Cycle C - Year I:

30 June 2019: Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

(Liturgical Color: Green)

Readings:

First Reading: 1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21

Second Reading: Galatians 5:1, 13-18

Gospel: Please Read Luke 9:51-62

The challenge of following our Lord!

Have you noticed that towards the end of the Easter Season the Church celebrates a series of Solemnities (Ascension, Pentecost, Holy Trinity, and Corpus Christi just last Sunday)?

Let us first take a short catechism on the Church's liturgical calendar as a backgrounder.

Solemnities are the highest degree of celebration and are usually reserved for the most important Mysteries of our Faith.

Feasts, on the other hand, honor a mystery or title of the Lord, of our Lady, or of saints of particular importance (such as the Apostles and Evangelists).

Ordinary Time in the Catholic liturgical calendar is that part of the yearly cycle of 33 or 34 weeks in which there is no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ is celebrated, but rather the mystery of our Lord Jesus Christ in all its fullness is observed.

Now after a series of solemnities we are back to Ordinary Time, and this Sunday is the 13th in Ordinary Time.

The Gospel from St. Luke presents Jesus determined to journey toward the final stage of His mission which must happen in Jerusalem. For it is in Jerusalem that He will reveal the whole purpose of His life on earth, namely, to die out of love for us sinners.

The travel narrative begins with the brief encounter where Jesus is rejected in Samaria. But Jesus rebukes His disciples who wanted to repay the hostility of the Samaritans with fiery destruction.

The rest of the Gospel story is an admonition from our Lord about detachment from all worldly security when we decide to accompany Him in this "journey".

What are the implications of the Sunday Gospel for us today?

The first lesson for those who would travel with Jesus is to put aside all initiatives prompted by anger, violence, and prejudice. That is why in the Gospel Jesus Himself rebukes the disciples James and John who wanted to "call fire from heaven to consume" the hostile Samaritans. As Christians we are taught to put aside anger and violence as ways to solve problems. And Jesus reminds us that to "call fire down from heaven" is definitely not the Christian way to deal with difficult people.

The second lesson is that those who follow Jesus must be willing to let go of all previous attachments. Because half-hearted discipleship simply will not be accepted to our Lord.

Thus, the challenge of our Christian faith is really to keep calm in the midst of storm, to keep our peace even in turbulent times. Because we believe that our life on earth is but a journey, in preparation for our final destiny in the heavenly home.

This is the challenge for those who want to follow our Lord Jesus Christ in His journey to Jerusalem. The Lord expects the same kind of decisiveness from His followers. It is not going to be easy, that is why we need to pray persistently and consistently for grace to be able to respond to the challenge. And our Blessed Mother Mary is our very model in trust and complete submission to God's will.

And so when we really begin to trust more the wisdom of Jesus, we will gladly let go of unworthy attachments as we trust more and more the promises of God and begin to run joyfully toward the future, which is our heavenly destiny.

A blessed Sunday to us all. And thank you for a moment with God.

Ad Jesum per Mariam!

Cycle C - Year I:

23 June: Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

(Liturgical Color: White)

Readings:

First Reading: Genesis 14:18-20

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Gospel: Please Read Luke 9:11b-17

Jesus: The Bread of Life!

In the "dancing sun", we look for God's presence in our world. And sometimes even in the clouds above, we are amazed when the clouds seem to form a silhouette image of the Lord. Or, we marvel at reported "dancing" statue of saints, and the Marian image that allegedly sheds tears. Perhaps, in our thirst for God and the divine, we are inclined to believe these manifestations of God's presence in our world.

But then we forget, that our Lord Jesus Christ is really and truly present with us in the Holy Eucharist.

We celebrate this Sunday another important feast: The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, or more popularly known as Corpus Christi.

Our belief in the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist is the very center and source of our Christian life. That is to say, even after His ascension into heaven Jesus chose to remain with us in the sacrament of the Eucharist. And so in the Eucharist we encounter Jesus Himself and thus receive a foretaste of heavenly glory.

The Gospel proclamation this Sunday is from St. Luke, which is about the multiplication of the loaves and fish. This miraculous feeding of the big crowd was a prelude to something much more wonderful, the miraculous gift of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself in the Holy Eucharist. The incident on the feeding of the crowd teaches us that Jesus desires to nourish His exhausted hungry flock with bread and fish. And this was a foreshadowing of the Lord's desire to spiritually nourish the whole world with His own Body and Blood in the Eucharist at Mass.

It is within the holy sacrifice of the Mass that we have our immediate experience of this encounter with our Lord Jesus Christ. So we are invited to prepare our minds, heart and bodies in anticipation of the representation of the paschal mystery. That means to say, our minds and hearts and bodies ought to be oriented toward adoration of our Lord, contrition for our sins, thanksgiving for our blessings and crosses and supplication offered with our particular intention in mind.

Now for us Catholics, the doctrine on the Real Presence asserts that in the Holy Eucharist our Lord Jesus Christ is wholly present, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the appearances of bread and wine.

That is why the great St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that Jesus' presence in the Eucharist is "visus, tactus, gustus." It means His presence is not imaginary in our mind. Because when we receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, we actually see (visus), touch (tactus), and taste (gustus) our Lord Himself. And so He is an "edible" God, as some theologians would say.

It is a good reminder for everyone that as Jesus makes Himself present to us as a gift in the Holy Eucharist at Mass, so too we must prepare ourselves to respond to His gift of self by our proper disposition during Holy Mass. Thus, our bodily postures of kneeling and genuflecting should remind us of Who we are about to encounter as we approach the altar for Holy Communion. Even our traditional discipline of an hour fasting before receiving the Lord into our bodies and souls should remind us of the purity and sense of mortification we must adopt if we want to imitate Him authentically.

As we prepare to go to Mass we should ask: "How will I offer myself to God during Mass in order to match Jesus' love and gift of self to me?" And we will soon discover that as much as we think we are giving to Jesus, in reality He is never outdone in His generous outpouring of His very life into our own... in the Holy Eucharist.

Finally, we cannot properly receive the Bread of Life unless at the same time we give the bread of life to those in need wherever and whoever they may be. Amen.

A blessed Corpus Christi Sunday to us all. And thank you for a moment with God.

Ad Jesum per Mariam!

Cycle C - Year I:  

16 June 2019: Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity 

(Liturgical Color: White)

Readings:

First Reading:        Proverbs 8:22-31

Second Reading:   Romans 5:1-5

Gospel:  Please Read  John 16:12-15

Our God is a Triune God!

What do we understand by "a Triune God"?

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity holds that God is one God, but three co-eternal con-substantial persons-- the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit-- as "one God in three divine Persons".   

The Church celebrates this Sunday the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The mystery of the Holy Trinity is the most fundamental of our faith. On it everything else depends and from it everything else derives. Hence the Church's constant concern to safeguard the revealed truth that God is One in nature and Three in Persons.

This doctrine on the Holy Trinity is the most difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to fully communicate with human words. We end up acknowledging that the Trinitarian character of God will always be, in reality, a great mystery. In fact, the shortest Gospel commentary is that the Trinity is a mystery, and that is the end of the story.

It is important to mention though that the Church did not invent the teaching on the Holy Trinity. Because it is our Lord Jesus Christ Himself who revealed this mystery of the Trinity to us through the first disciples.

So in this Sunday's Gospel from the evangelist St. John, Jesus reveals to us God's real identity in the Trinitarian mystery:

"I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take  from what is mine and declare it to you." (Jn 16:12-15)

But does the Church teaching on the Trinity make sense at all to us today?  The answer is "yes", and it does greatly help us to grow in faith and strengthens us in practical ways of our Christian living.

First of all, God allows us to know Him more intimately as He truly is in the Trinitarian mystery. Because we cannot love Him unless we know Him: one God in three divine Persons. Thus, He reveals Himself to us as a divine family. And we are all invited to be part of that family.

In the words of St. John Paul II: "God in His deepest mystery is not a solitude, but a family, since He has in Himself fatherhood, sonship, and love, which is the essence of the family."

Second, because we know that God is a communion of persons, we who are made in His image and likeness are likewise made to be in a relationship with God and with each other. We are made to be communal beings, meant to live for others. This is the nature of love and the nature of God who formed us in His image.

And finally, through the Holy Trinity God reveals Himself to us as a family, a loving communion of persons. So, therefore, our family should be a communion of life  and love modeled after the Trinity. It is in the family that we first learn some important lessons about Christian living, like sharing, about being patient and forgiving. It is in the family that we also learn how to practice a selfless, sacrificial love that is an image of the selfless love of the Trinity.

So in sum, the doctrine on the Holy Trinity tells us something about who God is, and tells us something about ourselves, too, made in His image and likeness.  In the Eucharist at Holy Mass, let us give glory to God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit-- one God, three Persons-- from Whom everything in the world and in history comes, and to whom everything returns, in time. Amen.

A blessed Trinity Sunday to us all. And thank you for a moment with God.

Ad Jesum per Mariam!