God reveals: Christ, the Spotless Lamb

WORD 2day: Friday after the Christmas Octave

January 3, 2025 - 1 John 2:29 - 3:6; John 1: 29-34

Jesus is revealed today as the Spotless Lamb that takes away our sins. In this, God is revealed as the Righteous One and Sinless One. Anyone who lives in God does not sin, and anyone who sins has never seen or known God - says John in the first reading today. This is a direct and categorical declaration on God and those who belong to God. Hence when John declares Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, we are given with not only a revelation of who Jesus is, but that of who God wants us to be - people who are chosen to belong to God, to be God's children.

To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God - yes, that is a special ability, a particular preparation, a deliberate choice - to become children of God. That is the role that the Lamb took upon itself to accomplish: to make us children of God. Two indispensable ways to move towards that goal: renounce sin and acknowledge God. That reminds us of the baptismal promise that we reconfirmed at our Confirmation ceremony: do you renounce satan and all his works and empty promises? And we said, I do. 

Renouncing sin is renouncing the evil one - for sin comes from the evil one, those who are in God shall not go by sin. While converting oneself from sin and changing one's life, are essential elements of becoming God's own children, we cannot forget that these begin with the simple Step zero, of renouncing sin - calling it by name and judging it in face. This is the biggest of the crises of our times: the loss of sense of sin - the lost of the capacity to identify sin and call it as sin.

Acknowledging God becomes phony, if it is not preceded by a denouncement of the Satan and all the ways of the Satan... the dangerous trend that we see in the world today is allowing the two to co-exist. That is an absolute debilitation of truth, of faith and of anything that is transcendent. Jesus' person, his birth and his life choices, his death and the purpose attached to it, is a deliberate acknowledgement of God and a reminder of what such a life would be.

May the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, help us to take on with courage and hope the world of sin!

God Reveals: Jesus is Christ

WORD 2day: Thursday after Christmas Octave

January 2, 2025 - 1 John 2:22-28; John 1:19-28

We have just ended the Christmas Octave. Let us centre today's reflection on a question: what was the purpose of Incarnation, the mystery that we celebrated for over a week! The focal purpose of the incarnation was, or is, revelation! The self revelation of God to us human persons that we could understand who God is, what God's relationship with us is and how much we matter to God. In the following three days the Word shall be preparing us towards the great commemoration of the epiphany, the manifestation, the revelation in the Son of God, that we will be celebrating shortly. 

Today the revelation that is underscored for our comprehension is that Jesus is Christ. And we know that it is the grace of the Spirit that anyone can declare, "Jesus is Lord" (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:3). There could three modes of negating this fact of revelation. The first is a naivete  in our understanding. This can happen to even the good willed, because good will alone would not suffice for right knowledge. There are thousands in fact who hold Jesus to be a great, kind, wise and gifted person, a great hero in history - but that would amount to mere incomplete understanding, although in itself it isn't wrong. 

The second is a rejection, where although one knows who Christ is, prefers to give that identity to some one else, or something else. At times this could be because one has not had the possibility of knowing to the full or one is stubborn not to see what is being revealed. Whatever be the reason, there is a lack here which could make the person(s) distant from the Truth, the ultimate, liberating Truth.

The third is a more dangerous and preposterous attitude of imagining onself as the Christ, that is Messiah or the Saviour. Whoever it be, whether as persons or as communities or as even churches, if we consider ourselves as those who are the saviours of the world, we are replacing the Lord, with ourselves. This psuedo consciousness is the greatest danger that is affecting humanity today, against which we are warned. Let us ask the Lord for the grace to encounter Jesus and acknowledge him as the Christ.