavery and eventually became a servant of the Lord and His Church. He suffered many times for his Christian faith, and he was sent to many punishments by the authorities for that.

Nevertheless, eventually when Pope St. Callistus I was chosen as the Bishop of Rome and the successor of St. Peter the Apostle, and as the Vicar of Christ, he extended a new outreached hand towards those sinners and those who had erred in their path, committing adultery and fornication, allowing them to return to the Church to seek God’s mercy.

There were indeed serious oppositions to this policy, and some including the Saint Hippolytus were firmly opposed to the policies of Pope St. Callistus I who was seen as being too lenient against the sinners. St. Hippolytus was thus elected as a rival Bishop of Rome and Pope, in opposition to Pope St. Callistus I. But despite the differences and the rivalry between them, God continued to exercise His good intentions upon the world through them, as they continued to minister to the people of God in faith. Eventually both of them would also meet their end in martrydom, in the defense of their faith.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the examples of the saints and the messages from the Holy Scriptures which we heard today, all call for us to reassess our own lives as well as our own actions and deeds. We have to remember that first, God is loving and merciful, and through the Law and rules which He had given us, He wants to bring us back to Him and be renewed in love, so that our sins may be cleansed, and we renewed and purified, may find justification and salvation in God.

However, at the same time, we cannot turn a blind eye on our sins and defects indeed. We cannot ignore them or to bypass them in our attempts to seek the Lord and find His mercy. For God hates and rejects sin and evil just as much as He loves and be merciful to all of us. Welcoming sinners is indeed important, and we should make it a priority to help sinners to come back to the Lord through Faith. However, this cannot be done at the expense of condoning sin or to reduce our contempt of sin.

Instead, brothers and sisters in Christ, from today onwards, if we have not done so before, let us all help one another so that we may remind ourselves of the sins we have committed, that we may repent from them and find our way to the Lord, seeking His mercy and forgiveness. Let us also from now on seek to understand the true meaning, purpose and intention of the Law of God, so that by obeying the Law in all its full meaning, we may gain the favour and the blessings of the Lord.

May Almighty God guide us always in life, and help us so that we may become ever better disciples and followers, rooted in love and abundant in charity and faith. God bless us all. Amen.

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(Usus Antiquior) Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (II Classis) – Sunday, 31 August 2014 : Homily and Scripture Reflections

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, most beloved ones in the Lord Jesus. Today, we partake together and celebrate together this Sacred occasion of the Sacrifice of our Lord Jesus together, and we are called to reflect on our lives today, on whether we have lived as what Jesus wanted from us and according to what He had told us as we heard in the Gospel today.

We heard about the famous and the well-known story and parable of the Samaritan and the man who travelled from Jerusalem to Jericho and beset by the bandits along the way. Three men passed through the same road, the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan, but out of all three, only the Samaritan stopped by and showed great mercy to the man wounded and left to die on that road.

The priest and the Levite, considered holy and sacred personas in the society of the people of God at that time, did not even stop by to care or show love and mercy to the wounded man. They pretended not to see the plight of the man and proceeded on to where they wanted to go, leaving the man to fend for himself and die a death in great suffering had the Samaritan not be there to help the man.

The Samaritan went out of his way, not just to stop by and help the man, but he even helped him to recover to full health by carrying him on his own beast of burden, on which he surely had sat upon. Therefore, we can imagine that the Samaritan was in fact walking along while the wounded man was sitting on the beast of burden. And not only that, he even paid the full fee of the man’s lodging fee in the inn and promised to come back and pay more if the man has not fully recovered yet in the allotted time.

And Jesus taught all of us to love, to love not just God but also that of our neighbours, those who are around us, with all of our hearts, with all of our strengths, with all the capacities of our minds, and with all of our abilities and in all the time we are able to spend with these brethren of ours, and of course ultimately to God. With this our faith will be real and living and will not be a dead faith.

What Jesus wanted from us is a living faith, based on the foundation of love and action. The commandments He had mentioned was the same as the Ten Commandments of God, which God had given to mankind, to His people through His servant Moses. The Ten Commandments are the ten tenets and key laws that govern how we mankind should live our lives, but all of them, are truly and is indeed about love. Loving God and one another with all of our beings and strengths.

Jesus also did not intend to belittle or make the priests and the Levites look bad by comparing their actions with that of the Samaritans. As we all should know, the Samaritans were the pariah of the society at the time, rejected by the Jews and they were seen as pagans who did not follow the faith and the way of the Lord, and this enmity had been ongoing for hundreds of years by the time of Jesus.

Why He used the Samaritans is in fact with a clear purpose to chide and rebuke the faithful, who were so proud of their faith, and who were feeling so righteous just because they thought they have the faith that they used their faith as a justification to condemn and persecute those others whom they deemed to be unworthy. And Jesus rebuked those who had been so proud of their faith and did so little to live according to that faith.

The examples would be the Pharisees, the teachers of the Law and the elders, who are together in the similar group as the priests and the Levites. These people were very honoured and respected in the society because they were supposedly the stewards and guardians of the law and the precepts of the Lord. Yet these people instead of truly living out the faith through their actions and deeds, they persecuted and oppressed the people by numerous rules and punishments so as to burden them and yet they did not make the people any more worthy than they had been.

We too, brothers and sisters in Christ, have to reflect on our own lives, whether we have done our part to live according to our faith, or whether we have not done so. We need to be proactive and active in our faith, that is in every words we speak, in every deeds that come from our hands and limbs, we must proclaim the Lord and thus show to all who see us, that we truly are belonging to God.

Let us all work together, and work consciously so that we may live this life we have on earth faithfully, casting out all impropriety and evil, and filling our lives and our hearts with good deeds and desire only to seek the Lord, He who is our loving God and Father, and the One who will judge us according to our actions. We should follow the footsteps of the Samaritan, in walking the extra mile to help one another, especially if we see someone in need around us, and when we are in the position to help. Let us never ignore the plea of those who seek for help.

May Almighty God awaken in us the spirit of love, that is both the love we have for Himself and for our brethren around us. And may He also awaken in us the spirit of pity and mercy, that we may be merciful to those suffering around us and forgive those who have wronged us. May God be with us all, all the days of our life. God bless us all. Amen.

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Thursday, 14 August 2014 : 19th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Red

Brothers and sisters in Christ, today we are taught on the value and importance of forgiveness in our lives by none other than our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who mentioned that we have to forgive and forgive, again and again. When Peter asked if he should forgive his brethren seven times and Jesus replied that he should do it seventy-seven times should not be literally taken as a seventy-seven times of forgiveness, but rather that our acts in all things must be filled with mercy and forgiveness, one that is genuine from our hearts.

The Lord Himself is the embodiment of the perfect mercy and love, forgiving His people who are also His children from their trespasses and rebelliousness, while chastising them for the kind of sinful and rebellious behaviour they had shown. But of course there is a limit that God has set to His mercy and kindness, especially if those to whom He had shown this mercy consistently and persistently refused to listen and to change for the better, then they are truly digging their own graves and lead themselves to destruction.

That was why our Lord sent prophets after prophets to help His people, to remind them and guide them on the right path, and this includes Ezekiel, whom God sent to His people in exile in Babylon, warning and reminding them of their continued sins and rebelliousness against God which would bring them to greater disaster and destruction in the end. God wanted to forgive them, but forgiveness must also be accepted with sincerity, or otherwise it will not work as intended.

The whole of mankind is indeed in exile, and had been since the days when Adam and Eve our ancestors first disobeyed the Lord, and therefore lost the certainty of inheritance of the divine glory and riches which had been our share as of when God created us. But God gave us nothing lesser than Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ, as the concrete and ultimate symbol of forgiveness and hope for mankind, that through Him, all our wounds and our afflictions would be healed.

It is now up to us, whether we accept graciously the generous offer of mercy and repent, following the Lord once again into salvation and eternal glory in heaven. It is also our choice to stay apart from the Lord and His love, following our own human desires and fallibilities, and likely these will end us in destruction and endless cycles of hatred, violence and evil. It is up to us, for us to break free from this cycle and usher a new era of peace, love and harmony based on the Lord.

And today we celebrate the feast of a saint, whose life and examples would truly awaken us to this idea of mercy and forgiveness, as well as love for our fellow men, and this saint had just passed before us less than a century ago. He is St. Maximilian Kolbe, the saint of World War II and the saint of the Holocaust in NAZI Germany. He was one of the many martyrs of the faith, who together with others like St. Edith Stein or St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, died for her faith.

St. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who joined the religious life since his youth, and was particularly devoted to the Immaculate Virgin Mary, trying his best throughout his ministries to spread the devotion to the Immaculate Virgin Mary, even establishing newspapers and publication dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. St. Maximilian Kolbe took part in numerous missionary works, and particularly he visited Japan many times, spreading the seeds of faith among the people there.

But eventually what made St. Maximilian Kolbe truly known to the world was his actions during the Second World War in which he was arrested and interned, and when several prisoners were found to have attempted escape from the prison at the infamous Auschwitz extermination camp, they were immediately sentenced to death. However, when one of the prisoners cried out in agony and sorrow over his family, St. Maximilian Kolbe immediately offered himself in exchange for the life of the Polish inmate.

St. Maximilian Kolbe endured two whole weeks of dehydration, complete isolation and total denial of food. But he remained cheerful and in fact encouraged the others who were also condemned to die, celebrating the Mass with joy and persevering amidst the shadow of death. And when the Germans decided to clear the room, they found St. Maximilian Kolbe to be still alive and proceeded to execute him. He met death with joy and without fear, and into the hands of the Lord he gave up his soul.

Therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ, are we all able to follow the examples of St. Maximilian Kolbe? He forgave his executors, brought life and hope to another man, whose family received him in renewed joy. St. Maximilian Kolbe and his actions truly showed the embodiment of the love and mercy of God. Remember, that if St. Maximilian Kolbe gave up his life in exchange for the life of a man chained in prison, then our Lord Jesus Christ gave up His life and suffer on the cross in exchange for the life of all men, that is all of us, chained by the chains of sin.

Let us all break free of the cycle of hatred, violence, evil and death. Let us all work together to seek peace and harmony among all peoples. And may Almighty God bless our endeavours, and may His love and mercy together with the examples and the intercession of St. Maximilian Kolbe help us to be better children of God, and always think first of the Lord and His infinite mercy. Amen.