Who is your hero?

WORD 2day: Monday, 4th week in Ordinary time

February 3, 2025: Hebrew 11:32-40; Mark 5:1-20

There is a book with an interesting title, 'even God has His champions!' It speaks of 120 saints and martyrs in history who have borne God's message to the world of their times.

The first reading from the letter to the Hebrews lists today a set of heroes, heroes of valour and vigour, heroes in history on whom the people pinned their hopes! But the letter adds an important but realistic twist... these heroes, they were all gone in the way of their fathers. That is an inevitable fact. However good or great they are, they are to be gone in time!

Today we too have our own heroes - persons or role models or absolute values or needs or priorities - heroes of various kind. It is important to ask ourselves who is our hero and what becomes the defining value of our lives!

With what Jesus did to the people of Gerasenes, they should have made him their hero. Jesus solved their years of problem in a moment. He just sent the legion of demons away from their living quarters... but was Jesus their hero? No! They asked Jesus to leave - may be because they felt their loss (of the swines) was too much to bear! No, they had some other things as their hero - not exactly what Jesus could offer them.

The crucial question is back: who is your hero?

TOTAL OFFERING TO THE LORD

THE WORD AND THE FEAST

Familiarity, Flexibility and Filiality

February 02, 2025 - The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

Malachi 3: 1-4; Hebrews 2: 14-18; Luke 2: 22-40

On this fourth Sunday of the Ordinary time, we celebrate the feast of the Presentation of the Lord and the World day of Prayer for Consecrated Life for this year, 2025. Past three weeks we have been seeing the gradual manifestation of the Christ, the Son of God... who gradually gets himself introduced to the people around him. The feast of the presentation, marking the 40th day after Christmas, comes to sum it all up, giving us a clue to understand what lies beneath all these - the self offering of Christ to do the will of God - behold, I come to do your will. 

Bringing all of these in perspective, we have one lovely challenge posed: the Challenge of Total Offering to the Lord. Not just persons in Consecrated Life, but every one of us is called to offer ourselves totally to God and that alone can give us true meaning and real happiness in life.

From the Word today, we can pick up three signs of our total offering to the Lord:

Familiarity: As the Holy Family which enters the Temple with that ease and eagerness to perform their spiritual duty, so are we called to remain always familiar with the Lord. That sense familiarity can have varied levels of significance - a feeling of being the family of God, a sense of unity and love as human families, and a solidarity of families into one big family of the children of God. The feeling of the family of God, we see how Joseph and Mary come to the Temple as those who are participants in the divine plan of God, for they know they are not just "normal" parents! The sense of unity and love as human families is evinced in the togetherness of Joseph and Mary, bringing the child into the presence of God as every family of the Jews did. The fact that Simeon, Anna and many others rejoiced in the new child brought to the Temple, and found the hand of God with that child is the evocation of the solidarity that they felt with this family from Nazareth.  

Flexibility: For the Holy Family from Nazareth, the presentation was not merely performing their duty, or a mere a ritual. Of course they did fulfil the rite, as a sense of fulfilment of their joy and gratitude to the Lord, but they found more things to rejoice, more insights to dwell upon and more directions to get from the Lord through holy instruments who were there! For us too, the prayer moments and celebration of sacraments cannot be reduced to mere rituals to be performed or duties to be fulfilled. We are called to live those moments with open hearts and pliable minds, in order that we be malleable as silver and gold in the hands of the smith, so that we can become what the Lord wants us to - because the Lord is making of us a great, lovable and precious ornament for Godself, provided we are ready to offer ourselves into the hands of the Lord. 

Filiality: It is towards filiality, we are ultimately invited to, as the letter to the Hebrew reminds us of this. This filiality inspired and enthused, Joseph to accept his call to be the foster father taking care of the family, Mary to say her whole hearted yes to all that God had in mind, and Jesus to belong to God totally in every way following the example of his parents. What this feast has to teach us is this fact, that we are called to imitate the same self-giving of this family - Joseph who offers himself totally without lamenting anything about being kept in the dark all the time right up to the last minute when he has to execute decisions; Mary who offers herself totally although she did not fully understand what her yes would comprise of; and Jesus who offers himself totally to his Father without counting the cost up until his death on the cross! All these are prefigured and summarised in this event as the holy couple step into the Temple with their first born child... a lovely reminder to every Christian family to grow recognizant of their filiality with the Lord. 

May the celebration of the event of presentation, help us fix our gaze on the love and surrender that we see in the Holy Familym and help us grow evermore familiar, flexible and filial with the Lord, our God.

The Relationship - trust beyond everything

WORD 2day - Saturday, 3rd week in Ordinary time

February 1, 2025 - Hebrews 11:1-2,8-19; Mark 4: 35-41

Yesterday the Word instructed us about the relationship that is built by living by faith and today we are called to reflect on the extent to which our faith has to go! We have the great example of Abraham and his entire exprience with God, along with Sarah and Isaac. The household trusted in the Lord, the trusted to the extent that although they died even before they saw the fulfilment of what they were promised, they believed that it would be! That is the relationship, the relationship of trust!

Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have not faith? When Jesus asks this question to the apostles, what he means is exactly this trust, the fruit of faith... a fundamental and practical experience of the relationship that we share with God. When things go wrong, or when nothing goes the way we want, if we can still smile and say to ourselves: Quite, be calm, then we have built a trust in the Lord, for whom nothing is impossible!

Trust is the expression of the relationship; it is the experience of the fruit of the relationship that is developed over a period of time, after concrete and reflected experiences that come together to offer a new meaning to life and all that happens in it. Faith, which is a relationship, is expressed in trust. The Lord who is ever faithful, has trusted us - that is why the Lord has entrusted us with numerous gifts: our life, our vocation, our mission, our people and so on. And do we trust the Lord? How do we plan to express that trust?

The Relationship: living by faith

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

January 31, 2025 - Remembering St. John Bosco

Hebrews 10: 32-39; Mark 4: 26-34

The Relationship that God establishes between Godself and us, is a call to live by faith. That is what the prophet Habakuk said and Paul quoted, and we see in today's passage from the letter to the Hebrews - the reighteous shall live by faith. What does it mean to live by faith: it can have two senses - to live in an endless sense of awe and to live totally dependent on the ultimate source of life, that is the Almighty!

Look at life, is there a limit to the surprises it offers? A person with a balanced reason, will certainly and without hesitation say, we can never understand life, at no point, to the full. A reductionist might define life as comfort or pleasure, a materialist may reduce life to possessions and successes , a blind nihilist might call life nothing or worthless, but one who is illumined will know how profound life is and how overwhelming a reflection on it could be. That is why in today's parable Jesus draws our attention to sense of mystery that is embedded within life, that puts us into a never ending feeling of awe. 

Secondly, the struggles and difficulties, moments of failures and challenges, experience of disappointments and acknowledgement of helplessness, are but opportunities to express our endurance in the Lord, to continue to do  God's will and gain what God has promised. The Saint we celebrate today, St. John Bosco, fondly known as Don Bosco, is a splendid witness to this fact. No amount of hardships or hurdles, no count of failures and burdens, would stop him from believing in the Lord and hoping in the Lord's promises. The great achievement that he has accomplished stands testimony to what it means to live by faith! Don Bosco would tell us the same words we heard in the first reading today: you and I are not the sort of people who draw back, and are lost, we are the sort who keep faithful until our souls are saved! 

The Relationship: Connecting and Radiating

WORD 2day: Thursday, 3rd week in Ordinary time

January 30, 2025 - Hebrew 10: 19-25; Mark 4: 21-25

The relationship that God has promised us in and through the Covenant, is not something that changes, it is something that remains forever - for the One who made this covenant is faithful. That does not mean it is static - the same all the time! It is dynamic and ever on the move. That is why it can be attributed with these two qualities that the Word today presents to us: connecting and radiating. 

God's relationship with us does not position us in a safe and cosy corner where we remain forever, contemplating and conserving our own selfcentered happiness. It is just the opposite - God's relationship pushes us onward, it pushes us out of ourselves, it makes us reach out, go forth. That is why the Christ comes to us, the Word comes to us, reaching out to us and becoming that curtain through which we can reach God... the unreachable summit. Christ connected, Christ connects... me and the One who loved me into existence and continues to love me,... me and my brothers and sisters, all of whom are children of that same God whose relationship has given me the grace of salvation. We need to connect to each other, we cannot remain aloof or unconcerned about each other! 

God's relationship with us, in connecting us to Godself, and to each other, makes us radiate that joy, that bliss, that presence of God that has to be felt by everyone around. Like the light that burns, shines and radiates, we are called to give (burn), inspire (shine) and unite (radiate) everyone in the love of God, in that relationship that gives us our sense and purpose in life. God's relationship radiates from within us and reaches out to the other - making God present everywhere. The more we give, the more we shine and the more we shine, the more we connect - that is manifestation of the relationship that we have in the love of God. 

The Relationship: covenant of love, not sin offerings!

WORD 2day: Wednesday, 3rd week in Ordinary time

January 29, 2025 - Hebrews 10:11-18; Mark 4: 1-20

God's relationship with the children of God is a covenant of love, God repeatedly has emphasised this fact, as the letter to the Hebrews explains to us today. God does not take up the sins of the past or require a settlement from one, once the person decides to commit oneself to the covenant of love! Once a person makes that commitment, the decision grows. Yes, although the decision made is once for all, it does not exclude moments of setbacks, failures and difficulties. 

Jesus presents us with a parable to understand that - that of the sower and the seed! It is God's love that has sown the inspiration to commit ourselves to this covenant of love - once we make this decision to commit, there could be situations of precarity when the enemy is at the best, trying to snatch us away from God our Father and Mother; we need to overcome that, let us not fret God is with us. 

Once we begin that journey, anytime we could hit the rock bottom, for our energy and enthusiasm is not always the same; but what matters is our original decision and let us not lose heart, the Lord of love is with us. Continuing that journey, we might come across thorns and thistles, bushes and shrubs that could block our way ahead, but all that we need to do is keep looking ahead, the One who has sown, shall reap when it is ready!

When we persevere in that original decision to commit to that covenant of love, we shall see that we bear fruit, we inspire many more, we inspire the world around and the Reign of God will show itself up. That is the relationship to which the Lord has called us - a relationship of love, a relationship of fidelity, a relationship of never failing covenant. 

The Relationship: doing God's will

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

January 28, 2025 - Remembering St. Thomas Aquinas  

Hebrews 10: 1-10; Mark 3:31-35

Relationship is the core of the Christian faith - but it is important to know what is the Covenantal or the Christian understanding of relationship. Let us consider our ordinary experience of relationship - with a person strange or just introduced we would be as formal as possible and as obliging as we could. But when the so-called relationship grows, we would beging to take the person for granted and would not mind doing what we want in relation to him or her. Is this really the Christ-ian or the covenantal significance of relationships? Certainly cannot be.

A Christian sense of relationship is not doing what I want, but wishing to do what the other needs! It cannot be even what the other deserves, but what the other needs, that is what the other intends to receive from us, even when the other has not expressed it to us. That is the crux of the definition of love, that the Saint whom we celebrate today gave: love is wishing the good of the other... doing whatever it takes to make the other feel good, be good, fare good. 

When the same is translated in the sense of faith - where the Other is God - it is being ready to do whatever God wants, wishes, wills. How often we begin to calculate in terms of saying, how close I am to God and God does not fulfil my wishes! It is not about God doing what we want, but we doing what God wills - that is what faith, or a covenantal relationship is all about! It is to say with sincerity of heart: here I am Lord, I come to do your will. That is how we shall become truly children of God, truly brothers and sisters of the Son.  

The Relationship: the promise of the New Covenant

WORD 2day: Monday, 3rd week in Ordinary Time

January 27, 2025 - Hebrews 9:15, 24-28; Mark 3: 22-30

We are continuing our reflection with the letter to the hebrews, and after the series on the journey of our faith in the first week, the reflection on 'the way' in the second week, we begin a reflection on the reason behind and the foundation of this journey and the way... the relationship - which is the crux of the promise that Jesus gave us! 

Jesus' promise of the New Covenant is a promise of eternal salvation. The Word affirms that this salvation is given to all, by that sacrifice once and for all, on Calvary. Every one is promised forgiveness and salvation, but every person has to claim that salvation for oneself. There can be three blocks that can prevent a person from claiming this salvation for onself. 

The first is the social block - that the background and experience handed down does not allow one to experience this salvation. This can be overcome by a new experience that can change the entire life of a person. The second is the personal block - that the weaknesses within us, the limitations that we personally experience keeps us away from God. But this block, can be worked out of, with the grace of God. 

The third, and most dangerous of all, is a psuedo block because of which I deliberately keep myself away from God. It is my lack of openness and anti-spiritual bias that takes me far from the promise of the New Covenant. It could be due to any selfish or egoistic reason, which most of the time is psuedo block... from which not even God can save us! 

BEING GOD'S PEOPLE

Identity, Call and Mission

3rd Sunday in Ordinary time: January 26, 2025

Nehemiah 8:2-6,8-10; 1 Corinthians 12: 12-30; Luke 1:1-4, 4:14-21

Jesus came and lived here on earth amidst us to remind us about our call to be God's people and to show us how to do it! People of God - that is our identity, that is our call and that is our mission. 

But looking at history - sometimes, it has been a dangerous proposition too! We see that the people of Israel, calling themselves the chosen people of God, killed and butchered clans and clans of the so-called 'others' and justified it too; Jesus himself was killed because they thought it is better that one dies instead of the entire lot of the 'chosen people' being put to risk; think of those times when we called ourselves the 'people of God' and went with flags marked with crosses menacing nations and even killing thousands; what about those who in the name of 'superior race' or the 'chosen race' wished to blot out the rest of the world; after all these have we anything to say when a group calls the rest as 'infidels' and threatens to eliminate people, if they don't become one of them? All these have unmistakably and gravely gone wrong somewhere, somewhere right at the foundations! 

When the Word tells us today we are called to be God's People, it is not a statement of pride or superiority or elitism or some kind of messianism claiming that the entire world is at our mercies! Absolutely no. Certainly, it is a statement of an identity that God wishes to give us, but along with it comes a call and a mission that defines it all. Yes, there are three tasks outlined for us by the Word this Sunday:

 

The first: Beginning with the Word - Our Identity

Being God's people means beginning with the Word: our identity lies there, not in the structures we have and the statistics we boast about (that we are the greatest in number and that we have survived for 2000 years and so on!) Our identity is based on the Word, the Word which has always guided humanity, the Word which had become human and the Word which calls us every day without ceasing to a life of love and compassion. Our identity has to be created on the foundation of the Word of God. 

When Nehemiah the King and Ezra the priest wanted to give an identity to the heart broken people, they did it with the Word, reading it aloud to them and getting them to hear it and be strengthened by it. When Jesus wanted to establish his identity among his own people, he did it with the Word, teaching in the synagogue for the first time. As individuals, as families or as communities, if we wish to identify ourselves to others, we need to found ourselves on the Word. 

 

The second: Building up the Word - Our Call

 

The Word was made flesh, the flesh was given to us and we were made One Body in Christ. The Word invites us to build up our communities of faith, in communion and sharing, thus building up the Word into a formidable challenge to the ways of the world. This task is to build up our believing community, the Body of Christ, the Body of the Word. 

The Word was made flesh, in order that God's salvation plan could be brought to its culmination in Jesus Christ the Son of God. Today the same Word has to be made flesh... the Word has to become a Body, the Body of Christ, the Body of the Word... that is our Community of faith - united as one body with the head that is Christ, the Word who lives amidst us. When we build up the community, we build up the Body of the Word, we build up the Word. When we break, divide, shatter, weaken, dismember this Body, we are killing the Word! We have just finished celebrating the Unity Octave (18 to 25 January), praying for the unity of all Christians, are we really ready to forget our differences, leave aside our past and unite in the name of the Word? 

The third: Becoming the Word - Our Mission 

The Word you have heard is fulfilled today in your hearing, declared Jesus. He was the Word personified... and we are today called to model our lives after him, to become the Word, to grow into the Word, into the living Word, into living images of Christ for the world today, offering sight to the blind, liberty to captives and freedom to the oppressed.

Unfortunately, some of our brethren tend to think that our mission is to memorize a few verses from the Bible and go shout it in the face of people and get them somehow by hook or by crook, by fears or by tears into our fold and say, "we have saved them". What a sham! We are not sent merely to throw the Word at others; we are sent to live It amidst others! We are not expected to swallow the Word only to spit It elsewhere, but to retain It, digest It and become It. Our mission is to be nourished by the Word and Become the Word! Looking at us, people should be able to say: 'what we heard is being fulfilled in you!' 

Becoming God's People is an identity we need to found on the Word, a call to build our families and communities on the Word, and a mission to transform ourselves after the Word. Can our daily lives be truly fulfilments of the Word, here and now?

The Way: the journey of Conversion

THE WORD AND THE FEAST

January 25, 2025: The Conversion of St. Paul

Acts 22: 3-16; Mark 16: 15-18

The conversion of St. Paul marks a the very first twist in the tale after the Risen Lord began to make a difference in history! Hidden life, persecution and private practice of Christ-inspired faith life was suddenly taken to the public domain with St. Paul getting into the bandwagon. A passionate attachment to Christ was growing into a Charismatic challenge! We celebrate this feast today and it fills us with great joy!

Some thoughts from the Word on this feast:

1. Conversion is a life Journey: We need this grace of conversion, which the Lord inspires within us. Yes, conversion comes from within - though we see the dramatic events that accompany the conversion of Paul, they are only external signs of something that was happening within him, at the core of his being.

2. Conversion begins with a Bolt: We seem to be going in great pace with our life, when suddenly strikes a bolt. We call that a misfortune, a shock or a setback. But we need to be conscious of the fact that these experiences are messages, invitations for a transformation we need to effect within us.

3. Conversion definitely involves falling to the ground: Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground, it will not bear fruit. When Saul fell from his horse to the ground, he rose as Paul, enquiring 'who are you Lord'! And from then his life changed...for no longer did he live, Christ lived in him.

4. Conversion is fundamentally a new vision: Nothing of Saul changed...he was the same determined, stubborn, hardliner. But his vision had changed. And that changed everything else. When he got back his sight, he did not only see again, but his vision was totally new! He now saw everything from the point of view of Christ. That is the conversion expected of us: to see everything as Christ does - that is the journey you and I are called to make, a journey of conversion.