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)
No comments:
Post a Comment