1. Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 3 / Sunday
    Readings: Jonah 3.1-5, 10 / Responsorial Psalm 25.4-5, 6-7, 8-9 (R/v 4a) / I Corinthians 7.29-31 / Mark 1.14-20

    “Come here right now!”  “When are you ever going to grow up!” Haven’t we all heard these words growing up? Haven’t we used them as parents or teachers?

    As harsh as these words may sound when we speak them or when they are spoken to us, they come out of hearts that care and are concerned about another’s wellbeing. In fact, these words express heartfelt, even urgent, desires for the best to happen to those we love and care for, and that these may happen more quickly.

    Like a mother, our Church cares that we grow up well and healthy in our faith and life. She utters the same sentiments that we grow up; we hear this message through the Church’s teachings and mass readings and through the examples of saints. Today’s readings do this too; they invite us to ‘grow-into’ our relationships with God and to ‘get on with God’s program’ for our lives.

    The Old Testament prophets did the same: they reminded and challenged Israel to grow in God’s ways. Jonah does exactly this in our first reading: he goes through Nineveh calling everyone, from the king to the servant, to conversion. The Ninevites hear; they repent; they conformed their lives to God’s ways. And God’s heart  softened; instead of punishing them, God mercifully embraced them into God’s love again.

    Do we hear God’s call to conversion? Do we change our hearts and lives? God invites us to grow up and live in God’s ways in such diverse ways as the Church’s catechism, Pope Francis’ homilies, and friends’ invitations to us to pray more or to learn about the faith. Aren’t these God’s invitations to love God by transforming our lives to live in God’s ways, and not fearfully love God by observing rules and laws?

    In our second reading, Paul urges us to attend to God’s calls of conversion with a sense of urgency. “I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out.” We have to do more than just listen to these calls; we have to respond to them quickly, if not immediately. For Paul, Christians can do this when we wake up to the truth that God has come and is in our midst to save us. But God needs us our permission to save us; God just needs us to say, “yes, Lord.”

    Are you and I saying “yes” to God enough times and in the many situations of temptations? Do we let the grace of urgency shape our response to God daily?

    When all is said and done, however, the Christian truth is that God in Jesus will always come to us first, and always, even before we reach out to God.  Jesus always calls us first into his good company. Then, as we come to know him more clearly, and follow him more closely, and love him more dearly, Jesus will speak God’s loving words, “grow up in my ways.” 

    The first words John the Baptist proclaims in the Gospels are, “Repent, the kingdom of God is hand.” In comparison, Jesus’ first words are, “This is the time of fulfillment; the kingdom of God is at hand.” This difference shows us that God in Jesus loves us so much to be with us by doing what God does best: to reach out to us first and always. Hence, we should not convert out of fear that God will damned us eternally for our sins. No, we should convert in gratitude because God wants to share life with us, however sinful we are, now and forever.

    We see this holy reality in today’s gospel reading.  Like Jonah, Jesus comes to call God’s people to a new way of living and loving. He comes into the everydayness of how people live and work, pray and play. His coming is the sign of God’s coming into human time and space. His coming then proclaims that this is now the time to begin being God’s people again. How come? Because God is now with us -- not just once in history but always with us into eternity 

    As parents call children "time after time," so Jesus repeatedly calls us to follow Him into God’s "good life" which is already in our midst. Jesus makes the same call to all humankind, from all times past to all times to come. His calls ought to wake us up to what truly matters in life: being with God always by letting God save us. 

    And don’t we especially hear Jesus’ call when we are entangled in the messiness and the littleness of our lives, as Jesus’ first followers were?  Or, when we experience losses and tragedies that spin our heads and hearts, leaving us to struggle with that annoying question, "what's it all about?" 

    As unbelievable as it is, these difficult moments are graced. In and through them, God calls us to grow and to get on with our Christian lives. God does not call us as the harsh, threatening and chastising parent. Rather, God’s call is that of the faithful parent whose assuring, consoling and warm timbre expresses her love that only wants her child to becomes more fully who he is, the beloved in whom we see the fullness of family resemblance. We each show forth our resemblance to God when we say ‘yes’ to changing our lives around to live in God’s ways.
      
    Are you and I saying “yes’ often enough when God calls us to conversion? Do we give God permission to let God grow us up?  

    Our lovingly patient God desires nothing more than to labor for our conversion. God came to Nineveh through Jonah; the Ninevites heard and responded. God came to the first disciples when Jesus walked past their boats; they heard and they followed. Today, God comes to us again. Not because time is running out on us. Rather, because it is in time that we encounter Jesus who shows us how God’s love is gently pursuing us to more and more conform our lives to God’s life for us.

    Yes, it is indeed in our human time -- often deemed ordinary; sometimes, extraordinary --that we will grow up slowly but surely in God’s ways. As we begin this new year, you and I are being asked to give Jesus a listen. This is how we can once again meet Jesus to follow him by choosing to live in his Christ-like way this year.

    It is indeed in the times of our lives that you and I will always keep running into Jesus. And each time we do, he will simply ask us, "come follow me."  

    (Inspired in parts by Larry Gillick, SJ)

     Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: from the Internet (www.welingelichtenkringen.nl)


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  2. Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 2 / Sunday
    Readings: 1 Samuel 3.3b-10, 19 / Responsorial Psalm 40.2-4, 7-8, 8-9, 10 (R/v 8a and 9a) / I Corinthians 6.13c-15a, 17-20 / John 2.35-42


    Do you remember that moment when a classmate or office worker became your friend? Or when it dawned on you that you found your life’s partner?

    Perhaps, it was the moment you saw her care for your parents. Or, it was when you felt safe in his presence on the rollercoaster. Or, it was when the both of you saw yourselves sitting on a swing and growing old together.

    These are defining moments between friends. They tell us when our interactions become friendships for life. More importantly, they teach us that true friends don’t ask us to be anyone else but ourselves. They accept and love us as we are. Such friendships allow us to live freely without pretense or the anxiety of never being good enough. Value these moments, we must. 

    And celebrate them, we should as people of faith. They are manifestations of God’s goodness. Through them, our friends show us how God wants to enliven and enrich our lives and faith, not because we deserve friendships but because God wants to be in friendship with us through them. The right and just response is joyful gratitude; this is the most human act we can do for friends. 

    Even if friendships challenge us, it is because God graces us with friends to nurture and authenticate our friendship with God. These more difficult moments are how God purifies, refines and deepens our friendship with God through the ordinariness of human friendships.  

    I’d like to believe that each of us has had similar experiences with Jesus in whom we meet God. Human as we are I think we often forget these moments of encountering Jesus. Our daily struggles and distractions in school, at work and in our family lives and friendships often divert our gaze from Jesus. 

    But let’s recall these moments: haven’t they been life changing? Life changing as Jesus transforms the ordinariness of our interactions with God into the extraordinariness of God’s friendship with us? You might have had such a moment in prayer or at a retreat, in Mass or when you served the poor. It might have happened at a difficult time of pain and suffering or in a time of grace and joy. It might even have been in an everyday moment like sitting among friends at the hawkers’ centre or lullabying a newborn to sleep.

    Why should we pay attention to these moments with Jesus as we begin a new year? What good is it to remember them when the world demands that we focus more on the future? 

    In The Sound of Music, Maria teaches the children to sing by starting at the very beginning, a very good place to start, with the Do-Re-Mis. If we seriously want to live our Christian lives better, Maria’s advice is worth heeding because I believe the quality of our Christian life depends on how well we anchor it in that definitive moment when our friendship with Jesus first began.

    Our gospel story on these first of many Sundays this year is about the beginning of Jesus’ friendship Andrew and the other disciple. It begins with questions to get to know one another and it ends with an invitation to come home.  
    'Where do you live?' they asked. Jesus replied, 'Come and see'; so that they went and saw where he lived, and stayed with him that day. It was about the tenth hour.
    Jesus invited both men to that most intimate of places we call home. Here, they stayed with him. Here, they came to know who he is. Here is where they lived with him. 

    To live with someone is to share one’s life. It is also to interact with another’s inner thoughts and feelings. And to allow someone to enter our living space is to permit her to share herself, as we have shared ourselves. This mutual sharing with one another of all that is good and all not so good is the very foundation for something beautiful and fruitful to come into being. What this is is genuine friendship. And the everydayness of life is where we experience genuine friendship.

    I’d like to think John the Evangelist must have been so deeply impressed with this encounter the disciples had with Jesus and beginning a friendship that it imprinted itself on his memory. Almost 80 years later when John wrote his Gospel, he found it important enough to remember this tenth hour, which is 4 o’clock in the afternoon. It is remarkably noteworthy that John records this hour because much of the gospels do not tells us the dates and times when Jesus encountered people.

    John’s description of this 4 o’clock encounter the disciples had with Jesus should challenge us: “Can we remember that significant moment when we encountered Jesus? When was it?”

    Perhaps, as we remember this moment we will see again how Jesus invited us into genuine friendship, even before we reached out to him. More importantly, our remembering will help us see more clearly how this definitive moment, this 4 o’clock hour, offers us the reason to live our Christian life well this year: this is the moment when Jesus assured us that his friendship is ours for all times and in all situations.

    This morning the Church, through the readings, invites you and me to remember how Jesus’ friendship is ours to save us. Jesus saves us by teaching us to  listen to God’s instruction on how to live the good Christian life. This is the lesson Samuel learns in our first reading: to listen to God’s voice. This is why Eli asks Samuel to say, “Speak, God, your servant is listening.” We would be wise to make this humble disposition our daily practice to live the good Christian life better. Then, it is good for God to hear us say, like the psalmist today,  “Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will.”

    Yes, if we want to seriously live our Christian faith well in the coming month days, it does matter that we remember the definitive moment when you and I met Jesus. For then was when our world was turned upside down because God befriended us in Jesus, and nothing ever was the same again. 

    So, when my friends was your 4 o’clock hour with Jesus?





    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore.
    photo: engagement time at central paky, new york city by adsj (Feb2014)

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  3. Year B / Solemnity of the Epiphany
    Readings: Isaiah 60.1-6 / Responsorial Psalm 71.2, 7-8, 20-11, 12-13 (R/v cf 11) / Ephesians 3.2-3a, 5-6 / Matthew 2.1-12


    Comings and goings. We associate these words with movement. 

    Our travels express well what comings and goings can mean. We come to a place to visit; we look and see; we taste and savour; we enjoy our encounters. Then, we go home, laden with memories and souvenirs for ourselves and good buys and gifts for family and friends. Don’t we come with little but go home with more, sometimes too much more with heavier bags or multiple ones?

    Pilgrimages are no different. We come to a holy place with good intentions and perhaps, more significantly, with hopes in God. And we go home from Lourdes or Assisi or Jerusalem with the many medals, bottles of holy water, crucifixes and rosaries we feel we need to buy to say we had a holy time. But do we go home with God?

    Comings and goings, whether for spiritual wellbeing or bodily rest, are always part of an adventure: we don’t really know what will happen. All we have is the journey; and we’re always being invited to be a part of it. The journey, more than our comings and goings,  is perhaps the most important experience in our life and faith.

    Something of travelling, of pilgrimage, of adventure is woven into the narrative of the three wise men that we remember on this solemnity of the Epiphany.  These wise men of learning — or rich kings as they are sometimes depicted — journey to find the newborn king. They come to Bethlehem. They find Jesus. They do him homage and they offer him gifts. Then ‘they depart for their country by another way.’ The wise men come; the wise men go.

    We know the details of their coming from Matthew’s Christmas narrative. We know about the star that leads them to Jesus. About their encounter with Herod who affirms from Scripture that Bethlehem is their destination. We know they find Jesus there, prostrate themselves before him, offer him gold fit for a king to reign, frankincense fit for God to be praise, and myrrh fit to anoint the human body in death. From folklore, we know them as Melchior, Casper and Balthazar. 

    Our Scriptures, Catechism and Tradition teach us that their coming to Bethlehem involved an encounter: their human yearning for God met God’s eternal longing for humankind. This encounter revealed God’s love to save all peoples into eternal life. This is Epiphany, and this is what we remember, celebrate and believe in again today. We do so because it is good news. 

    But it is radical good news because God’s love in Jesus is not just for the shepherds, the poor and the people in darkness in Israel.  It is also for the rich, the learned and the foreign in distant lands. It is truly good news because in Jesus God’s love is for more than those who know God in the faith; it is also and always for all, no matter if they are of different faiths and from myriad nations. Truly, all are entitled to God’s salvation.

    This good news is so radical that it cannot be anything else but joyful. This must be why the angels on high sing ‘Gloria’ and ‘Peace to people of goodwill’ because this is who God is and what God does for all peoples in Jesus.  And so, shouldn’t ask ourselves: “Do I delight that God in the mystery of God’s saving love has come in Jesus to redeem not just me but also my Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist neighbor into eternal salvation, or am I disturbed by this reality of God's saving love?”

    Today, I believe we also celebrate something else; something that can illuminate our own journeys of life and faith, with all the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties we have as a pilgrim people.

    We will find this something in the ending to the story of the three wise men. Nothing is said about what happened to them after their encounter with Jesus. Only this: that they returned home by a different route. They seem to have slipped away quietly and disappeared into anonymity. You might say that their stories blended into the collective Christmas tale. 

    Yet, their slipping away is integral to the plot line of the Christmas story. It teaches us of what is truly exchanged between God and humankind: not gifts but the gift of being held in safe hands. This is the something that can enlighten our journeys; it is a lesson for us.

    The wise men followed the star. They found and adored Jesus. They completed their journey. In coming to Jesus and then going forth after encountering him, their movement did not end in a God they sought. Rather, it brought them to a beginning with a God who came to them. Yes, they placed their gifts, everything of worth they had, at the feet of the Infant King. But they also offered everything they were safely into God’s hands that allowed them to begin their life anew. 

    As characters in the Christmas story, we see how the wise men have no need to fight for the central place in the plot. They happily cede everything to Jesus, the central protagonist in the this story. This is why they disappear in the plot: because they can. They are free enough to do so. Free because what they really gift Jesus with is not gold, frankincense and myrrh but their trust — a trust that God will hold them safe in Jesus’ hands.  

    I believe this must have been the experience the wise men had of coming to Jesus and going forth from him: we only need to imagine how true this must be as they let the baby Jesus hold them as they cradled him, and how this embrace remained their comfort through their lives. Haven’t you experienced something of this in carrying your newborn child or nephew or niece, and remembering how you held each other lovingly? 

    Indeed, what other expression of being securely loved is there but that of being held in safe hands? Isn’t this true when God has held us into eternal love in Jesus’ safe hands, no matter how often we have sinned?

    Perhaps, this is why Simeon’s prayer must come alive in us: “Now, Lord, you can dismiss your servant!” To come to Jesus; to be held in Jesus’ safe hands; and to go forth from Jesus with this comfort for our lives — isn’t this enough reason to have Simeon’s ready disposition that we can die, whatever the state of our Christian life, because we are indeed already in Jesus’ safe hands? 

    The Christmas story of the three wise men tells us that we are in safe hands. Are you and I ready to let go and to let God lead us on our life journeys, however dark and disconcerting they may be? 

    If we are, we should refocus what our life journey is about. It cannot be about our comings and goings in our journey to God. Rather, we must let ourselves be found and held safe by our God who always journeys to us in Jesus. 

    May be when you and I do do this, we will understand why T.S. Eliot closes his poem “The Journey of the Magi” with this truth: that with the Incarnation everything changes, and our journeys of life and faith, like the journeys of the wise men, will never be the same again.

    (With insights from Dom Damien, monk)

    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    artwork: “Adoration of the Magi” by Andrea Mantegna (c. 1500)

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"Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute way final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything."

Pedro Arrupe, sj, Superior General, 1965 - 1983

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is a 50something Catholic who resides in Singapore and works for the Church. He is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.
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