Liturgical Colour : Purple/Violet
Isaiah 55 : 10-11
As the rain and snow come down from the heavens and do not return till they have watered the earth, making it yield seed for the sower and food for others to eat, so is My Word that goes forth out of My mouth : It will not return to Me idle, but it shall accomplish My will, the purpose for which It has been sent.
Liturgical Colour : Red
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we heard a very clear call through the Sacred Scripture passages, for us to repent from our sinfulness, reject our wayward path of life, and make a turnaround to follow the Lord our God with all our heart and strength, following Him with all sincerity and commitment. This is what the Lord had called us all to do, and we really should go and listen to what He had said.
Sin is something that had become a difficult and persistent stumbling block on our path, which is due to our disobedience and refusal to obey to the Lord and His ways. And all of these were born from our own human sense of pride, of arrogance and greed, as the prophet Sirach mentioned in our first reading today, as a series of warnings for us, not to be haughty and be overconfident, thinking that nothing can harm us.
Indeed, while God loves each and every one of us, but sin is one thing that God does not love from us. Truly, sin is an abomination in His sight, and it is because of our sins that we have suffered the consequences of those sins. We have been sundered from the grace of God, and because of that, we should have fallen into hell, and we should have faced the consequences for sin, that is death and eternal suffering, an eternity of suffering and despair out of which their is no hope for escape.
That is why the Lord sent His many messengers, prophets and servants to help guide His people, that is all of us, so that as many as possible among them might be saved. And we know just so much that God loves us to the point that He did the most extraordinary thing of all, that is to give His only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, the Divine Word of God, to us as our Saviour and our Hope.
Through Jesus His Son, God had revealed to us the importance for us to reject sin, as we heard it in the Gospel passage today. Jesus was speaking about maintaining the purity of our beings, our hearts, minds and all things, also in our physical bodies and flesh alike. But we must be careful not to misunderstand and misinterpret what He had said, as we cannot take things literally as He had said.
Why is that so? That is because certainly each and every one of us have been tempted through our various senses and parts of our bodies, and if we really literally follow through what Jesus had said, then just imagine how many people out there would be blinded or with just one eye, disabled and debilitated, with no arms or with no legs, just because we misunderstood the true intention of the Lord.
What the Lord wanted from us is for us to resist the temptations to sin, to restrain ourselves and not to give in to the pressure either from the outside or from the inside to sin. It is part of our nature to experience that desire and the temptation to sin and commit things that are not in accordance with what the Lord had taught us, but we ourselves are also able to consciously reject the advances of those temptations, and rebuke Satan and all of his attempts to subvert us to sin.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is where we really need to be prepared and we cannot be lax in our spiritual discipline. We cannot be like those who think that they have all the time in the world, and that they are free to enjoy the world and all of its goodness in whatever ways they like, even if in the process they fall into debauchery and wickedness.
We need to prepare ourselves, as when the Lord comes to seek the reckoning for each one of us, at the timing that He alone knows, then we must be prepared. Certainly, I am sure that we do not want to regret when the time of reckoning comes, and we end up among those whom God will condemn and reject, as sinners and wicked people.
Perhaps, it would be good for us to follow in the footsteps of St. Polycarp, the holy saint whose feast we are celebrating today. St. Polycarp was one of the disciples of the Apostles St. John who was one of the bishops of the early Church, whose contributions was crucial for the foundation and the strengthening of the early Church and the early Christian communities.
It was told that he was a convert to the faith, and he devoted his whole life to the service of the Church and God’s people, even though there were many difficulties facing the faithful people of God, due to the opposition and persecution by the state against the Christian faith. Eventually he was arrested and tortured, given a choice between betraying his faith and living, and standing by his faith and dying in painful agony.
St. Polycarp was not deterred by that temptation to abandon the Lord and preserve himself. Rather, he proclaimed courageously his faith in God before all those who were present at his trial, and stood by his faith among all the other people who had been arrested with him for their faith. As the shepherd of the flock, he had shown good examples for his people.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we should emulate the good examples of St. Polycarp in our own daily life. Let us all commit ourselves to the Lord, reject all forms of sin and temptations, so that we may grow ever closer to God and find our way to Him. May all of us draw closer to God and be reconciled with Him, through our actions and deeds that show our faith to Him at all times. May God be with us all, and may St. Polycarp intercede for us sinners. Amen.
Liturgical Colour : Red
Mark 9 : 41-50
At that time, Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone gives you a drink of water because you belong to Christ and bear His Name, truly, I say to you, he will not go without reward. If anyone should cause one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble and sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a great millstone around his neck.”
“If your hand makes you fall into sin, cut it off! It is better for you to enter life without a hand, than with two hands to go to hell, to the fire that never goes out. And if your foot makes you fall into sin, cut it off! It is better for you to enter life without a foot, than with both feet to be thrown into hell.”
“And if your eye makes you fall into sin, tear it out! It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, keeping both eyes, to be thrown into hell, where the worms that eat them never die, and the fire never goes out. The fire itself will preserve them.”
“Salt is a good thing; but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”
Liturgical Colour : Red
Psalm 1 : 1-2, 3, 4 and 6
Blessed is the one who does not go where the wicked gather, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit where the scoffers sit! Instead, he finds delight in the law of the Lord and meditates day and night on His commandments.
He is like a tree beside a brook producing its fruit in due season, its leaves never withering. Everything he does is a success.
But it is different with the wicked. They are like chaff driven away by the wind. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous but cuts off the way of the wicked.
Liturgical Colour : Red
Sirach 5 : 1-10 (Greek Septuagint version – Sirach 5 : 1-8)
Do not rely on your wealth. Do not say, “I am self-sufficient.” Do not let yourself be carried away by greed and violence; they would make you their slave.
Do not say, “Who can stop me?” For the Lord has power to punish you. Do not say, “I have sinned and nothing has happened!” For the Lord bides His time.
Do not be so sure of pardon when you are heaping sin upon sin. Do not say, “His compassion is great! He will forgive the vast number of my sins!” For with Him is mercy but also anger; His fury will be poured out on sinners.
Do not delay your return to the Lord, do not put it off from day to day. For suddenly the anger of the Lord will blaze forth and you will perish on the day of reckoning. Do not rely on riches wrongfully acquired for they will be of no use to you on the day of wrath.
Liturgical Colour : Red
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day we heard of the work of God’s love, which He had done out of love for all the things which He had created. In the first reading today, taken from the familiar passage of the first part of the Book of Genesis, we heard about the account of how God created the entire universe, that from nothingness that was before creation, God made the whole universe, all of creations complete with all the creatures.
God did not create the whole universe, with all of the objects, things both living and non-living without a reason. That reason was love, for He Himself is love, and is in perfect harmony and love in Himself. He existed in perfect harmony and love within His most Holy Trinity, but then, He wanted to share that love. And therefore, He created all things, including us all mankind because He wants to love each and every one of us.
He did not create us to allow us to perish in the darkness and in damnation of hell. But it was because of our ancestors’ and our own disobedience and refusal to listen to Him that we have been separated and sundered from His love and grace. He has made all things good and perfect, but it was our refusal to obey and to embrace His love that had brought evil upon this world.
Yet, despite all of that, He never gave up on us. Had He not loved us, or hated us for what we have done, then God would have pulled away His love and grace from us. Just as easily as He had created us, He could have destroyed us utterly as well, for after all, He is God, the Almighty God of the whole universe. But He did not do so, and that is because of His love. He loves each and every one of us so tenderly that He is willing to give us a chance.
That was why He continued to work on us mankind throughout time, sending His servants and prophets to call us back from the darkness and therefore to return into His light. He called many times for mankind to abandon their ways of sin and evil, and to return to the truth and the righteousness of God. And to that extent, He also promised that He would send us all a Saviour, Who would deliver us from all of our sins and troubles, and He did fulfil that promise perfectly, through the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.
In the Gospel today, we witnessed and heard how Jesus and His disciples went from place to place, and many came to Jesus wanting to be healed from their afflictions, both that of the body and that of the spirit. He healed them, cured them from the diseases that affected their flesh, and He cast out demons from them, making them healed both in body and spirit, and be reconciled with God.
He urged them to repent from their sins and called them to a life of righteousness, to be forgiven by God and to live a life of virtue and upright nature, which is what He had commanded His Apostles and disciples to continue in this world, so that even after He had left this world, His works would still continue to go on and save more souls, the proof of the love of God Who willingly suffered for our sake and Who willingly endured the cross for us.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, today we commemorate the memory of those who have followed in the footsteps of the Holy Apostles, those who have received the same calling and ministry as the disciples of our Lord had. Today we remember St. Paul Miki and his companions, who were the faithful servants of God, martyred in the land now known as Japan, at the time of the great persecution of the faithful there approximately four centuries ago.
At that time, the Church and the faith grew rapidly in Japan, as many missionaries came to that land making use of the opportunity of the open door policy of the Japanese government at that time, consisting of many local warlords, who welcomed the Europeans who came to trade, and at the same time, carrying with them missionaries seeking for the conversion of souls.
Many people, both the commoners and the nobles alike were attracted to the faith for various reasons, but many of them genuinely came to believe in the message which the missionaries had preached, about the Lord our God Who loves us all so much, about the state of our sins and our fate of damnation, and how God wanted to save us all by calling upon Himself all peoples from every nations to come and to approach upon the Throne of His mercy.
Many were baptised and became ardent Christians, including St. Paul Miki and many others. They openly practiced their faith and preached it to many others, who also were then convinced to repent their sinful ways and be converted to the faith. The faith and the Church there was rapidly growing, and its outlook was great. But no sooner that the changes in the political scenes happened, that the Christians soon found themselves in trouble.
For the new government of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan became increasingly suspicious and hostile to the influence that the Christian faith had on many people in the Japanese society. There were increasingly more and more persecutions of the faithful, and more and more people found it difficult to practice their faith openly, out of fear of the authorities.
But there were many of those who refused to be daunted by the challenges presented to them, and continued to do the good works which had been started in them. Many of them, including St. Paul Miki and his many other fellow brethren in faith were arrested, and were made to choose between staying on in their faith and facing certain death, or to abandon and reject their faith in God, by the act of stepping on images of the Lord and crucifixes, and live.
St. Paul Miki and his many companions in the faith did not comply with the offer of the authorities. They would rather serve the Lord Who loved them even though they knew that they would suffer great persecution, torture and eventually death. They would not choose the comforts of the world to save themselves but at the cost of betraying the Lord and therefore losing their souls.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, from the examples of St. Paul Miki and his many fellow companions, we should learn to follow the Lord as they had done, filled with faith and commitment. We should love Him in the same manner as they had done, that is with all of their hearts. After all, God had loved us all so much, that even though we have sinned, but He was willing to forgive us.
May the Lord strengthen in us our faith, and may He awaken in us the strong desire to love Him and to devote ourselves to Him. Let us all help one another to grow ever closer to God, and to grow in our faith, love for God and love for one another. May we all become worthy and good servants of our Lord, in the footsteps of the Holy Apostles and the holy saints of God, St. Paul Miki and his companions. God bless us all. Amen.
Liturgical Colour : Red
Mark 6 : 53-56
At that time, having crossed the lake, Jesus and His disciples came ashore at Gennesaret, where they tied up the boat. As soon as they landed, people recognised Jesus, and ran to spread the news throughout the countryside.
Wherever He was, they brought to Him the sick lying on their mats; and wherever He went, to villages, towns or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplace, and begged Him to let them touch just the fringe of His cloak. And all who touched Him were cured.
Liturgical Colour : Red
Psalm 103 : 1-2a, 5-6, 10 and 12, 24 and 35c
Bless the Lord my soul! Clothed in majesty and splendour; o Lord, my God, how great You are! You are wrapped in light as with a garment.
You set the earth on its foundations, and never will it be shaken. You covered it with the ocean like a garment, and waters spread over the mountains.
You make springs gush forth in valleys winding among mountains and hills. Birds build their nests close by and sing among the branches of trees.
How varied o Lord, are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all – the earth full of Your creatures. Bless the Lord, my soul!
Liturgical Colour : Red
Genesis 1 : 1-19
In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth had no form and was void; darkness was over the deep and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.
God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘Day’ and the darkness ‘Night’. There was evening and there was morning : the first day.
God said, “Let there be a firm ceiling between the waters and let it separate waters from waters.” So God made the ceiling and separated the waters below it from the waters above it. And so it was. God called the firm ceiling ‘Sky’. There was evening and there was morning : the second day.
God said, “Let the waters below the sky be gathered in one place and let dry land appear. And so it was. God called the dry land ‘Earth’, and the waters gathered together he called ‘Seas’. God saw that it was good.
God said, “Let the earth produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants, fruit trees bearing fruit with seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.” And so it was. The earth produced vegetation : plants bearing seed according to their kind and trees producing fruit which has seed, according to their kind. God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning : the third day.
God said, “Let there be lights in the ceiling of the sky to separate day from night and to serve as signs for the seasons, days and years; and let these lights in the sky shine above the earth.” And so it was. God therefore made two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the smaller light to govern the night; and God made the stars as well. God placed them in the ceiling of the sky to give light on the earth and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning : the fourth day.
Liturgical Colour : Green or Red (Martyrs) or White (Bishops)
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day we are reminded by the Scripture readings on the importance and the sanctity of the matter of marriage, which is the union that God had made between a man and a woman. In the first reading, we are told by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Hebrews, that marriage must be respected by all, and that we should not depend on money.
Indeed, it is worldly cares and temptations such as money, pleasures of the flesh, lust, immorality, fornication of the flesh and many others which are able to endanger the sanctity and unity found in our marriage. It is from them that adultery and all sorts of despicable sins were born from, as what we can see in the example of the adultery of king Herod, as told in the Gospel today.
King Herod was the ruler of Judea, who was one of the sons of king Herod the Great. Philip was his brother, the ruler of Decapolis, but this brother died before Herod, and left behind a widow named Herodias with a daughter, as mentioned in the Gospel today. It was not lawful for him to take Herodias as a wife, as she had been lawfully and rightfully wed to his own brother.
But both of them persisted in their sins, not least Herodias who resented John the Baptist for telling them off on their adultery. After all, she was most likely still young, even with a daughter, and in the world then, even today, who would not be tempted to be the wife of a king? She would be influential, powerful and wealthy, instead of being a sombre widow of a deceased king.
Herod himself also embraced the sin, and he was unable to restrain himself, which became the source of his undoing. He tried to listen to John the Baptist, and tried to restrain himself, but he was not able to resist the temptations of the flesh, as shown in the Gospel today. He lusted in the daughter of Herodias who danced so beautifully as to mesmerise him and turn his heart away from anything else. He was so tempted as to make vows and promises, even to give away half of his kingdom.
In the end, that led to him being responsible for the death and martyrdom of John the Baptist, a holy man and the herald of the Messiah. In this, he had committed a great sin, not just because of his adulterous behaviour and relationship with Herodias, but all the more because he was unable to restrain himself and succumbed to the temptations that led him to commit a murder, even when done unintentionally.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, it is important that all of us heed the lessons to be learnt from today’s Scripture passages. We must learn to resist our vulnerabilities and all the temptations that lead us to sin. We must not be complacent and neither should we give in to the temptations that can bring about our downfall. We have to be upright and we must commit ourselves to the way of the Lord and not to worldly values.
Let us all follow the examples of St. Blaise and St. Ansgar, the two holy saints whose feast we are celebrating today. St. Blaise was a bishop of the Church, and also a famous physician, who was renowned for his prowess as a physician, healing many people from their bodily illnesses. Later on, he would devote himself to the Lord, becoming a physician and healer for the souls.
Through his many works, he helped many people to overcome their attachments to sin, to worldliness and to all temptations of the world. St. Blaise showed the people how they ought to live in faith and avoid all forms of fornications and sin. He was later arrested and tortured under the persecution of the faithful by the Emperor Licinius, and was told to have suffer torture with iron combs and was later beheaded.
Meanwhile St. Ansgar was a devout servant of God and an influential preacher, whose works of evangelisation in the region now known as northern Germany, Denmark, Sweden and some other areas in Northern Europe had led to the conversion of the pagans and the sinners there into the Christian faith. At that time, many of the people there still lived in ignorance of the faith, and they sinned against God.
But St. Ansgar showed them by examples, and also through his teachings, by revealing to them the Sacred Scriptures and the Good News of the Lord, that their ways had been wrong, and encouraged them to return to the Lord and accept baptism for the forgiveness of their sins. This St. Ansgar had done, and many were saved by his works. He helped to lay a solid foundation for the Church and the faith in the places where he worked to minister to the people of God.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, through what we have heard in the Scriptures today, the bad examples of Herod and Herodias, and the virtuous examples of St. Blaise and St. Ansgar, let us all as Christians learn to uphold Christian teachings and values, and strive to be upright, honest and just in all of our ways and deeds. May the Lord help us in all of our good works, and may He strengthen in us the resolve to live our lives free from sin. May God bless us all. Amen.
petercanisiusmichaeldavidkang 