Luke 17: 26-37 (Friday, November 16, 2007)

In today’s gospel, Jesus is simply telling us that we need to always be ready because we do not know when the parousia would occur. It will may occur when we least expect it – maybe you would be in your desk at work; or your may be in the saloon fixing your hair or at Walmart shopping. The second important point from today’s gospel is that salvation is a personal invitation and not a communal invitation. Jesus calls the members of his church to be saved but this is in personal relationships with him. Judgment would be personal. Your spouse cannot stand in judgment for you; your parents cannot stand in judgment for you; your children cannot stand in judgment for you. You will go before the Lord alone and him an account of your stewardship – how you were able to respond to his invitation to you to be saved. That is what the last judgment simply is. Let us live our lives every day as people who believe in the parousia.

Prayer:
God our Father, thank you for the salvation which you have extended to us in the person of Jesus. Help us to respond wholeheartedly to this invitation to be saved, so that when you come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, you will say to us, “welcome home, good and faithful servants.”

Luke 17: 20-25 (Thursday, November 15, 2007)

In the Lords prayer we pray, “thy kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.” What do we pray for? We pray that the glory of the Lord shine upon this earth, as it is in heaven; we pray that the peace of the Lord reign upon this earth, as it is in heaven; we pray that the joy of the Lord radiate this earth, earth as it is in heaven. Jesus tells us in the gospel of today that the kingdom of God is among us. God’s kingdom is here, but we are not seeing it. It is here in the Eucharist we share; it is here in our brothers and sisters, members of the ecclesia. In fact, we are the kingdom of God today. We should not look at the kingdom of God as an ideological concept; as something out there. We should look at it as something here with us. We all have the responsibility of bringing that kingdom to other people. Whatever Christian thing that we do furthers the realization of that kingdom here on earth.

Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, through our lives and work, may your kingdom come upon this earth, as it is in heaven.

Luke 17: 11-19 (Wednesday, November 14, 2007)

God has given us so many gifts. Our very existence is itself a gift from God. Sometimes we fail to show appreciation for what God has done for us. We whine and complain and we always want more, without stopping to say “thank you” to Jesus. Only one of the lepers in the gospel of today returned to say “thank you” to Jesus. The others just walked away. Our appreciation can come in different ways. While it is an excellent and praiseworthy thing to thank Jesus in prayer, it is also important that we thank him in our actions. We can show our appreciation to him by giving back our service to the community. Jesus did not despise the lepers in the gospel of today by holding to the claim that either their sin or the sins of their ancestors brought them that predicament. That was a common belief at the time. Rather, Jesus loved them and healed them. We too must love the poor and the less privileged around us and we must generously share of our gifts to them without despising them or accusing them of laziness.

Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, give us the spirit of generosity that we may generously share the gifts you have given us with others. Help us to recognize that true appreciation comes from sharing of what you have given to us with others in need. All these we ask in Jesus name.

Luke 17: 7-10 (Tuesday, November 13, 2007 – Feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini)

Catholics always have the tendency to want to know what they must do in order to be considered practicing Catholics. The church has done a good job over the years telling them precisely what every Catholic must believe or do. No other religion or Church has as many rule books as the Catholic Church: the Bible, the Catechism, Code of Canon Law, magisterial documents, dogmatic pronouncements, etc. Recently a parishioner asked, what is the basic minimum number of times a Catholic must go to confession in a year? To push it further, some Catholics might ask, what parts of the Mass do I have to be present in order to have fulfilled my Sunday obligation?

True religion is not all about obligations, but it is about the Spirit of God working in you, leading you to act above and beyond the requirements. The servant in the gospel of today is not to be praised because he is only doing what he has been commanded to do. We cannot be saints if we do only the things our faith has obliged us to do. To be saints, we need to go beyond the minimum and do the very ordinary things in an extra-ordinary way.

Prayer:
Lord help us today to serve you in truth and in spirit. Give us the patience to do the little things you have asked us to do in extraordinary ways.

Luke 17: 1-6 (Monday, November 12, 2007 – Feast of St. Josephat)

We all have had occasions when we have forgiven someone who has wronged us one or two times and we conclude that we will never forgive again because the person is making a fool of us. If in forgiving those who sincerely ask for forgiveness, we are making a fool of ourselves, Jesus wants us to be fools in forgiving. Remember that people did not understand why anyone in his right senses will choose to die a shameful death on the Cross for his enemies. When Jesus prayed on the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing,” the people may have thought he is foolish. When you live radically the Christian vocation, people will think you are foolish. Just as Jesus Christ does not impose limits on the amount of mercy he shows to us, so he does not want us put limits on how much we can forgive. This is the distinctiveness of the Christian dogma. In other religions, it is an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; but in Christianity, we are invited to forgive those who hurt us as many times as possible. Is it easy to forgive? No. However, God has given us the graces we need to be able to forgive those who hurt us. We need faith to be able to forgive. When we forgive, we bring healing not only to the person who has offended us, but we become healed ourselves.

Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for your forgiveness which you gave to us on the Cross of Calvary. Help us every day of our lives to grow in the spirit of forgiveness, that we may generous forgive all those whom we find the most difficult to forgive.

2Maccabees 7: 1-2, 9-14; 2Thessalonians 2: 16-3:5; Luke 20: 27-38 (Sunday, November 11, 2007 – 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Today’s readings invite us to reflect on one of the fundamental aspect of our faith – the resurrection. In the first reading of today, the mother and her seven sons are martyred because of their refusal to live against the law of Yahweh. Both Leviticus 11: 7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8 prohibit Jewish people from eating pork. These Old Testament martyrs saw the life after as being more important than their present life which will eventually end. They professed that they would rather die than violate the law of Yahweh. They believed that eternity with God was more important than the short securities of this present life. Their statements when faced with this severe persecution reflect a deep theology of martyrdom.

Ø They believed that it was better for the Just to die than to succumb to sin. The Just know that earthly death is only temporal, the life beyond is more important. They know that their death is not in vain as God will vindicate them. After many years of persecution of the church by the Roman emperors, Christians were steadfast in their faith and at the end of the day, God vindicated them. 2000 years later, we can confidently say the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the faith. When faced with the difficulties of this world, we shouldn’t give up our faith. For the Christian, it is better to die than to deny the faith; it is better to fail that exam than to cheat to be successful; it is better to lose that business deal than to lie to get the deal; etc.

Ø The just would be resurrected. Jesus proclaims himself as the resurrection and the life in John 11:25 and he goes on ahead to raise his friend Lazarus back to life. He does not just stop there, he himself after three days of his death, came back to life to show that he is truly the resurrection and the life and death has no power over him. St. Paul tell us in 1Thessalonians 4:14 that if we believe that Jesus died and rose, God will bring forth with him from the dead also those who have fallen asleep believing in him.

Ø There is no resurrection for the wicked. They shall incur the wrath of God. The martyr embraces his or her death joyfully knowing that the person who is causing him this pain does not believe in the power of the resurrection. If only they believed in the power of the resurrection, they will not treat fellow human beings that way. They act the way they do because they have given their lives to sin and as St. Paul tells us, the wages of sin is death.

Ø The martyr believes that his or her suffering is because of their sin but their death has an expiatory value. The sin here does not necessarily mean the giving of self totally to sin. It is an understanding that as a human being he or she is sinful but what the martyr has, that the wicked person does not have is that the martyr believes in the power of God’s mercy and believes that there is redemption in the precious blood of the lamb. The martyrs blood brings expiation from all their sins.

More than any other thing, today’s readings are an invitation to Christian hope. Christian hope is basically the hope in the resurrection. St. Paul tells us in 1Corinthians 15 that, “if there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is void of content and your faith is empty too.” So, for St. Paul, our resurrection is closely linked with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is for the reason that Christ has been raised from the dead that believers can hope that they too will experience the resurrection. The Sadducees in the gospel of today use Deuteronomy 25:5 to argue against the resurrection. It is important to keep in mind that the Sadducees who are an aristocratic, conservative group that hold only the Torah to be authoritative, do not believe in neither angels nor the resurrection. Jesus would not respond to them using the later development of the teaching on the resurrection as it is found in both Maccabees and Daniel. They would not accept these books as authoritative. So, Jesus uses the teaching from Exodus 3. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not the God of the dead but the God of the living.

When the Sadducees argue against Jesus using the example of marriage, they are looking at resurrection more or less as a resuscitation of the body. Christian resurrection as understood in the New Testament is not resuscitation. It is a transformation in which our bodies are no longer mortal or corruptible. The resurrection conquers all authority and the last enemy of the human person is death. The resurrection conquers death. Since death is conquered by the resurrection of Jesus, Christians too can hope in the resurrection. And since Christians are transformed and they would live forever with Jesus in heaven where he is the all in all, there would be no need for marriage. The only marriage will be the marriage of the lamb, where Christians would unite with their master and savior Jesus Christ and would see God as he truly is.