Liturgical Colour : Green
Psalm 127 : 1-2, 3, 4-5
Blessed are you who fear the Lord and walk in His ways. You will eat the fruit of your toil; you will be blessed and favoured.
Your wife, like a vine, will bear fruits in your home; your children, like olive shoots will stand around your table.
Such are the blessings bestowed upon the man who fears the Lord. May the Lord bless you from Zion. May you see Jerusalem prosperous all the days of your life.
Liturgical Colour : Green
Ephesians 5 : 21-33
Let all kinds of submission to one another become obedience to Christ. So wives to their husbands : as to the Lord. The husband is the head of his wife, as Christ is the Head of the Church, His Body, of Whom He is also the Saviour. And as the Church submits to Christ, so let a wife submit in everything to her husband.
As for you, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her. He washed her and made her holy by baptism in the Word. As He wanted a radiant Church without stain or wrinkle or any blemish, but holy and blameless, He Himself had to prepare and present her to Himself.
In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they love their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. And no one has ever hated his body; he feeds and takes care of it. This is just what Christ does for the Church, because we are members of His Body.
Scripture says : Because of this a man shall leave his father and mother to be united with his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a very great mystery, and I refer to Christ and the Church. As for you, let each one love his wife as himself, and let the wife respect her husband.
Liturgical Colour : Green
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day we heard from the Scripture passages, a reminder that as Christians and members of God’s Church, we must always be first and foremost, dedicated to God and centre our lives on Him. For it was through God that all of us have been vindicated and liberated from the chains of our sins. And as long as we live, we should glorify the Lord by our lives, at all times.
The first reading today from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians highlighted very, very clearly the role that Christ our Lord has played in the salvation of all mankind. The Lord Jesus has made peace between us and God, and He has reconciled us through His Cross, which reconnected us to God’s love and grace. By His perfect and humble obedience on the Cross, Christ has bridged what was once a great chasm separating us from God that was impossible to cross.
He came when we had no hope and were in wretched state. He extended God’s love and compassionate mercy to us, and redeemed us with love when we were in the greatest need for His love, care and mercy. He made a new Covenant with us when we were in darkness, lost and were distracted by sin, calling on all of us to return to Him with love and sincere faith and commitment. We can therefore see just how generous the Lord had been towards us all these while.
And all these are very timely kind reminders from the Lord to us, that each and every one of us ought to be ready and prepared for the Lord by living our lives each day with the full conviction and desire to proclaim our Christian faith through our lives, to serve the Lord and glorify His Name by our every living moments. We must always be ever ready and prepared, as the Lord reminds us again today, how the time of reckoning may come at any time, and we do not want to be caught unprepared.
How do we then live our lives that we truly become worthy of our Christian faith and God? We can therefore look upon the examples of the Lord Himself, as He dedicated Himself completely and humbly to obey the will of His heavenly Father, in reaching out to us all, the wretched children of mankind, in loving us all even when we have not been faithful and obedient to Him, and when we have abandoned and betrayed Him for false gods and idols.
We are all called to love as generously as the Lord has loved, to show the love of God in everything that we say and do, in all of our interactions with one another. We should be faithful bearers of our Christian faith in our community, and to be beacons of God’s light, to love and care where others had caused hurt and injury, to bring forgiveness and compassion where hatred and jealousy, anger and divisions had once reigned.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we are all called to be true disciples of Christ, not just in appearances or formality, but in real deeds, in all the little things we do that bring honour and glory to God. Are we willing and able to commit ourselves to the Lord in this way, brothers and sisters? God has called and chosen us to be His followers, but are we ready and willing to dedicate ourselves and answer His call definitively?
Let us all discern God’s call carefully, and think of what each and every one of us can do in order to respond to His call. Let us all wait no more, and give our very best to serve God and to love Him with all of our hearts, by living virtuously and most-Christianlike in all of our works and efforts, actions and interactions. Let us bring God’s light, truth, compassion and hope to this world, that through our efforts, more and more people can be saved. May God bless us always, now and forevermore. Amen.
Liturgical Colour : Green
Luke 12 : 35-38
At that time, Jesus said to the people, “Be ready, dressed for service, and keep your lamps lit, like people waiting for their master to return from the wedding. As soon as he comes and knocks, they will open the door to him. Happy are those servants whom the master finds wide-awake when he comes.”
“Truly, I tell you, he will put an apron, and have them sit at table, and he will wait on them. Happy are those servants, if he finds them awake when he comes at midnight or daybreak!”
Liturgical Colour : Green
Psalm 84 : 9ab and 10, 11-12, 13-14
Would, that I hear God’s proclamation, that He promise peace to His people, His saints. Yet, His salvation is near to those who fear Him, and His glory will dwell in our land.
Love and faithfulness have met; righteousness and peace have embraced. Faithfulness will reach up from the earth while justice bends down from heaven.
YHVH will give what is good, and our land will yield its fruit. Justice will go before Him, and peace will follow along His path.
Liturgical Colour : Green
Ephesians 2 : 12-22
At that time, you were without Christ, you did not belong to the community of Israel; the Covenants of God, and His promises, were not for you; you had no hope, and were without God in this world.
But now, in Christ Jesus, and by His Blood, you, who were once far off, have come near. For Christ is our peace; He, Who has made the two people, one; destroying, in His own flesh, the wall – the hatred – which separated us. He abolished the Law, with its commandments and precepts. He made peace, in uniting the two people, in Him; creating, out of the two, one New Man.
He destroyed hatred and reconciled us both to God, through the cross, making the two, one body. He came to proclaim peace; peace to you who were far off, peace to the Jews who were near. Through Him, we – the two people – approach the Father, in one Spirit.
Now, you are no longer strangers or guests, but fellow citizens of the holy people : you are of the household of God. You are the house, whose foundations are the Apostles and prophets, and whose cornerstone is Christ Jesus.
In Him, the whole structure is joined together, and rises, to be a holy Temple, in the Lord. In Him, you, too, are being built, to become the spiritual Sanctuary of God.
Liturgical Colour : Green
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today as we listened to the words of the Scripture, we are presented with the matter of the adherence of the Law of God through Moses, all that the Pharisees and teachers of the Law enforced among the people, and how this blind obedience followed by lack of genuine understanding of the faith often hurt the faithful and in fact prevent them from finding their path towards the Lord.
That is why we are all reminded to keep faithful to the teachings of the Lord, to break free from the trap of the adherence of the Law as the Pharisees, the teachers of the Law and all others had kept, which reduced the faith into a mere exercise of formality, regularity and piety, where people thought that their actions alone were sufficient to guarantee themselves salvation.
When St. Paul mentioned how those who were circumcised were enslaved and subjected to the Law, he was referring in fact contextually to those who forced and demanded that every members of the Christian faithful embraced all the tenets, rules and regulations of the Law of Moses.
And this is a reminder that our salvation is due to our faith in God and not due to the Law or the obedience to the Law. Obeying God’s will, following His laws and commandments are all part of our faith, and it is by our faith that we have been saved. We do not save ourselves through our actions, separated from our faith. For without faith, all of our good actions, obedience and all the observances of the Law are empty and meaningless, just as faith without actions and obedience is dead.
The Pharisees were were too preoccupied with the appearances and the ‘letters’ of the Law, that they had overlooked and ignored the ‘spirit’ of the Law. And this is what the Lord was displeased at the Pharisees for, as He pointed out in our Gospel passage today, saying how although outwardly they appeared to be good and pious, but in reality, in their hearts were wickedness and sin.
What the Lord wants to remind all of us is that faith needs to be genuine and living, and we need to devote our time and effort, to follow the Lord, dedicating our whole lives to be inspirations for each other, to be virtuous and to be truthful in our everyday actions and living. We must always be Christ-centric in everything we say and do, and we must always be the beacons of hope and light for the community, for each other.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, by our faith in Christ, by our dedication and love for God, we are saved. And it is through our obedience of the Law, made through genuine and sincere love for God that we are brought into God’s grace and salvation. And to be Christians, genuine and living, we need to be fully committed and be transformed in our lives and walk faithfully in the Lord’s grace. We need to be thoroughly faithful, inside and outside, our whole heart, mind, body and whole being attuned to God.
Are we able and are we willing to commit our lives to the Lord, spending time and effort to glorify God at all times? Are we willing to follow Him with all of our hearts? This is our calling as Christians, and being reminded today of our obligations, let us all embrace our faith and commit ourselves from now on. May the Lord be with us always, and may He strengthen us and empower us with the courage to carry on living our lives as good Christians from now on. May God bless us all, now and always, forevermore. Amen.
Liturgical Colour : Green
Luke 11 : 37-41
At that time, as Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked Him to have a meal with him. So He went and sat at table. The Pharisee then wondered why Jesus did not wash His hands before the dinner.
But the Lord said to him, “So then, you Pharisees, you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside yourselves you are full of greed and evil. Fools! He Who made the outside, also made the inside. But according to you, by the mere giving of alms everything is made clean.”
Liturgical Colour : Green
Psalm 118 : 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48
Give me Your unfailing love, o YHVH; Your salvation, as You have promised.
Take not the word of truth from my mouth, for I would also lose my hope in Your word.
May I always keep Your word, for ever and ever.
I shall walk in freedom, having sought out Your laws.
For I delight in Your word, which I fear.
I will lift up my hands to You, and meditate on Your commandments.
Liturgical Colour : Green
Galatians 5 : 1-6
Christ freed us, to make us really free. So remain firm, and do not submit, again, to the yoke of slavery. I, Paul, say this to you : if you receive circumcision, Christ can no longer help you. Once more, I say, to whoever receives circumcision : you are now bound to keep the whole Law. All you, who pretend to become righteous through the observance of the Law, have separated yourselves from Christ, and have fallen away from grace.
As for us, through the Spirit and faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. In Christ Jesus, it is irrelevant, whether we be circumcised or not; what matters is, faith, working through love.
petercanisiusmichaeldavidkang 