Joy - the true sign of Christian life and ministry!

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

December 27, 2019: Remembering St. John

1 John 1: 1-4; John 20: 2-8

The Christmas joy continues, even as we commemorate St.John the Evangelist today. 

"The Joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus," says the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, no.1. Though the Gospel reading draws our attention to the scene of resurrection, the message is all about an encounter with Christ that redefines one's life. When a person encounters Christ in all one's earnestness, there is a choice, a categorical choice for Christ and Christ's mission! 

As St. Paul affirms that it is no merit that an apostle proclaims the Word, but woe to him if he does not (1 Cor 9:16), today we see John explaining in the first reading: I am called to announce Christ, not merely because others will benefit from it; but primarily that my joy may be complete (1 Jn 1:4). 

For a Christian, a joy-filled proclamation of Christ is the only way to live his or her life - joyfully proclaiming Christ in every word, every action and every choice that is made, at every moment of one's daily life. St. John teaches us that and inspires in us to become beloved disciples of Christ, in joy!

The Reign Dream

THE WORD AND THE SAINT 

December 26, 2019: St. Stephen, the first Martyr

Acts 6: 8-10, 7: 54-59; Mt 10: 17-22

Persecutions and Martyrdom have never been alien to Christian Faith. St. Stephen is the first Biblical evidence to it. Continuing in the line of the prophets and persons of God who have been treated at will by the world in the Old Testament, we see Jesus and most of his disciples facing the same end in the New Testament. 

Religious fanaticism and the consequent discrimination and communalism is dangerously being justified these days as patriotism and conservatism! Be it the 'islamophobia' that is spread globally, or the anti-secular system that is being forced through the fabric of tolerance and conviviality in great enviable traditions, the hate speeches and hidden agenda... these are signs of anti-Reign elements in the world today. 

St. Stephen knew what it meant to suffer for the Reign and die for Christ; it meant suffering for the things that really matter; it meant standing for true beliefs and convictions that can elevate your spirit to the heavens open and the angels coming down!  

It was Stephen who also imitated his Master literally: While Jesus prayed for those who crucified him and offered his spirit into the hands of his loving Father, Stephen prayed for those who stoned him and surrendered his spirit into Jesus' hands. What an example for us to emulate! Not only praying what Stephen prayed but seeing what he saw: the open heavens - that is open hearts, high ideals, profound humanity, in short, the Reign dream!

HOPE, LOVE, JOY & PEACE

Holy Christmas 2019

Christmas means Hope: the Hope of a second chance, an endless second chance that God gives me. God has never expected me to deserve God's mercy! How blessed am I! To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God (Jn 1:12). That is Hope! I receive hope as I receive the Lord today!

The fact of migration of persons was once upon a time an international issue, later it became a national issue with various nations taking diverse stands and deciding what they would do. Today it has become a communal issue people divided and polarised, in many cases by forces that are evil minded. There is a need to keep the hope alive, that there is a new world somewhere, a new humanity, a true Reign of God, for every person on earth. 

Christmas means Love: God so loved the world that he sent his only son (Jn 3:16). There is no end to the Love that God has for me. The Mercy of God abounds all around me! When I receive this love, when I truly receive this love, I will be transformed into love. If I am not transformed into love, I have not received that love. Today the task for me is to receive that love truly... become merciful, as merciful as the loving Father.

Look at the cases of abuse of persons, abuse of all kinds, including that of the women, children and the weak. They are all because of the reduction of an understanding of love to merely liking and pleasure than true love and good of the other. The incarnation is the epitome of love, love which is essentially giving and just giving, a total self giving, and not receiving or exploiting! Can we give true love a chance today? 

Christmas means Joy: The joy of the Saviour...the joy that cannot be taken away from me, the joy that I have in coming to understand that I am never alone. That your joy may be complete (Jn 15:11). A joy that comes from the right perspective to life, right priorities in life and the Lord's principles for life : a life of true mercy and forgiveness.

People who are oppressed due to do many inhuman conditions arising out of innumerable socio economic policies and practices, people who have nothing and no one to rely on... What kind of a joy can we expect them to have? What role am I playing to further the cause of their joy? What kind of sacrifices am I ready for, in order that they may have joy, the real joy that the Lord has given me. 

Christmas means Peace: The Lord be with you is synonymous to Peace be with you! Where the Lord is there is peace. Let our hearts not be troubled (Jn 14:27), for the Lord is always with us. That is the message of Christmas, that the Lord came to be with us, to stay with us, to live amidst us, to dwell among us. Peace comes where Mercy resides.

Understanding and dialogue leads to peace, while pride and egoism leads to strife. Celebrating the coming of the Lord would make no sense of I am not ready for dialogue as my way of living. It has to become the basic perspective of life. Only a person ready for dialogue can truly understand the mystery of incarnation for it is basically a dialogue between the glory of divinity and the longing of humanity. How prepared am I to set aside my prefabricated ideas and truly listen with an open heart and mind to the other?

Christmas is hope, love, joy and peace - those experiences humanity longs for today. The Lord brings it to us, provided we are prepared and ready to receive them.

May your life be filled today with hope, love joy and peace. Merry Christmas. 

CHRISTMAS NOVENA - DAY 9: O Morning Star!

24th December: O Morning Star...

The 7 O-Antiphons are over with yesterday...
but the Novena ends today...with the rising of the Morning Star!

O Morning Star, Radiance of eternal light
Sun of Justice, come and enlighten those who live in darkness
and in the Shadow of death.

Morning Star, actually is the star that is seen in the east shining bright just before the dawn! It is considered the imminent sign of the morning that is already rising.

The Lord is not just near...but the Lord is here!!!
We celebrate the Rising Star, the Morning Star that announces the break of day!
The Lord comes to rule in our hearts, not just in the world...
Let us prepare ourselves..for the Lord is here.

Needed traits to Receive the Lord #3: AWE

THE WORD IN ADVENT - 24th December

2 Samuel 7: 1-5, 8-12, 14, 16; Luke 1: 67-79

Translated as fear of God, or an awe towards God, or the sense of spiritual wonder, the capacity to be open to the doings of the Lord...Awe is the third and most important trait to receive the Lord. Without a sense of wonder, no one can even perceive the Lord, let alone receiving the Lord.

Very often we think of our spirituality as doing something for God - going to the Church, saying prayers, going for Mass... they are all important, yes! But more important is our openness to God, allowing God to work in us, listening to God, looking to understand what God communicates to us here and now! Is it you who would build a house for the Lord, asks prophet Nathan to David... God would build you a house!

David who was a simple shepherd boy was built into a house - the House of David: about which both the first reading and the Gospel speak of today. God built David into a house, a house, a lineage in which the Saviour of the humankind would be born. What an awesome feat of God. Imagine if David had rebelled and said, 'No I would by all means build a house for God', after all building the temple of the Lord was a noble thing. Doing a noble thing is good, but more important and crucial is doing what God wants us to do and the the most noble thing is surrendering to the Lord and allowing the Lord to do what the Lord wants with us, with a sense of awe!

At times in our busy 'doing'...we forget 'to be' in the presence of God. Let us keep this as the highest priority today... as we are just a few hours from celebrating the awesome mystery of incarnation, let us stay in awe, remain in wonder at the marvels of the Lord, the immensity of the Love that the Lord shares with us this Christmas! Let us open our heart and our mind, that we may receive the Lord in awe!

CHRISTMAS NOVENA - DAY 8 : O Emmanuel!

23rd December: O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

Based on the famous prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, the title Emmanuel is the key to the mystery of incarnation. The presence of God with the people was the greatest of the promises that they could experience. Be it with Abraham or with Moses or with Joshua or with the people who were walking in the desert, one of the prominent promises that God gave was to be with them! Christ comes as the fulfilment and the most complete expression as that promise: as God among us.

The symbol is the virgin with the child in the manger. It is not just any child, but the promised salvation of the God of the universe, the king who has come to meet his subjects to make them co-heirs to his throne. The manger is a lovely symbol that unites the heaven and the earth, the Divine and the human!

The presence of the Lord is salvific; one who has experienced it cannot remain silent - he or she has to go out and share it, make every one else experience that presence! This is the crux of evangelisation: it is not proselytisation, not sheep stealing and increasing the numbers within a fold. It is sharing that salvific presence that one has experienced, from the Lord. The first call is to experience the God-with-us, the presence of the Lord with us, and the call that follows is to share that presence with those around - that is salvation.

The prayer is to the Lord our God to save us by God's saving presence... in simple words it is a beseeching to stay with us, to live with us. to sanctify us, to make us worthy of God and of God's great big family.

Needed traits to Receive the Lord #2: READINESS

THE WORD IN ADVENT - 23rd December 

Malacchi 3:1-4,23-24; Luke 1: 57-66

Let us continue with the necessary traits to receive the Lord who comes to visit us...the second trait necessary is, Readiness. 

Readiness does not mean a mere passive waiting... it is an active preparation, without which one would miss the moment of truth.  The preparation would consist, first of all,  of knowing. It's the message we reflected this Sunday... Knowing and understanding, they form the first level of preparedness. 

Being prepared may not be enough. Speaking to a group of graduating students, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, made an enlightening statement, God bless him. He said, it is not enough to be prepared, but one needs to be ready. 

The coming of the Lord is a moment of truth for us, and we have to be ready - which is, to be prepared in heart and mind, of course. But along with that, to be ready in spirit and in action. To know and to live by what one knows, to believe and to live by what one believes - that is being ready! 

The first reading calls us to exactly to this - to be well disposed, to be refined as silver is refined in the furnace, to make our life worthy of the sacred mysteries we are about to celebrate. It is like the period of pain that Elisabeth and the time of muteness that Zachariah had to go through. The sacrament of Confession is a wonderful moment of refinement, a great sign of our READINESS to receive the Lord, this Christmas!

Have you made your confession yet? 

CHRISTMAS NOVENA - DAY 7: O King of Nations!

22nd December: O King of Nations

O King of the nations, and their desire,

the cornerstone making both one:

Come and save the human race,

which you fashioned from clay.

Based on Isaiah 9:6, 2:4 and 28:16, the King of the nations is a yearning of the people of Israel. They wanted Yahweh to be their king always, even when they had a human king ruling them. That is why they did not give in to the Emperor worship that was so widespread in the dominant cultures of their times. God is the king, forever and over all!

The Symbol is the crown, and some times even the sceptre, that signifies the central place that God has in our personal and universal history; and the authority that rests solely with God. Remember the feast we celebrate just before beginning the advent, that is on the last Sunday of the Ordinary time - that is the adaptation of the same theology of Israel, into the Christian way of life.

Today power is misused for manipulation and arriving at hidden agenda; power which is given to certain persons for the sake of furthering the care of humanity is used to destroy the very humanity. Who is to be blamed? Those who manipulate it? Yes, of course. But what about those who let them do it? those who keep silent when it is done? If it is true that we have accepted God as our King, Christ as our King, it means we have accepted Truth, Justice, Love and Peace. Anything that, or anyone who goes against these, just cannot be sided with - it would be a wrong allegiance, a slavery!

The prayer is to save the human kind, from slaveries of sin and death to the freedom of the children of God, for that is what we are, children created in the image and likeness of God. It is to grow in this identity and dignity that the coming of the Lord invites us.

BEHOLD THE PROMISES OF THE LORD

THE WORD IN ADVENT

December 22, 2019: Fourth Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 7: 10-14; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1: 18-24

Promises, prophecies and prodigies fill the history of our Christian faith. Promises are from the Lord, prophecies are from persons of God and prodigies are for all of us to see, provided we are ready to see it. One thing is God revealing Godself, it is entirely another thing that we receive it! We are at the threshold of the feast for which we have been preparing for the past three weeks, and today we are in fourth Sunday of Advent, just two days away from the event - but are we ready to Behold the Lord, are we disposed to behold the promises of the Lord? This is the question that the Word wants us to raise within ourselves. 

The drama of the God-Human interplay begins with a promise from the Lord: let us consider that promise from the Old Testament - when the humankind fails miserably and disobeys God, God instead of disowning the humankind, chides the evil one who led God's children away, something which the prince of lies continues to do even today. God does not only just chide the evil one but challenges to save the humankind to eternal life - against the wish of the evilone to lead them to eternal damnation. The challenge was in the form of a promise: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offsping and hers! That was a promise which amounted to say to us: I shall never leave you at the mercies of the evil one! But has the human kind always lived up to it? In other words, has the human kind always beheld that promise?

The Lord renews that promise once again as we read in the first reading today, the propehcy of Isaiah: The Lord himself will give you a sign; the maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son, whom she will call Immanuel, a name which means 'God-is-with-us'. The woman, the maiden, the girl of Nazareth -is with child and in two days we shall celebrate the event when she gave birth to that child. And then there were so many prodigies, did they really behold it? The promises were given, they were prophesied about, and prodigies brought those promises to life - but they ignored it, they rejected it... let us say, WE rejected it, we ignored it, we failed to behold it. 

Today the promises are being fulfilled, revealed with prodigies all around, are we ready to behold it? The capacity to behold the promises of the Lord - that is what Christmas is all about. We are about enter into the festivities, but hold on, let us have a look at ourselves, our dispositions: are we ready to behold the Lord? Have we developed the capacity to behold the promises of the Lord. That capacity consists of three levels and this is what the Word instructs today about.

The first level is the level of knowing! To know first of all that we have great promises from the Lord and secondly to know what they are! One of the promises that God has never ceased to give is that of God's never failing presence! I am with you until the end of times - this was Jesus the Christ. But that is only a reflection of what God the Father had promised the people of Israel - through Abraham, through Moses, through Joshua, through Jeremiah... and finally through God's own Son who would be coming soon among us, as God made human, Word made flesh! The promise - if only we truly know them and understand them! This is what St. Paul reminds us, writing to the Romans today - to know and to understand the promises of the Lord and those of Christ.

The second level is the level of believing! To know the promises is one thing, to believe in them is another. At times we know God has promised to be with us, but whether we believe in it all the time, is a serious question. We think God is up there and distant from us at times, when we go through things in our life with our own calculations and hidden agenda, with external justifications and completely different internal motivations, with appearances that totally deceive others from what truly goes on in the depths of our hearts - does not God know it? Whose patience are we trying to put to test, asks Isaiah in the first reading. God knows the innermost thoughts of our minds - do we really believe in the promises of the Lord? Do we believe that God is faithful and God will never fail in keeping up to God's promises? If not, how will we behold them at all?

The third level is the level of experiencing! To know the promises and to believe in them actually means, experiencing them in our daily life, in every day chores, in every person we meet, in events that happen around us, in miracles that surround us, in wonders that keep happening and in the signs and splendours that mark the history that we are living and creating everyday. At times we are lost in seeing what the powerful decide that we see, we are too occupied in sensing what those who manipulate us want us to sense, we are too busy perceiving things from the perspective of those who want to lead us astray or at least to their own perspective. We consider some strangers, because we are taught to consider that way. We consider some as low, because we are conditioned to think we are higher. We consider some as superior because we are brought up to look down on ourselves...we fail to truly experience the reality, the real beauty in God's creation - with all its diversities, with all its varieties, and with all its peculiarities. How can we them see the richness of the revelation of God? God reveals Godself on a daily basis, how can we really see it if we are not disposed to behold it? Look at Joseph in the Gospel today: he was able to look at Mary with compassion and accept her. Look at Mary: she was able to accept that strange call, trusting in the presence of God with her. Look at the saintly couple, Mary and Joseph: they were able to carry on with every thing that was happening between them, because they trusted in the promises of the Lord. They lived it!

Today, let us take it upon ourselves to get to know the promises that God wishes to give each of us. Let us believe that God would always be faithful to God's promises. Let us prepare ourselves to experience those promised in our daily life, because let us remember, Miracles abound for those who are prepared to see them around!

CHRISTMAS NOVENA - DAY 6: O Rising dawn!

21st December: O Rising dawn

O Morning Star,
Splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

Based on Isaiah 9:2 and Isaiah 60:1-2, the title in Latin O Oriens, actually means literally O Rising Sun or Dawn, but for poetic sense translated as Morning Star, refers to the power of God's light to lead us from ignorance to knowledge and from mere knowledge to enlightenment. 

The Symbol is the Rising Sun, which dispels the darkness of the night and wakes the light of the morning, inviting all to life and activity. The coming of the Lord for us is a wake up call, an invitation to live as people of the light and not of darkness!

Today we see people disputing with each other, clamouring to be right in contrast to another, remain divided among themselves because of their allegiance to someone or some ideology - are they really certain where lies the real truth? Even within the Church today we see people polarising themselves, unnecessarily for the sake of some ideologies and philosophies - Apostle Paul warned us long back - do not be deceived by all these ideologies and philosophies, cling on to Christ and Christ alone is the enlightenment of God, who can clarify the real truths of our life.

The prayer is for enlightenment, that in these times of confusion and crisis, confounding choices and staggering philosophies, we might remain always in the light of faith, that not only helps us see the Lord, but see with the eyes of the Lord (Lumen Fidei).