1. Year B / Ordinary Time / Sixteenth Sunday
    Readings: Jeremiah 23.1-6 / Psalm 23.1-3,3-4,5,6 (R/v 1) / Ephesians 2.13-18 / Mark 6.30-34


    The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
    In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
    beside restful waters he leads me;
    he refreshes my soul.

    We are all very familiar with these lines from Psalm 23. We proclaim them at Eucharist, sing them at funerals and pray them at retreats. No matter how often we encounter these lines, our familiarity with them goes much deeper: they echo our deepest longing for peace.

    We spend much of our everyday time looking for peace. When school is done, the younger ones amongst us put away their studies for some quiet and peace. During lunch breaks, some of us log off the computer, mute the handphone and turn the chair around for some peace of mind. And when death comes, we believe that our eternal rest is God’s peace. Yes, we all want peace.

    In today’s gospel story, Jesus’ disciples are in need of peace. They have returned from their first mission trip. They are exhilarated and eager to share stories of healings, exorcisms, and effective teaching, and may be, even some stories of failure, rejection, and hardship. But they are exhausted. 

    Sensing this, Jesus recognizes their need for solitude – some space for peace, some time of peace. Jesus attends to their needs as a good shepherd does. He calls them to “come away to a deserted place to rest.” There is an urgency; the crowds are gathering around them. Jesus’ invitation is tender and longing; all he wants is for them to rest, to recuperate, to be at peace.

    Haven’t you and I also experienced Jesus leading us into the peace of God’s presence, as only the Good Shepherd can? 

    It could have been when we needed quiet to grieve a beloved’s death. Or, when we yearned to give thanks for a job well done. Or, when we longed for a retreat’s solitude. I believe we have all experienced God’s peace in such times. That elusive peace we sought, we needed, and we had to have to carry on our Christian pilgrimage.

    But peace is not the same as tranquility. 

    Tranquility is lying on the ground, enchanted by the countless twinkling stars. Tranquility is standing at the lapping water’s edge and losing ourselves in the expansive horizon at sunset. Tranquility could even be the stillness we experience as we fall into the enveloping silence. In all these moments of tranquility, the stresses, insecurities, and anxieties of life fade away; we can let go and we know all will be fine.

    In this respect, tranquility isn’t bad. We need it. In fact, our busy, anxious life will be calmer, healthier and happier from disciplined tranquility and stillness, which we experience in prayer and in retreat. 

    If tranquility isn’t the same thing as peace, what kind of peace is Jesus calling his disciples to? I would like to suggest that we can glimpse an answer by reflecting on our exchange of peace each Sunday at Eucharist. 

    Like you, I’ve long associated the “Peace be with you” I say as a wish for tranquility, a prayer for calm upon each other, a hope that your stresses would slow down. 

    In liturgy, however “Peace be with you” symbolizes the restoration of ourselves to right relationship with God and with one another. We anoint each other in this exchange for the community we will become in communion, which we behold in the Eucharist: the body of Christ. 

    And isn’t this the peace Jesus’ message proclaims: that we are the one body, the one community of God on earth as it is in heaven through salvation? Jesus’ peace is therefore a peace that restores. It is not a retreat into tranquility and quiet stillness. 

    In our gospel story, Jesus leads his disciples away to be by themselves and to rest. They didn’t go away seeking peace, as we understand it. They just went seeking quiet. And in the quiet, Jesus gave them peace that refreshes, reenergizes and repairs individual and community. This peace restores. 

    Jesus himself received this same peace from God. Whenever Jesus went away to be alone, to pray, or to rest in the gospels, God gave him peace that restored him for the mission. Christian peace is not just about being quiet before God; it is also about being commissioned to bring about God’s kingdom. 

    We know this is the work of peace from how the gospel story ends: Jesus called the disciples away to peace, but the demands of other people for peace interrupted them. Jesus was with them in the quiet. But when he disembarked and he saw the crowds, he cared for them with compassion. The disciples learnt from Jesus how God’s peace that restores is indeed the same peace that must be bestowed on all who seek peace. 

    Like the disciples, we would be wise to learn from Jesus’ example. Then, we will know that God’s peace will truly give us fullness of life only when we do as Jesus does. Today Jesus calls us again to go and do what he does as the good shepherd: to restore all in God’s ways and into God’s embrace. 

    When we dare to share God’s peace with others, we become more like Jesus the good shepherd to one another, but, most of all, to the last, the lost and the least. 

    We would be most Christian then when we listen and attend to our family and friends who seek our understanding, to the increasing have-nots in our midst who cry out for our assistance, and to those whom we have discriminated against and who demand we stop as they plead “no more.” 

    Jesus’ peace is therefore not the sound of tranquility, or respite from pain, or even the absence of suffering. It is peace for justice. 

    Such peace must be disturbing: it is like a sword cutting through the petty, oppressive and hurtful ways we sometimes practice towards one another at home, in school and at work. Jesus’ peace is indeed holy disturbance. And Jesus commands that we share this peace. Why? Because we can then better restore the souls of others and the wellbeing of our world in God’s love and into God’s life.

    Very soon, we will exchange the sign of peace. Today, we learn that it cannot be about words we say or handshakes, nods and hugs we make. No, the exchange of peace we will share must be our concrete commitment to shepherd one another into God’s peace that restores us all. 

    Will you and I accept this commitment? Will we then express it by saying “Peace be with you” wholeheartedly and mean it?

    I believe we can. We can because 
    the Lord is our shepherd; we shall not want.
    In verdant pastures he gives us repose;
    beside restful waters he leads us; he refreshes our souls.

    Give us this peace, Lord Jesus, 
    so that we can say to each other and to all, 
    “Yes, peace be with you and with your spirit,”
    for God’s love always refreshes, and eternally restores.


    (inspired in part by David Henson, "Peace is Not Tranquility")

    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: www.catholicworldreport.com

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  2. Year B / Ordinary Time / Fifteenth Sunday
    Readings: Amos 7.12-15 / Psalm 84.9-10, 11-12, 13-14 (R/v 8) / Ephesians 1.3-14/ Mark 6.7-13

    Do you like to travel? Do you travel to discover new places and meet new people, to see new sights and hear new sounds, even to savour new tastes? Or, do you travel to visit relatives and friends, to catch up on old times and to share new beginnings? Perhaps, you travel for work and business, or even to escape.

    A metaphor we often use to describe traveling is “journey.” A journey  from A to B. An adventure from beginning to end. A route that meanders; a trek over mountains to scale and into valleys to forge. In all these journeys, the traveler is always moving forward towards his destination. 

    We use the Christian metaphor “pilgrimage” to express what more a journey, this travel, in life can mean: our way home to God. If Christian life is a pilgrimage to return to God, we should not be afraid to ask Jesus for what we need to make this journey well.

    In today's gospel passage, Jesus gives us three teachings on traveling well: travel to preach; listen to travel; and be empowered for travel. “Tips for the trip” is how I would describe these lessons. 

    Lesson 1: Travel to preach  
    Jesus calls his disciples to travel not for themselves but to preach and serve others. He gathers them, and then missions them to proclaim the Good News. They extend Jesus’ work of bringing God’s kingdom to the frontiers. It is when these disciples say “yes” to this journey that they are transformed into apostles. The root word for apostles in Greek means “to send out.” A disciple’s’ “yes” allows Jesus to send him out as God’s messenger. With Jesus, he can then proclaim that God is love and God is with us.  

    Lesson 2: Listen to travel
    Jesus instructs his disciples on how to carry out the mission on their travels. He does this because traveling in the world can be difficult. There are thieves and bandits who waylay travelers. There is poverty some struggle with to complete their journeys. And there are burdens, sometimes too many, that travelers carry. So Jesus sends his disciples out in pairs for safety. He tells them to travel light so that they can better complete the journey. And he instructs them to welcome the hospitality others will give them along the way. 

    Lesson 3: Be empowered for travel
    Jesus also empowers his disciples to transform the world into God’s kingdom as they travelled. He empowers them to proclaim repentance, to dispossess the possessed, and to heal the sick. His power helps them to uplift the people they encountered. These people learn that they are not unknown or unwanted. Rather, they are God’s sons and daughters, loved by name. This is the Good News that the apostles proclaim. 

    To travel to preach; to listen to travel; and to be empowered for travel.  What do these lessons have to do with you and me, you might ask?

    I'd like to suggest something important because we are travelers in life and pilgrims to God. We might miss out on what Jesus is offering us if our attitude today is “well, it’s another Sunday Eucharist, one in the repetition of many Sunday Eucharists in life. So, I come, I listen, I pray, I receive communion, I go back home, and tomorrow I go to study and to work. Just the same old same old.” 

    What we’d miss out on if we have this outlook is the opportunity Jesus is offering us to travel purposefully as Christians. That is, to travel through life with Christ-like significance. 

    How many of us have had the opportunity to travel for the good of others? To heal broken relationships? To free and uplift those in need? To announce good news? This is the opportunity Jesus gives his disciples in today’s gospel passage: that possibility to go out for people's ultimate good. This is what I mean by traveling through life with a Christ-like significance. 

    And Jesus is offering us this chance too. This chance to travel through life and to make God’s love, God’s life real for someone else in every community we inhabit, not just in St Ignatius parish and in our church ministries. 

    And we can make our travel, our journey, our pilgrimage significant for others by acting in such Christ-like ways as these: by laying down our lives like Jesus did to save others; by giving more charitably to the poor as Jesus commanded us; by forgiving our enemy and healing the suffering like Jesus did; and by being thankful for the ordinary things in life, like food, friendship and sleep, as Jesus did by thanking God.

    Amos heard the call to travel with significance in our first reading: though a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores, the Lord called him to prophesy to the people. Jesus’ disciples responded to the call to mission. And saints, missionaries, and all those who have transformed our lives with God’s word and action live out this call daily. 

    But what allowed them to respond to this call to travel with Christ-like significance? What do you and I need to do likewise? 

    I'd like to suggest that we can glimpse an answer in Pope Francis’ motto: “By having mercy and by choosing him.” Francis chose this line from a homily by Bede the Venerable who reflected on Jesus calling Matthew, the tax collector. At the heart of Jesus’ call is the loving mystery of God’s mercy that still values the sinner worthy for God’s work. 

    And the right and only response such a person need make when he is called by God is to be totally dependent on God. Take nothing: no food; no sack; no money; just a walking stick, sandals, and a tunic. Jesus reminds his disciples and us that radical dependence on God is indeed the just and human attitude for traveling with Jesus and for Jesus. Like Jesus, dependence is what keeps us truly open to serve in God’s ways and through God’s providence. 

    Don’t we know this truth deep down in our hearts in each confession and at every mass: that though we are sinners, Jesus tells us again and again how worthy we are to continue his work of making God alive and real for others?

    It is precisely in our dependence on God, that we can let Jesus’ Spirit -- not political, economic, or social power -- give us God’s life to evangelize  through lives of service. And it is this same Spirit that will lead us home to God in each other’s good company.

    At the end of this Eucharist, you and I will leave this holy space. We will travel to our homes and return to our everyday spaces. Some of us will go outward to the world. As we make the travels we must to wherever we go this week, the question I think we have to answer is this: how do you and I want to spread Jesus’ message about God in our journeys of life and faith? 

    Hopefully, with a lot more Christ-like significance as Jesus teaches us today.




    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: tomales point, point reyes national park by adrian dankers, sj

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  3. Year B / Ordinary Time / Fourteenth Sunday
    Readings: Ezekiel 1.1-5 / Psalm 122. 1-2a. 2, 3-4 (R/v 2cd) / 2 Corinthians 12.7-20 / Mark 6.61-6

    Were you lucky enough to play hide-and-seek with your parents when you were young?

    I remember my siblings and I playing it with Mom and Dad every now and then. As little ones, our two-story semi-d house in Changi seemed huge: there were many places to hide. There was an air of suspense whenever we hid quietly. And when Mom and Dad found us, there was always plenty of laughter. Hide-and-seek was a delightful game to play.

    Writing in The New York Times last Tuesday, Alison Carper, a psychologist, reflected on the foundation children must have to play hide-and-seek. They will only play this game, she noted, when they have the confidence that they will be found. 

    It is not the act of being found that gives them this confidence. Rather, it is faith: faith in someone they know who will look for them because this person really wants to find them.

    Today’s gospel reading invites us to consider the kind of faith we have in God as Jesus’ followers.

    Last Sunday, we reflected on the faith the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus had in Jesus who embodied God’s healing power. Their faith moved them to reach out to Jesus for healing. Throughout the gospels, many of the sick, and those who interceded for them, did the same. We think of the blind man, Bartimaeus, the 10 lepers, the paralytic lowered through the roof, and the centurion’s servant. They came; they asked; and they let Jesus heal them in the ways he wanted to. And Jesus often said to those he healed: “your faith has saved you.”

    This evening we hear that Jesus “was not able to perform any mighty deed” in his hometown Nazareth, “apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.”

    Jesus could not perform miracles because the Nazarenes lacked faith in him as a teacher and a healer.  They did not come to him like sick with hope; they approached him scorn: “Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? … Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary?”

    Why did the Nazarenes not have faith in Jesus? Because they did not have a personal relationship with him. They knew of him; they had heard of him; they probably had seen him from time to time in Nazareth. Some of them might have remembered him as a young boy and teenager in their town. But they never were in relationship with him. 

    Faith is always founded on a relationship. We have faith in someone, never in something. Why? Because faith is rooted in trust, and trust involves care and love. The kind of care and love that enables a young child to play hide-and-seek because she knows and trusts that daddy or mommy will always find her. This is how children learn to have faith in their parents and to grow in this faith. Charity begins at home, they say. What they should add, especially, for parents is this: “teach your child to have faith in you.” When children have faith in their parents and in their love for them, they can begin to better understand what faith in God can look like.

    The Catechism teaches us that “Faith is a personal act—the free response of the human person to the initiative of God, who reveals himself” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §166).  Christian faith is founded on the interaction between ourselves and God: because this relationship is always rooted in trust and love, we become familiar with God and with God’s ways in our lives. 

    We glimpse what this familiarity can be like in a married couple; they are intimate. This is why if one says to another, “I have no faith in you any more,” and if he means it, the bond they share is temporarily or even permanently overturned. And faith is broken. 

    For John Foley, “the deepest meaning of faith is to trust in God, to let his love into us and then to respond to it. Faith is like a home in which personal relationships take place between people and God.” This is why, “If we fail in faith, how can faith save us?” he asks.

    As Christians, we come to have faith in God through Jesus. And we grow in this faith by following Jesus more closely. It follows that where our friendship with Jesus is lukewarm, our faith in God is probably lacking. This is why Jesus’ words, “Your faith has saved you” must challenge us: if the sick, the lame, the blind can come to Jesus to ask for God’s healing, what about you and me? Do we come to Jesus with as much trust and love, with as much faith in God, as they do? Or, do we ask for God’s healing in Jesus’ name with a half-hearted and shallow faith? 

    Today we see Jesus’ amazement at the Nazarenes’ lack of faith.  This is the stumbling bock Jesus is warning you and me about. Like them, we can easily forget the faith-filled familiarity of being in relationship with Jesus that is so necessary for union with God. 

    What do we forgo when we become unfamiliar with Jesus? That Jesus frees us to do two things. First, to see ourselves as we are -- always in need of God in Jesus. Second, to see Jesus as he truly is for us -- the one through whom we receive God’s gifts. 

    But Jesus never forces us to choose friendship with him, and, through him, God. He will never do this. Patiently, he only awaits us to choose him. The Nazarenes rejected Jesus. What will your choice and my choice be?

    The Christian insight to all who answer this question is this: that even if we do not choose Jesus, he will choose us. He will come and find us. We who sometimes complain that God doesn’t hear us, or answer our prayer, or seek us out in our suffering. 

    If we live lives playing hide and seek with God -- we hiding from God in our sinfulness, and God repeatedly seeking us out in mercy -- then Jesus’ appearance in Nazareth must be a hope-filled reminder for you and me. Why? Because Jesus will always find us in the most secretive places where we hide, conceal or closet ourselves from him, as he will also find us in Nazareths of our lives, those spaces we call families and friendships, work and play. 

    Jesus comes to us because he knows that deep down in each of us there is faith that God really does love and want to find us. And no matter how little this faith might be, it is for Jesus a very good reason to always look for us, and finding us, to say, “Found you!”

    Will you and I then let Jesus find us, not once but always?



    Preached at St Ignatius Church
    photo: www.news.com.au
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I hope you will find in these posts something that speaks to you of the God who loves us all and who always holds us in the palm of his hand. Blessings!
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Fall in Love, Stay in Love
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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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