Messiah

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Monday, 18 November 2013 : 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. Peter and the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Dedication of Basilica)

Luke 18 : 35-43

When Jesus drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the road, begging. As he heard the crowd passing by, he inquired what was happening, and they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was going by.

Then he cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The people in front of him scolded him. “Be quiet!” they said, but he cried out all the more, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Jesus stopped, and ordered the blind man to be brought to Him; and when he came near, Jesus asked him, “What do you want Me to do for you?” And the man said, “Lord, that I may see!”

Jesus said, “Receive your sight, your faith has saved you.” At once the blind man was able to see, and he followed Jesus, giving praise to God. And all the people who were there also praised God.

Alternate Reading (Mass for Dedication of the Basilicas)

 

Matthew 14 : 22-33

Immediately Jesus obliged His disciples to get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side, while He sent the crowd away. And having sent the people away, He went up the mountain by Himself to pray. At nightfall, He was there alone.

Meanwhile, the boat was very far from land, dangerously rocked by the waves, for the wind was against it. At daybreak, Jesus came to them walking on the sea. When they saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified, thinking that It was a ghost. And they cried out in fear.

But at once Jesus said to them, “Courage! Do not be afraid. It is Me!”

Peter answered, “Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You walking on the water.” Jesus said to him, “Come!” And Peter got out of the boat, and walked on the water to go to Jesus. But seeing the strong wind, he was afraid and begtan to sink; and he cried out, “Lord, save me!”

Jesus immediately stretched out His hand and took hold of him, saying, “Man of little faith, why did you doubt?”

As they got into the boat, the wind dropped. Then those in the boat bowed down before Jesus, saying, “Truly, You are the Son of God!”

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Sunday, 17 November 2013 : 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the Lord shall come as He had promised, and the hour of His coming is drawing very near indeed. And we do not know when this will exactly happen. It is only the Lord who knows the time of His second coming, when He will come to judge all creations, and indeed, to judge all of us, whether we will be found worthy or unworthy to be with Him in the glory of heaven.

That was what the prophet Malachi, the last of all the prophets of the Old Testament had proclaimed, that the Lord will come again, and His coming will be likened to a sun of justice, the light and brightness of which shall unveil all errors and evils, cast out all things dark into its proper place, that is in the darkness of hell, which will be condemned together with those rebels and wicked ones, at the end of time.

Yes, the Lord had indeed once come into this world of ours, God incarnate into our frail body of man, and the divine who assumed the mortality of our human flesh, in Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, and yet at the same time, also the Son of God, fully man and fully divine. This is the first coming of our Lord, who came to destroy the veil of darkness that had separated us for so long from our God. This veil is sin.

The Lord had come to pierce the veil of darkness, and place in all of us, each of us, the light that belongs to Him. This is so that we truly can belong to Him who is Light, as the children of the light, and not of the false light, that is Lucifer, the fallen lightbearer, the deceiver of mankind, and the evil one. In Jesus Christ who came into our world to be our Messiah, our Saviour, exists the fullness of God’s redemption and love.

Yes, the Lord has offered us full pardon and the complete extent of His love for us. All we need is to believe in Him, believe in His death and His resurrection, through whom He had made all these possible for us. Just as He had risen from the dead and elevated into the heavenly glory, assuming His place at the right hand of the Father, we too will be raised up, just as Jesus had promised us through His disciples.

But all of these do not come free and easy, my brothers and sisters, for we have to work and toil hard for it to come about. This is just as St. Paul had said in his letter to the Church in Thessaly, how they laboured and worked hard. They laboured not only for their own sustenance, that they will not bother and be a burden to the people whom they worked with, but they also laboured for the sake of the Gospel.

That is why we too must labour and work, not in any menial way, but what we need to do is that we need to live up the faith that we have in God and show that faith through actions and through love that we show in our actions. We have to show our love for God through our actions, by serving Him wholeheartedly, and by loving our fellow men, especially those who need most of our love and help.

In us, Jesus has dwelled and remained within us, if we have accepted Him as our Lord through the waters of baptism. The Holy Spirit from the Lord dwells within each of us the faithful ones, and we become the Temples of the Holy Spirit. We have been planted with the seeds of goodness, that is with faith, hope, and love, the three most important cardinal virtues. That is why we are expected to bear fruits of faith, the fruits of hope, and ultimately the fruits of love, through our actions that reflect our nature, which itself is a reflection of God.

Jesus Himself referred to His own Body as the Temple of God, as from the time of His coming onwards, and from the time when He had fulfilled the grand plan of salvation, that is dying on the cross at Calvary, the physical Temple of Jerusalem was no longer necessary. The Temple was first built by King Solomon and prepared by his father, King David, built of great beauty and adorned with great wealth and adornments worthy of the Almighty God, Lord and King of all kings.

That Temple was razed at the fall of the city of Jerusalem and the end of the kingdom of Judea to the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. The exiled people of Israel returned to their homeland after seventy years in Babylonian exile, and built the second Temple, which lasted until the time of King Herod the Great, the same King Herod who was mentioned in the birth of Christ, the one trying to kill Jesus.

King Herod rebuilt that Temple into a magnificent Temple that we refer to as the Temple of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. It took many years to build, and it was not to be completed until decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection. And only a few years after its completion, it would be destroyed by the Romans after a failed Jewish rebellion, which saw the expulsion of the Jews from their homeland. This was the fulfillment of what Jesus had said, that the Temple as it was would not stand and remain, and would be destroyed.

But Jesus also referred to His Body, that is the Temple, which is referred to in other similar Gospel passages, where the people taunted Him when Jesus said that He will tear down the Temple of God and rebuild it in three days. The physical Temple, as we can see, has given way to the real Temple, that is Jesus Christ Himself, God incarnate. This we can see when the veil of the Temple was torn apart when Jesus gave up His life, signalling the end of separation of God from mankind.

Yes, the tearing of that veil symbolises the beginning of a new era for all mankind, that is for all of us. The veil was once used to separate the Holy of holies where God resided in the Temple, and all the people. That veil represented the separation that was present between us and God, that is the barrier preventing us from approaching God. That barrier and veil was indeed sin, our sinfulness.

Jesus tore down that veil by His death, where He brought upon Himself, the punishments for the sins of the entire world. With that singular act, He had made us all worthy once again of God, and we would no longer be impeded on our way to the Lord our Creator and our God. And Jesus has given Himself to us, that from then on, we would live in Him and He in us. Through the Most Holy Eucharist, He had resolved to come and dwell within us, making us the new Temple of His Presence.

That is why, brothers and sisters in Christ, we ought to prepare, that we ensure daily cleanliness and purity of this holy Temple, that is our body and soul, as God has resided in all of us who believe in Him. We cannot contemplate to sin or commit any evil acts that will corrupt this holy Temples of ours, incompatible with God. Remember that without God we are nothing, and antagonising God is the last thing we all should think of doing.

That said, as mentioned earlier, Jesus promised us the coming end of times, and the fulfillment of salvation. He promised that we will not suffer death but receive new and eternal life, if we all remain faithful to Him. He will be a beautiful light as the sun of justice to all who believe and to all who are righteous in their ways. But to those who are wicked and keep wickedness and evil in their ways, their acts, and their thoughts, they will suffer greatly.

We should not be worried for the coming of the kingdom of God, brethren, for worrying bring about no good. Indeed, worry only distracts us from the real work that we have to do. And worry in this case, that is about our fate and our salvation, only highlight the nature of our self-centredness and our selfishness. We tend to become idle in worry and therefore fail to do what is expected from us.

We ought to love, and to show that love in our daily actions and deeds. We cannot be lax, brethren, for the coming of our Lord is known to Him alone, and that is why we must be ever ready, and ever prepared for His coming. No better way to do this, than to profess our faith daily to Him through real action and real dedication of love, of our hope, to our brethren, especially those who desperately are in need of them.

May the Lord therefore, the great sun of justice, the great and true Light of the world, shine His light upon us, on the path that we are to take, that we may keep faithfully to the path that He had shown us. Hence, we will not fall or go astray from the truth, and seek instead the lies of the devil, in the pleasures of the world. May God continue to love us, watch over us, and guide us as we approach towards His great kingdom. God bless us all. Amen.

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Sunday, 17 November 2013 : 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Luke 21 : 5-19

While some people were talking about the Temple, remarking that it was adorned with fine stonework and rich gifts, Jesus said to them, “The days will come when there shall not be left one stone upon another of all that you now admire; all will be torn down.”

And they asked Him, “Master, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” Jesus then said, “Take care not to be deceived, for many will come claiming My title and saying, ‘I am He, the Messiah; the time is at hand!’ Do not follow them.”

“When you hear of wars and troubled times, do not be frightened; for all these things must happen first, even though the end is not so soon.”

And Jesus said, “Nations will fight each other and kingdom will oppose kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines, and plagues; in many places strange and terrifying signs from heaven will be seen. Before all these things happen, people will lay their hands on you and persecute you; you will be delivered to the synagogues and put in prison, and for My sake you will be brought before kings and governors. This will be your opportunity to bear witness.

So keep this in mind : do not worry in advance about what to say, for I will give you words and wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends, and some of you will be out to death. But even though, because of My Name, you will be hated by everyone, not a hair of your head will perish. By your patient endurance you will save your souls.

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Thursday, 14 November 2013 : 32nd Week of Ordinary Time (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the Lord warns us today, that the kingdom of God is coming, and indeed it is drawing nearer even as we speak. No one but God Himself knows about the exact timing when this will happen. We can only know that it is indeed very, very soon. We are urged to be prepared that when the time comes, we will not be caught unprepared and therefore thrown into the pits of hell and suffer for eternity.

Jesus revealed that the kingdom of God has arisen within each one of us, since the Holy Spirit that gives us life, dwells within all of us. It is with this Spirit that the kingdom of God arrives to us within our hearts. As mentioned in the first reading taken from the Book of Wisdom, wisdom itself came from God, and indeed everything eventually has their origins from the same, one, and true God.

It is the Holy Spirit who dwells in us that represent the wisdom present in all of us. Wisdom is a gift from God to mankind, that we all may, through the Spirit, discern about our lives and what happens around us. A truly wise person is not someone with plenty of knowledge or intelligence, as this is not true wisdom. A truly wise person is someone who realise that the Spirit within them has empowered them to do many things, including realising and preparing for the coming of God’s kingdom.

Through wisdom in the Holy Spirit, the full truth of the works of Christ in this world has been revealed completely, just as it had to the apostles many years ago. Through Christ, God wants to reunite mankind to Himself, by the redemption of their sins and the resurrection of the body and soul from death. That has been revealed to us in the life of Jesus Himself, who suffered for our sins, died, was buried, and rose up from death, leading mankind towards the Father in a similar way.

Those who sincerely believe in God will have no need to ask what the Pharisees and the people had asked, because they already know God’s involvement in all things, especially in what Jesus had done throughout His ministry. These others asked because simply their faith is not strong enough and lacking. They doubted the works of God in Jesus, and were not convinced by what Christ had told and taught them all those while.

They asked for signs of the coming of the kingdom of God, and yet Christ Himself is the concrete sign that the kingdom of God is near. All the prophets had been prophesying about Him, the one and true Lord who would come to save His people, and yes, He came indeed, in Jesus, saving all mankind through His sacrifice on the cross, that a new hope may dawn, the hope of everlasting life in glory in heaven.

Jesus has given us much, as He gave His own flesh and blood for us, through His disciples, and which we commemorate in every Mass until today, for us to eat and drink, and be strengthened by His power and presence within us. Through the Most Holy Eucharist, the Lord comes within each one of us who believes and dwells within us. That is the essence of wisdom that had been mentioned.

For wisdom cannot come without accepting the Lord our God as our Saviour and Lord, and immerse ourselves in the abundance of His divine love. For it is in the Lord and with the Lord who dwells within us, with His presence and His Spirit, that we gain the complete perfection of wisdom as well as the completeness of salvation.

Many would say that science and the present day discoveries and developments prove that our faith in God and all that are meaningless. Why so? Because they tried to use human wisdom to explain what is divine, and in the same way, this is precisely what the Pharisees had done. They doubted the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus, just because they were not able to see it. They were blinded to the truth that has already been revealed through Jesus and through His actions.

Science, brethren, is in fact not a bad thing. It is how people use it makes it look bad, especially to us the faithful ones in God. Science is our humble men’s attempt to explain what happens around us, and inevitably, the greater understanding we have for our surroundings, for our universe, will bring us to the greater picture, that is the realisation, of how wondrous God’s love for us, and how great God is, in bringing about all creation together, by Himself.

Many phenomena in our universe cannot be fully explained by mankind, and through science, no matter how advanced it is. Why so? That is because many of the important events that scientists have deduced through science are in fact, deductions and hypotheses. These are predictions based on what people think might have happened, through observation. Yet, again, in all these, without the presence of God, everything truly is empty and meaningless.

For it is God who made all things, in ways that our minds and our understanding can never comprehend, not even with the most advanced tools and technologies. It is He who give purpose and meaning to all things, even to our very existence, to our very own lives. How wasted and meaningless our lives would be, if it were to be without meaning, without a clear goal, that is for us to reach out to God, the One who made all things exist.

And the Lord promised us that He will come again, and come again He will indeed! As we all always say in our Creed, that the Lord will come again to judge the living and the dead, that is the moment, when the kingdom of God is truly present and become a perfect reality, when all the righteous ones will join God in heaven, while those who are wicked will be cast out from the sight of God for eternity.

Yet, as Jesus had said, the kingdom of God is already within us, as we who received the Lord and the Spirit that He sent us, the kingdom of God is already within our heart. Inside, the Lord had planted various good seeds that awaits us to germinate, grow, and produce fruits. Therefore we are all expected to give fruitful and indeed, bountiful returns. We cannot be barren nor be useless. For when the Lord comes again to judge all creation, we will be found unworthy by the Lord.

May the Lord our God who loves us, continue to do so, and keep us always in His grace. God bless us all. Amen.

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Thursday, 14 November 2013 : 32nd Week of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Luke 17 : 20-25

The Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was to come. He answered, “The kingdom of God is not like something you can observe, and say of it, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘See, there it is!’ for the kingdom of God is within you.”

And Jesus said to His disciples, “The time is at hand, when you will long to see one of the glorious days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. Then people will tell you, ‘Look there! Look here!’ Do not go with them, do not follow them.”

“As lightning flashes from one end of the sky to the other, so will it be with the Son of Man; but first He must suffer many things, and be rejected by this generation.”

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Wednesday, 13 November 2013 : 32nd Week of Ordinary Time (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brethren in Christ, today we listen again to the healing miracle of the ten lepers by the power of Christ our Lord. The Lord has authority over all things, as the Lord and Creator of all things in this universe. He alone has the power to alter everything as He saw fit. He had come down to us in Jesus His Son, to bring about concrete change to all of us, reaching out to us all as we are all in one way or another, sick.

Yes, we are sick, and we are ill, brethren! Not the illness of the physique or those that are visible to the eyes, but the illness that is inside our souls. This is what Christ had come to us to cure. For physical illnesses and diseases can have many cures but for this illness of the soul, there is only one and only cure, that is in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Jesus, as He Himself had said, came especially for the sick and for those who are downtrodden. And yes, we are all sickened, brothers and sisters, and this sickness, that is of our soul, is the illness of sin. Yes, sin is our suffering and the pain that had infected us, affected us, and made us all unworthy before God our Lord.

Sin is a leprosy, yes the most terrible form of leprosy indeed, that is the leprosy of the soul. All of us have sinned at one point of our lives, and indeed, even from day to day we have sinned and inflict on ourselves more and more of this leprosy. And just like leprosy, sin spread like disease, affecting all of us, corrupting the health of our souls. Sin has no bounds and it affects everything.

Yet, unlike our diseases of the body, which inflicts physical pain and suffering to us, which none of us would certainly like, sin is often enjoyable and even attractive to many of us, that we are constantly always tempted to commit sin in our daily lives. That is why, sin is so dangerous, and we all ought to be careful, lest we all fall into corruption of sin.

The Lord Jesus came to us to heal us from this affliction, just as He showed His power by healing the lepers, the paralysed, those with physical debilitation, as those with spiritual illness, as those whose demons He had cast out. But often, we are too proud to admit our sinfulness and indeed, this illness, this leprosy of our souls. We are like those portrayed by the Book of Wisdom in our first reading as the proud and the mighty, those who do not bend their knees to acknowledge our Lord, the Master of all.

We are also often like the nine other lepers, the ones who did not return to Jesus after knowing that they have been healed. Jesus did not ask them to give Him thanks or worship Him for what He had done, but yet the one leper, the Samaritan, returned and give thanks and glory to God. For he knew that it is God who is the One with the power and authority, healing him from the leprosy that had affected him.

We are often like the nine other lepers, because we are often too immersed in our joy and happiness, when we received good things from God, that we failed to give Him thanks for all the blessings He had granted us. We often even give glory to ourselves and praise ourselves instead of God. That is what happened to the nine other lepers, that they were so engaged in their happiness, that they dashed off back to their old lives without stopping and use the chance to thank God as the Samaritan had done.

Nevertheless, brethren, we must not think that God does not want us to be happy, as what He wants from us is merely our love for Him. It is only right and just that we thank Him for the multitudes that He had given us. Not the least of which, is the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. It is the greatest gift God had given us mankind, because in Jesus, we are saved and given a new lease of life, and He did this precisely by striking against that leprosy of the soul, that is sin!

Therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ, today let us take time to reflect, whether for the many good things God had given us, we have thanked Him properly for them. God does not need us to utter a long litany of thanks, as what He truly needs is, none other than our love, and our wholehearted dedication to Him. May the Lord who loves us dearly, continue to bless us and watch over us, as we grow in His love. God bless us all. Amen.

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Wednesday, 13 November 2013 : 32nd Week of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

Luke 17 : 11-19

On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus passed through Samaria and Galilee, and as He entered a village, ten lepers came to meet Him. Keeping their distance, they called to Him, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

Jesus said to them, “Go, and show yourselves to the priests.”

Then, as they went on their way, they found they were cured. One of them, as soon as he saw that he was cleansed, turned back, praising God in a loud voice; and throwing himself on his face before Jesus, he gave Him thanks. This man was a Samaritan.

Then, Jesus asked him, “Were not all ten healed? Where are the other nine? Did none of them decide to return and give praise to God, but this foreigner?” And Jesus said to him, “Stand up and go your way; your faith has saved you.”

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Tuesday, 12 November 2013 : 32nd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : White

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we are all servants of the Lord Most High, our God. We are the ones subservient to that great Lord the Creator of all of us, and all the universe. Yet, at the same time, He calls us sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters, as the ones whom He loved so dearly, that He gave us Himself through Jesus His Son, so that we can be saved, and be lifted up from our fate that is death, into a new life with Him, eternal in heaven.

For we were created by the Lord not to suffer nor to experience death and eternal suffering that is our fate. This is in fact because of the fall of our ancestors, who disobeyed God, that we too are made susceptible to the power of death. They obeyed their own desires and wishes instead of the will of God, and fell they did, succumbing to the allures and lies of the evil one, Satan the deceiver.

Satan was once Lucifer, the greatest and the mightiest one among all the angels of God. Beautiful and radiant, he was the most brilliant of all creations, and yet, he sowed evil in his hearts. He became proud and arrogant of his own beauty, might, and power. In the perfection and beauty he had been created, he craved greater power, that is to set his place above that of God Himself. Thus he rebelled against heaven and against God, and was felled and thrown down away from the glories he had once commanded.

Satan was certainly displeased at this, and therefore he seduced our ancestors, leading them away from God with false and empty promises of greatness, that they were cast out of heaven and the eternal glory set out for us. That is how we deserve death and destruction, because we have been tainted by sin and by rebelliousness. But God did not let us to just perish and be destroyed, because in  Jesus, He gave us a new hope.

Mankind cried out aloud to the Lord for the sufferings and injustice they had suffered, for we all, and our ancestors all had suffered greatly under the yoke of evil, that is sin. For sin, even though outwardly often look good and enticing, but in reality, it distorts us and bring pain to us, that is the pain and suffering of severance from the love of God and from God’s grace.

For although the Lord loves us and cares for us very much, but He is at the same time also a just and a righteous God, who cannot stand the presence of sin and disobedience against Him and His laws. Those who had committed sin, had rebelled and been disobedient against Him. And the punishment for such disobedience and rebelliousness is none other than death. And death that leads to hell, that is the total separation from God.

It is for this fate that we cry out to God, for mercy and for forgiveness, that we do not have to suffer this grievous fate. And out of His love, God sent us Jesus, to be our Redeemer, to make righteous again the whole assembly of the people of God, that everyone may not suffer death and eternal suffering, but be raised in glory with Christ, to reclaim the glories in life that we had lost in our rebelliousness.

Today, brethren, we celebrate the feast of St. Josaphat, also known as St. Josaphat Kuntsevych, a monk and later a great bishop of the Eastern Catholics. St. Josaphat lived a few hundred years ago, in what is now northern part of Ukraine. He lived at a time of great upheavals of the faith, which cost the faithful dearly and brought about many bitter emotions and feelings even to now, the present day.

Ever since the Universal Church’s unity was undermined by the series of heresies and breakups, there rose splinter groups claiming to hold the true faith in God. Many of these divisions eventually disappeared and the unity of the Universal Church was restored. But when the Eastern churches broke away from Rome over political and other petty issues over a thousand years ago, a great wound was created in the universal Church.

This is the reality of what faced St. Josaphat Kuntsevych, who grew up in an area of clashing ideologies. In the area where he lived, the population  was divided between the believers of the true Apostolic faith, and those who follow the churches that broke away from the Apostolic authority of the Church. St. Josaphat, upon his ministry and later on as a bishop of the Eastern Catholic community, had hard work laid out in front of him.

The people had mixed opinions about the faith in the Church, as they were in a way forced to comply with the decision of the state. Many of them belong to the Eastern Orthodox churches that broke away from the Universal Church over petty political and personal squabbles. The Union of Brest declared the reunion of all Christians in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into the Universal Church of God. Thus the task of St. Josaphat was made very difficult, with the people even openly rebelling against the religious authorities.

St. Josaphat persevered through all of those tribulations and faithfully served the people entrusted to him, even though they were openly against him and his obedience to the Apostolic See, to the Church of God, one and true. He served faithfully and dutifully even unto his death at the hands of the people of whom he was the shepherd. St. Josaphat was murdered by an angry mob just outside of a church and his body was thrown into the river.

In sweet and holy martyrdom therefore, St. Josaphat was welcomed into the glory of heaven. Following the footsteps of Jesus who died for His people, St. Josaphat too chose to die to himself and bring glory to God, that salvation may draw closer to His people. We too can do the same. Let us all draw closer to the Lord our Master and the source of our salvation. May He forgive us from our sins and welcome us back into His loving embrace. God bless us all. Amen.

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Monday, 11 November 2013 : 32nd Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Martin of Tours, Bishop (Gospel Reading)

Liturgical Colour : White

Luke 17 : 1-6

Jesus said to His disciples, “Scandals will necessarily come and cause people to fall; but woe to the one who brings them about. It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck. Truly, this would be better for that person, than to cause one of these little ones to fall.”

“Listen carefully : If your brother offends you, tell him, and if he is sorry, forgive him. And if he offends you seven times in one day, but seven times he says to you, ‘I am sorry.’ Forgive him.”

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” And the Lord said, “If you have faith, even the size of a mustard seed, you may say to this tree, ‘Be uprooted, and plant yourself in the sea!’ And it will obey you.”

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Sunday, 10 November 2013 : 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Second Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

2 Thessalonians 2 : 16 – 2 Thessalonians 3 : 5

May Christ Jesus our Lord who has loved us, may God our Father, who in His mercy gives us everlasting comfort and true hope, strengthen you. May He encourage your hearts and make you steadfast in every good work and word.

Finally, brothers and sisters, pray for us that the Word of God may spread rapidly and be glorified everywhere as it was with you. May God guard us from wicked and evil people, since not everyone has faith.

The Lord is faithful; He will strengthen you and keep you safe from the Evil One. Besides, we have in the Lord this confidence that you are doing and will continue to do what we order you. May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.