One People of God - the difference with a difference

WORD 2day: Saturday, Fifth week in the Eastertide

May 04, 2024 - Acts 16: 1-10; John 15: 18-21 

Jesus would have found it an Heculean task to make his disciples and apostles understand that they are different and different in a particular way. That they were different, they knew immediately. Because they were chosen and they were going around with Christ, seeing him do things that they have never witnessed before. But this was a dangerous feeling of being different - it was like the Hebrews, who felt they were a chosen people and therefore different from others and as a result they despised the others in a way! Jesus' teaching was not the same.

That they were different - not in comparison to the others, but in their choices and their priorities. Jesus taught them that they did not belong to the world, that is, they did not belong to the mainstream that justified sins, glorified craftiness, longed for first places and died for power! He taught them to lookout for the lost, be with the least and be treated as the last. He told them to be ready to be hated, while everyone longed to be loved. 

That they were different, in a specific way - not trying to prove themselves to be better than the rest, but in having a mindset of total obedience and allegiance to the One who has made them, called them and love them. They were to listen to the Lord - they were expected to go where they are told and not to go where they are forbidden... because they are totally guided by that Voice, that Spirit, that Lord who has redeemed them. 

Today, we are called to be different from the others. This is not what every one goes crazy about - being different, doing something different and being different. This difference is a difference with a difference, a difference that says - I don't mind to lose, I don't mind being hated, I don't mind even being killed - for the sake of my call and the One who has called. 

Called, Loved and Trusted!

THE WORD AND THE FEAST

May 3, 2024 - Celebrating the Apostles Philip and James

1 Corinthians 15: 1-8; John 14: 6-14

Today we celebrate the Apostles Philip and James - the Word today reminds them of these great personalities, and these two can give us an inspiration to live by today. 

First let us consider James - we can outline three details ascertained in the Gospels and other New Testament writings: that James was the son of Zebedee along with John, that James was called and referred to as the brother of Jesus, and that James was one among the close three apostles of Jesus who had the grace of witnessing to many things that the other apostles did not. Hence he was a privileged apostle. However he was notorious too: did he aspire for a seat on the right or left of Jesus when he would return in glory; did he not want to call fire down from heaven to destroy the people who did not accept Jesus?

The other apostle, Philip - he too has some specific merits attached to him: that he was the one who brought Nathanael to Jesus thus occasioning one the most profound discourses of Jesus, that he was the one who was approached by the Greeks and later he would bring in the Ethiopian minister into the Christian fold, that as the Gospel narrates today, he asked to see the Father and thus made Jesus reveal another profound truth - if you have seen me, you have seen the Father. He seemed to have been an enterprising apostle, although Jesus finds him very often wanting in fuller understand of the mysteries revealed - be it in the episode we hear in the Gospel today or in that of the multiplication of the loaves and so on. 

What are these aposltes inspiring us to: first, that we are specially called and each of us is in some way a privileged disciple of Christ; secondly, we do have our share of incompleteness and lack, but that can never take away anything from the love that the Master has for us; and thirdly, our responsibility is to do all we can to remain totally faithful to our call, like Philip whom we come across in the Acts of the apostles as a tireless messenger of the Word and James who laid down his life as first of the apostles to give his life for the Word. 

We are called, we are loved, and we are trusted by the Lord as God's messengers.