1. Year B / Eastertide / Sixth Sunday
    Readings: Acts 10.25-26, 34-35, 44-48 / Psalm 98.1,2-3,3-4 (R/v cf. 2b) / 1 John 4.7-10 / John 15.9-17


    He sat faraway from the house. “Boy, Boy, dinner time,” the maid called. He didn’t move. He put his head onto his folded arms and sobbed quietly. Dad had just scolded him harshly for making his younger brother cry.

    Then he felt a hand around his shoulder. It drew him close into a warm, comforting embrace.  “But Tee Tee kicked me first.” “I know; it’ll be ok,” she said. He leaned in, and laid his head on her chest. He felt consoled.

    For many, the mother’s act is kind and caring. For the young boy, it might have been just marvellous. “Marvellous” because it is extremely good and it pleases very much, as the dictionary defines.  And, who amongst us does not hope for a marvellous deed or two, now and again, in our lives from our loved ones or from those we interact with? 

    What about God? What could God’s marvellous deed be in our lives?

    Listen to this line from our second reading: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. We know this line well; it is the foundation of our faith in God through Jesus. We profess it each time we say the Creed. And yes, this is God’s marvellous action in our lives.

    But what if God keeps doing another marvellous deed in our lives? That of knowing us, and our need to be saved, more honestly than we do.

    Psalm 139 is about God who created us always searching our hearts and minds, to know our deepest most thoughts and feelings. Here is God wanting to know the stuff that you and I want God to know, like our patient longing for God in our pains and hurts, our grateful praise to God for the goodness in our lives, and even, our doubts about whether God really exists. Yes, this is how God knows that deep in our core lives a spiritual being who trusts God as best as we can in everything.

    But don’t we also live lives with stuff that we don’t want God to know about: lives on the surface and in the superficial; lives of addictions and bad habits; lives that are unChristian and sinful. Yes, lives that do not do justice to the core of who we each are. God knows this ugly, greedy, dark and furtive side of our lives too. This side we try to rationalize, to blame others for, and to hide from one another, from God, and from ourselves.

    Now, if God knows everything about us, everything we’ve ever done or thought, the good or the bad, so, what then?

    The “what then” must be this marvellous fact: that God still wants all of us.  Still wants you, no matter how often you’ve refused God’s love to turn your lives around. Still wants me, in spite of the times I have failed to live my priesthood well. Still wants each and everyone of us, irresistibly, no matter how much wrong we have done, like the executed criminals in Indonesia, or how disrespectful towards Christianity we may be like Amos Lee, or how faithful we are like a good Christian who will die tonight after a lifetime of good works. 

    “That God still wants all of each of us.” Hasn’t this thought kept us awake sometimes at 2 and 3 a.m., wrestling to answer this question: “How can God’s love be so merciful towards me and my habitual sinning?”

    God is love and God is merciful because God values the “loveable” in you and me

    Being loveable comes from within us. There, God's grace plays artist in our lives.  God’s grace creates and nurtures the beauty of who each one of us is -- God’s beloved. This beauty does not appear only in the saintly; it is also and always present in the sinful. In fact, this beauty always radiates outward from everyone of us, however holy or unholy we are. It cannot be smudged off or wiped away or criticized into disappearance because “loveableness” is God’s beauty shinning through our lives.  And our “loveableness” is always good enough for Jesus to call us to remain in God’s love. 

    Isn’t this the mercy of God Jesus reminds us about this evening? This is why after Jesus asks us to love one another in John’s Gospel, he will ask us to allow him to wash our feet, our simple and often times flawed humanity. Do we dare let God in Jesus wash our feet? If we do so, we will give Jesus permission to help us reclaim what is loveable and loving in us. Our human ways of loving God will never perfect; but our letting God love us in Jesus will make our living with imperfections, faithful.

    Sooner or later, we will all come to know that God does love us. Then, we might say, “I know God’s kind of love. I get it.” But getting it isn't the point. The truth is that we will never fully understand the height, the depth and the breadth of God’s love in our humanity.

    The point we are to catch is this in Jesus' message today is this: all God wants for you and me is to remain in God's love, to have life in God. And how does Jesus convey God’s desire? By telling us this: I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.

    My joy!? When did we hear someone else say, “Your joy matters to me”? When was the last time we gave half a thought to our own joy?  

    Today Jesus tells us that our joy matters. And it must matter because joy is indeed the whole point of being in relationship with God. Yes, the joy of being with God! This counts most. Not responsibility. Not duty. Not accomplishment. Not even prayer or sacrifice. Just joy; God’s joy in us; God’s joy for us.

    How can we have this joy? By humbling ourselves and letting our hearts be moved compassionately by one who just does not say, “I love you,” but who lives out in deed the depth of his love for us: No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

    Jesus commands us to love like he did because our human tendency is to be selfish, self-serving, self-preserving. When we dare to love someone else, and to love them for their wellbeing, and not for us to feel good or be savior-like, then, we begin to give love a chance to take root, and to grow wider and deeper in our world. Then, love can save, transform and give life. 

    Jesus asks this of us as his disciples because this is how our lives and the world can turn away from sin and its consequences, and begin living anew. Yes, love is truly, madly, deeply true love when it is laid out there, on the crosses in our lives, for someone else to live more fully, more freely, more happily.  After all, isn’t this how Jesus gave us Easter joy?

    She looked down at her son. She stroked his hair as she sang him a lullaby to sleep. Then, quietly, she whispered, “I want you to be happy, baby. I love you.”

    Doesn’t Jesus’ assurance of God’s love this evening remind us of how we’ve also experienced God through our mothers? Yes, marvelous, isn’t it how true love always stoops down to our level, only to lift us up, again and again, into the fullness of life and the abundance of joy?




    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: wisegeek.com (Internet)

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  2. Year B / Eastertide / Fifth Sunday
    Readings: Acts 9.26-31 / Psalm 22.26-27, 28, 30, 31-21 (R/v 26a) / 1 John 3.18-24 / John 15.1-8


    My Dad loved to garden. When we lived in Changi, he planted gardenias, bougainvillea, hibiscus, Japanese primrose (my favourite) and even papaya.

    He would teach my siblings and I to dig and plant, and to get our hands dirty as we weeded and fertilized. He taught us about seeding and watering, about planting according to the wet and dry seasons. He showed us how to graft a desirable trait, say a branch from a particular fruit or flower, onto another plant with stronger roots and stock.

    Though I don't have a green thumb, everything I know about gardens and gardening comes from him. He taught me to like gardens and to appreciate the hard work gardening is.

    Like every good gardener, Dad knew the value and necessity of pruning. Cutting away what is dead, unwanted and overgrown is hard work. As it is hunting for and destroying slugs. But he did all this to prune, prune, prune the plants and shrubs: not just to keep our garden neat, but to let it flourish and be lush with new growth.

    Pruning is a good metaphor for how we ought to let Jesus shape us so that our relationship with him can bear good and abundant fruit. This kind of spiritual pruning involves courage to hear Jesus call to conversion and generosity to say, yes, I wish to be healed.

    But don’t we find ourselves struggling when we give Jesus permission to prune us to grow anew in our Christian life and faith? Struggling to turn our backs on bad habits and addictions? Wrestling to remove the self-centered, self-righteous, self-serving ways we live? Grappling to clear out those parts of our lives that are dead to Jesus’ love? 

    I’d like to think that sayings “yes” to being pruned is also saying “yes” to the grace that struggling, wrestling, grappling with Jesus promises us: that Jesus’ pruning will make something divinely better of our human lives.

    Why grace? Because these struggles involve the necessary and life-giving work of gradually surrendering ourselves into Jesus’ life and love. This is how we can begin to root out our vices and to plant God’s virtues in our lives. This interpretation of Jesus teaching is about the call to conversion so that we can live more fruitful Christian lives. A conversion we have to choose by remaining connected to Jesus or by rejecting him.

    But there’s another, richer lesson that Jesus teaches us today. It is about the beauty of how abiding in God is our true life. Easter joy is about knowing this truth, and living it out fully. 

    We need Jesus to help us convert our lives and to enjoy the fruitful life God wishes us to have. But we will experience this good life fully when we respond to Jesus’ call to abide in him. Our readings throughout the Easter season echo this call in the constant invitation they make to us: that only in Jesus will you and I fully live in God. And this life is ever growing.

    Last Sunday, Jesus gave us the image of the good shepherd. His words and ministry brought this image to life. In doing so, Jesus taught us that God’s saving action is primary to who God is and what God does in our lives.

    Today Jesus gives us the image of the vine and branches. It describes the kind of relationship we ought to have with God through him, with him and in him. A symbiotic relationship like the vine and the branches have: they abide in one another for life.

    This image is indeed hope-filled because it speaks of how God’s primary action in our lives -- to save -- isn’t finished. Gods action is ongoing; it is pregnant, growing, life-giving. Jesus, the vine doesnt go anywhere; he patiently, peacefully provides strength and sustenance for us, the branches. The branches hold fast to the vine, letting life flow through them, bearing fruit.  They are free to grow because the vine supports them.*

    The promise of the branches abiding in the vine is the freedom to live freely and fruitfully. As an Easter people, this is the kind of life the risen Jesus bestows on us to live in and through his Spirit.

    Such a life must matter to us: it testifies to how God in Jesus is indeed the source of life for us; God will raise us from the dead as God raised Jesus into eternal life. This is why we should abide in Jesus: through him we come to abide in God. And when we abide in God, we come to experience and know how God’s action for our wellbeing and happiness always precedes our actions. This is why we can believe that God’s actions always save: God attends to our every need even before we ask God to intervene.

    If you agree with me that God is always present in us and for us, and that God is always laboring for our salvation, then we have to acknowledge this fact of Christian life: that our actions do not create the conditions for our free and fruitful lives. Rather, our actions only enable the growth that life in God first produces and always enables.

    Isn’t this a lot like gardening? Gardeners only aid the growth of plants and shrubs. What makes a seed grow is the life source in the soil, in the air, in rain and moisture, in the ground.

    My Dad never taught us this insight explicitly; he simply repeated what Mom always taught us about living each day: observe, record and take note. This is how my siblings and I learnt that there is indeed growth in the mysterious process that transforms an ugly brown bulb into a glowing scarlet amaryllis.

    Yes, growth is all about that one breath of life -- never finished, always evolving, forever bestowing new possibilities to grow, to live, to fruit. And you and I are also grafted into this one breath of life, as are the unfortunate slugs in the garden. 

    This one breath of life we know, we believe, we profess to be life in God.

    Perhaps, this is why the ancient monks interpreted Jesus’ teaching about pruning and abiding as the good and necessary work of “soul keeping” we must do with Jesus daily.

    We would be wise then to keep in mind that today Jesus tells us five times to bear fruit in him, and eight times to remain in him. How many more times, then, must you and I let Jesus continue to shape us to bear good and abundant fruit for God and for one another?




    *Katie Munnik, “Abiding is a wonderful verb”

    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: 2paragraph.wordpress.com (Internet)
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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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