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Sunday, 5 May 2013 : 6th Sunday of Easter (Scripture Reflection)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, peace of Christ be with all of you. For Christ is the true peace, and the true light of the world. There is no true peace without Christ in it, since Christ is the Prince of Peace and the bringer of salvation to all creation. For in Him lies the true peace that only God can give, the peace of knowing that we are saved, and will no longer be separated from He who created us, and peace of knowing that we will live with Him in bliss and true joy for eternity.

Peace is not something to be easily found in this world today. We do not even need to refer to the true peace that only Christ can offer, but even it is difficult to achieve worldly and temporal peace in this world. Look around you, and you can easily find in any kind of situation, in any society, violence and hatred running rampant throughout, showing that we still have much to go to achieve true and lasting peace.

For since evil has entered the hearts of men since the beginning of creation, peace has been shrouded by veil of violence and hatred, and love has dissipated from mankind. It is evil and our rebellion that has veiled our hearts and darkened it against the light of God’s love and peace. We who believe and keep our faith in God has received new love and peace through Christ, and if we keep His commandments of love, we will remain always in His love.

If we remain in the love of Christ, we will receive the reward that is due to us, that is the bliss of eternal life of true joy, happiness, and love in the heavenly Jerusalem, as we had heard in the second reading from the Book of Revelation. Heavenly Jerusalem is not just a city of joy and physical happiness, as it may indeed be very beautiful and magnificent, as St. John had described it in the Book, but in fact the even greater happiness that we will receive, if we remain in God’s love, is the pure, inexplicable happiness of our soul, a spiritual joy that nothing else can replace.

For if we do what is good in the eyes of God, and follow His commandments, to love Him greater than any other things, and to love Him unconditionally with all our minds, our hearts, and our souls, and if we also love and care for our fellow men, just as we love Him and just as we love ourselves, we would gain true peace and calmness in our hearts. This is a peace that only God can give, that will remain in our hearts, forever and ever.

With God, all things are possible, and nothing is impossible. He will renew us and our spirit, that we be reborn as people of peace, of justice, and of love. But, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, those of us that believe, and indeed have received the peace and love of the Lord, will still need to be active in our world. We cannot be idle while there is still violations to peace, justice, and love in this world.

Just as St. Francis of Assisi said in his famous prayer, let us be the bringer of peace, to bring peace when there is violence, and to bring love when hatred ruins the harmony of the people of God. Let us be the harbinger of peace wherever peace had been silenced, and let us bring love where love had been snuffed out from the hearts of men. Show this world that love and peace that is of the Lord, is still the norm and let us show the power of God, against the violence and hatred of Satan.

Peace is not impossible to achieve, and with God’s help, we will surely gain it. Not even Satan can keep us away from the Lord and His everlasting peace, if we remain faithful to Him. Let us from now on, commit ourselves to peace, and love, that we become the children of peace, the children of our One, true God, who is peace and love. Work for peace, love, and harmony in our world, that everyone can also enjoy the peace that our Lord has offered, that they too eventually will believe and listen to the Word of God through Christ.

Therefore, beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, today, let us renew our commitment to peace in this world, and to achieve everlasting peace both in this earth, this world, and also in the world that is to come. Let us renew our commitment to bring peace to all mankind, to let Satan has his hold over us no more, and let violence and hatred to no longer have any place in our hearts. Let God remain in our hearts, and let Him transform us into beings of light, that we will be like Him, who is peace, who is love, and who is perfect.

May God remain with us, at all times, within our hearts, and protect us, always. May all of us also remain in His love, forever and ever. Amen.

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Friday, 26 April 2013 : 4th Week of Easter (Scripture Reflection)

Behold Jesus, our Risen Lord and God! He is the Son of God, the Messiah, who was rejected and tortured and suffered a humiliating death, abandoned by those near to Him and those who were dear to Him, just as prophesied by the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah has spoken much about the Messiah who is about to come, and in Jesus that prophecy is perfectly fulfilled.

In Christ lies our salvation, and in Him is all hope, because the Lord has given to Him authority over all. He has been given the authority to rule all the nations, with an iron rule of justice and love. Through Christ we have a new way towards the Lord, and if we keep God’s commandment and do His will, Jesus will prepare rooms for us in His Father’s kingdom, just as Jesus had promised to the disciples.

Christ had to endure death to achieve His mission, that through His suffering on the way to Calvary, Christ justified us by the outpouring of His blood from His holy wounds. His wounds are our sins, past, present and future, all our faults and rebellions against God, and all our unworthiness that Christ bear unto Himself, that all who believe in Him may not die, but enjoy everlasting life, through Him.

For Christ in His death had destroyed our own deaths, our fate for having abandoned God and His commandments, that we inherited from our forefathers in their stubbornness against God’s will and God’s words through the prophets. He restored us then to life, when He rose again in a new life of glory, on Easter day, when He is risen from the dead.

Christ our Lord is truly the Lord of life, the living God, just as the Father is God of the living, that death has no more power over us, and therefore, Satan, who first instigated mankind in rebellion against God’s will, has no more power over us. For Satan and his evil advocates and allies controlled us and enthralled us through the agents of sin, which they propagated through worldly temptations.

This Easter season is a holy season, a good season indeed for the renewal of our faith and our dedication to God our Lord. We should make best use of this opportunity and let it not go to waste, by embracing our faith in the Lord ever more intimately and strongly, and embrace God’s love ever more within our hearts.

Do not harden our hearts and do not turn a deaf ear against the Lord’s will and words that He spoke to us, not by loud proclamations, but by simple and soft whispers in the depths of our hearts. If we remain faithful to Him, and keep our hearts, minds, and soul attuned to Him, we will be able to listen to Him speaking to us in our hearts, in silence, the words of truth, of life, and salvation.

Therefore, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, despite all our busy schedules and occupancies, we should always try to set aside some time for the Lord, spent in quiet contemplation, that we will be able to follow Him ever more, and take His message of eternal life into our own being. Let us never forget the greatness of His love and the sacrifice He had endured on Calvary, so that all of us may live, and not die, in eternal life. Amen.

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(Holy Thursday) Thursday, 28 March 2013 : Mass of the Lord’s Supper – Cena Domini, Holy Week (Scripture Reflection)

Jesus showed us that to be a leader, one must be ready to be a servant. For a leader is not appointed for the sake of the leader, but rather for the sake of the people over whom the leader is appointed for. Therefore, Christ too, who is the Lord and Master of all things, are also in service to all those things He is Master of, that is all the mankind and all those children of God to whom He come.

No better form of service that our Lord had rendered to all the people, other than the gift of Himself, the Lamb of God, as the lamb of sacrifice in the manner of the lambs of the Passover, since that first Passover in Egypt, when the Lord told Moses to celebrate the Passover to mark the salvation of the people of Israel from the slavery of Egypt.

In Christ, there is a new salvation indeed, not just salvation from physical bonds, but indeed, the most important of all, the breaking of the bonds that had bound us since the time of our forefathers, from the time of Adam and Eve, the first mankind, when they rebelled against the Lord under Satan’s instigation and sinned. Thereafter, sin enslaved mankind, and made them do plenty of immoral things and things evil in the sight of God.

Yet Christ, the Son of God, who came into this world, out of the perfect love that God has for all of us, became the new Adam, who renewed mankind’s bonds with the Lord, by acting as the one and only bridge through which mankind, banished since the time of Adam onto the wild earth, to return back to God who loves them like a father loves his children. Christ broke the bonds of sin, and released mankind from slavery of sin, that is the spiritual slavery of the soul, much worse than any physical slavery.

For as long as we are enslaved by sin and the evil one, we have no hope of life in God, and we are doomed to death eternal with Satan and his fallen angels, to suffer the separation from the love of God for eternity. Christ ensured that this does not happen to us, as long as we are also welcoming of Christ’s love and redemption, that He offered freely to all mankind.

Christ poured out His Blood and His Body for all to eat and drink, through the bread and wine transformed into His Divine Presence in the Eucharist. Just like the unblemished lamb, whose flesh was eaten by the people of Israel, and whose blood marked the doorposts as a sign of salvation to God, that whoever marked by that blood, belongs to Him and deserves no death.

Therefore, similarly, Christ marked us through His Blood, and through His flesh, His Body. For no lamb is greater and more perfect than the Lamb of God Himself, and no blood or sacrifices are ever more worthy of redeeming one’s sins than that of the Blood of the Lamb itself. He gave Himself that we all may have hope of life, in Him! Such is the sacrifice and the service that He, who is Lord and Master, had rendered to all His people whom He loves.

Just like Christ who washes the feet of His disciples, He washes them clean from impurities, therefore the Blood of Christ too washes our sins away. Remember that in the Book of Revelations, John saw the large multitude of saints and martyrs who had washed their robes white in the Blood of the Lamb, that they be made holy and pure through their willingness to die for the sake of their Lord, and in defense of their faith.

Therefore, just like the martyrs and the saints, we too should wash ourselves clean through the Blood of the Lamb, which He freely gave to us. We are already cleaned externally as long as we bathe and ensure that all hygienic steps are taken, but what is much more difficult to clean is that of our interior, our heart, our mind, and our soul.

This is why we should bring the Lord into us, and we can do that by receiving worthily the Precious Body and/or Blood of our Lord. Just as the Church teaches us that either the Body or the Blood is already complete in itself, so it does not mean that if we only receive the Body then we receive the incomplete Lord.

No! This is not the case, and the most important things is to keep sacred the Temple of the Lord that is our being, our body, and our soul, that we make ourselves to be a worthy vessel, a worthy Temple, and a worthy Tabernacle in which our Lord resides. He who resides within us, through the Holy Spirit, and through his cleansing Blood, will purify us from our sins, if we are truly repentant and wish to be rid of such impurities.

Therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ, in the commemoration of this year’s Maundy or Holy Thursday, let us renew our commitment to the Lord, in order to receive Him into ourselves, and to partake in His Body and Blood, and welcome Him in our hearts, and humbly accepts His cleansing of our being and our soul, just as how He washed the feet of His disciples.

Let us all strive to be more faithful and be more loving, just as Christ had loved us to the point of death. May He shine over us and bless us with His grace, that we may have a great time in our celebration of the Easter Triduum, and will truly become the children of God, who values service to others, and to embody service in our leadership if we are chosen as leaders, and also to show God’s love through our actions, daily and even to the smallest of things that we do, that we show love in them. Amen.

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Friday, 22 March 2013 : 5th Week of Lent (Scripture Reflection)

Jesus Christ, is indeed the Son of God, a third of the Holy Trinity, in perfect unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, as one and only God. He came from the Father to save us from the certainty of death caused by our rebellions against God, and the sins that our forefathers, beginning from Adam and Eve, had done in the past. He came as the bringer of a new covenant and of salvation, through His own death and resurrection on the third day after that death.

Christ had brought a new hope for all mankind, for all creation to be brought back to be once again together in God’s great love and God’s loving embrace. He had given us Himself on the cross, that He had delivered us from the hands of Satan and his evil angels, who are determined to drag us away as far as possible from God and His love, and His grace. Christ through the cross had brought a new dawn, a new light, for all the people to see. That the people who lived in darkness, are now in the light, and became children of the light, and no longer that of the darkness.

Why did the Jews then not see the goodness of Christ, that of His mission, and His redemptive actions in this world? That is because they were blind, blinded by their blind obedience to their laws, in which they failed to see that the laws and the prophecy of the prophets of times past, all of them simply pointed out to God’s love, which He was to show through the Messiah, the Saviour, who would save God’s people, all mankind, from the destruction because of sin, evil, and death.

That is why today, we have to be careful, brothers and sisters in Christ, that we too will not fail into blindness as they were, but remain in the light, and remain aware of God and His loving presence, and His good works which are still always manifest through our Church, through His ministers, our Pope, bishops, and priests. Through them, we learn about Christ, and we know about His love through their teachings, and also through the Sacred Scripture upon which we base our faith, guided by our teachers in faith.

For all of us, we are already in the light through our baptism, and our eyes are already opened to God’s love, to Christ’s mission in saving all mankind, and our hearts are already opened to receive the new covenant Christ had brought with His death and resurrection. But, we must always cultivate the love and the fruits of the Spirit that God has planted in us, that they will remain alive and robust, and that they will not stay only within ourselves, but be shared for all others around us, especially those who still closed their hearts and their minds from God and His presence.

Teach one another and bring love to one another, that they too can learn about God, and feel God’s divine presence. Not necessarily by any miraculous experience, but even our simple loving acts will make God’s love and light manifest through us, to them, allowing them to witness God’s presence firsthand, and hopefully will bring them closer to God, and accept Him as their Saviour and their Lord.

Therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ, today, let us renew our resolve to love Christ, our Lord, ever more. For He is our Saviour who had brought us from death into life, through His own death and resurrection. Let us strive to share this love with one another, especially those who still yet to find out God’s love. Bring God to them through our own actions, and keep on praying for them, for all of us, and for all those who are working hard in the ministry of the Lord and His Gospels. Amen.

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Friday, 8 March 2013 : 3rd Week of Lent, Memorial of St. John of God, Religious (Scripture Reflection)

Today we hear again about love, and about compassion, these two most wonderful things in the world that came to us from God Himself. For God is love, and God is compassion. He loves all things, and especially all mankind, the last and greatest of all of His creations. Of course God hates all forms of evil and sin, but even greater is His love is for us sinners, if only that we too show Him our sincere and pure love for Him.

That is why the greatest commandments of all is to love, and even the base and heart of all the ten commandments in the Ten Commandments given to Moses, in all the prohibitions and the wordings are basically about love, and the commands given by God not to spurn the love between God and man, and the love between mankind themselves, who are fellow brothers and sisters in God. That is why love is very important, especially in our world today, when love is increasingly marginalised and misinterpreted.

For love is not just a commercial kind of love, and love is not desire and lust. Contrary to what popular perception is, love is not just limited to the love between a love-struck male and a love-struck female. That is just one form of love, and there are many kinds of love, and true love is definitely much more difficult than just to say “I love you” or giving presents and expensive gifts to show our ‘love’.

For to love means to have the profound and concrete change in our heart, and our being, and in some cases even to give ourselves in its entirety, to the other person, especially in the case of our love to God, to love Him with all our hearts, our minds, and our souls, and of course love between man and woman who have been made one by God, and no man should divide and separate such a divine union.

The reason why the institution of love, marriage, and the family had been under attack and had been subjected to much destruction in recent years is because of the growing absence of love in our world today, either between spouses, within the family itself, between the parents and the children, and between man and God, and between man and their fellow neighbours. Many of our world’s troubles today are because of the lack of this love, that man began to turn their back against God, abandoning Him for other pursuits, either for material goods or for the fame among men.

Violence in our world today has also arisen because of this growing lack of love, where brothers and sisters would not hesitate to attack one another physically or verbally, totally disregarding the commandments that God had given us, that is to love one another as we love ourselves. In too many cases today, we love ourselves too much, and we think too highly of ourselves. We are increasingly becoming less communal and more individualistic, and began to isolate ourselves from others, either in our busy career, in our busy commitments, or in our material properties and wealth, and at the same time also isolating ourselves from God and His love.

That is exactly the kind of love that St. John of God, whose feast we celebrate today, want to get away from. For St. John of God was a holy and pious man of God, and often strived for his personal piety and salvation through prayers and faith in God. However, one day, a great enlightenment came for St. John of God, through another saint, St. John of Avila, who advised him to put his personal piety and salvation behind an even more important matter, that is love for others, and service for the poor, the needy, and the less fortunate.

Since then, the light of love within St. John of God, which was previously confined within him, was released and he did plenty of good works for the sake of the poor, the abandoned, and the weak in the society of his time. This is the kind of love that God wants us to have, to care for our brethren, our fellow mankind without any hesitation, qualms, or ulterior motives, and to die first in ourselves, that we can be born anew as caring persons that place the well-being of others before our own.

It is not easy to cast away our selfishness and our strong love for ourselves, but brothers and sisters, if we help one another, and keep a strong prayer life, God will show us how to love others. It is not enough just to love God or to love ourselves alone, but to love others unconditionally is the final piece in the puzzle, that allow us to become truly beings of love that God desires, for when we love others in this way, and give ourselves to them, our own love for God will only become more perfect and more profound.

Let us pray brothers and sisters in Christ, that our life will be filled more fully with love, and that our actions too will be based on love and compassion. That we can do more things as God wanted us to do, to help one another, especially those least among us. Forgive one another’s sins and faults too. For if we do not forgive, we can never fully love one another, with the grudge and faults being in the way for that perfection of love. Let us imitate St. John of God, and also experience his moment of epiphany, when he understood that love can be more perfect, and faith can be more perfect, when it is shared and used for the good of others around us, rather than just kept within ourselves.

St. John of God, pray for us sinners, that we may follow your footsteps and grow in love for one another, and love for God our Father. Amen.

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Friday, 8 March 2013 : 3rd Week of Lent, Memorial of St. John of God, Religious (Gospel Reading)

Mark 12 : 28b-34

So a teacher of the Law came up and asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?”

Jesus answered, “The first is : ‘Hear Israel! The Lord, our God, is One Lord; and you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And after this comes a second commandment : ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these two.”

The teacher of the Law said to Him, “Well spoken, Master; You are right when You say that He is one, and there is no other besides Him. To love Him with all our heart, with all our understanding, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves is more important than any burnt offering or sacrifice.”

Jesus approved this answer and said, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that, no one dared to ask Him any more questions.

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Thursday, 28 February 2013 : 2nd Week of Lent (First Reading)

Jeremiah 17 : 5-10

That is what YHVH says, “Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings and depends on a mortal for his life, while his heart is drawn away from YHVH! He is like a bunch of thistles in dry land, in parched desert places, in a salt land where no one lives and who never finds happiness.”

“Blessed is the man who puts his trust in YHVH and whose confidence is in Him! He is like a tree planted by the water, sending out its roots towards the stream. He has no fear when the heat comes, his leaves are always green; the year of drought is no problem and he can always bear fruit.”

“Most deceitful is the heart. What is there within man, who can understand him? I, YHVH, search the heart and penetrate the mind. I reward each one according to his ways and the fruit of his deeds.”