Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Saturday Mass of our Lady)

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the Lord provided for His people out of His great love. He was moved with compassion seeing them all so faithfully following Him despite having no food to eat or place to properly lay their heads on at night. He showed His love to them, by giving them food to eat, that everyone may share in that food and be filled to satisfaction.

The people of God were lost, and they were lost in the darkness. The Lord was sorrowful for them and He wanted to show them His mercy. Ever since our ancestors betrayed the Lord’s trust and love, we have been cast out of God’s loving embrace, and separated from Him, we were indeed once like sheep lost in the wilderness without a shepherd to lead and guide them.

And the parallel can be drawn with what happened with the division of Israel between the son of Solomon, King Rehoboam, who ruled over Judah, and Jeroboam, the chosen usurper of the Lord who was given the ten tribes of Israel of the northern kingdom. The ten tribes was in a sense, torn apart from the whole unity of the twelve tribes of Israel, much like how our own ancestors were torn out of God’s grace because of their sins.

But Jeroboam did not fulfill well his appointed role as God’s shepherd for his ten tribes of the north, and he, like Solomon and Saul before him, was consumed with human emotions and in particular, the fear of losing his power and authority in the world. And in seeking to avoid that loss, he resorted to do things wicked and inappropriate before the Lord.

He created his own set of religious rules, established a new priesthood not based on the prescriptions of the Lord that is not of the Levite tribe, and also set up idols, in the image of the golden calf, so that the people under his rule would go and worship them instead of going to the House of God in Jerusalem. He feared that if his people were allowed to go to Jerusalem freely, his authority would be undermined.

He certainly had forgotten that the golden calf itself was the same reason for the Lord’s wrath against His people, when they threw away their faith in Him at Mount Horeb, committing a grievous rebellion and betrayal against the Lord. And Jeroboam lightly took the same offense and replicated it as his own, as part of his own insecurity of the fear of losing his power.

The people were misguided and they were misled by the king and his new laws and ordinances, they were led to believe in things that are against both the will of God and His laws. And sadly, what Jeroboam and his successors had done was truly no different from what mankind had done in the past few hundred years. And that exactly what had happened because of human ambitions and desire for glory, which caused my grief and damage to the Church of God.

Yes, I was referring to the attempts by many people to challenge the authority of the Faith and the Church, establishing their own independent ‘religions’, centred on themselves and their pride instead of on the Lord, the One and only God we should worship and focus our whole attention on. We all know what had happened, the people who had broken the unity of the Church of God and His people.

Martin Luther, John Calvin, King Henry VIII, and many other names that can be named are these people who walked the same path as that of Jeroboam. While some of their intentions might initially be good and noble, for the good of the Church and the people of God, but in the end they made up mess out of everything they did, and brought the people of God to sin. Yes, just as what Jeroboam had done.

They put their human interests and desires first before the interest of God. They put their human ambition and thinking ahead of the wisdom and love of God. Some of them even had the nerve to separate the people of God from the One and only Church, just so that they could serve their own purposes, like that of King Henry VIII who sought an heir so desperately so as to marry six times, and in the end it was still in vain, and he brought the people of God under his care to ruin.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the week of prayer for Christian Unity might have been over close to a month ago, but that does not mean that we cannot continue to pray for unity. We have to continue to pray for unity without cease, and we have to hope and work daily for the unity of the faithful in the Church of God. Learning from the examples of Jeroboam, let us seek the reunion of our separated brethren who had followed the example of the wicked king.

Let us bring one another to our Lord, who wants to see us together, and who loves us so much. He wants to feed His people and give them nourishment of faith, just as He had done with the five thousand, feeding them with much food until they were completely satisfied. Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray and pray hard for unity, and let us pray that God will continue to love us and grace us with His blessings. God bless us all. Amen.