bukas palad: February 2021

Year B / Lent / Week 1 / Sunday

Readings: Genesis 9:8-15/ Responsorial Psalm: 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9 (R/v cf 10) / 1 Peter 3:18-22/ Mark 1:12-15

“I establish my Covenant with you… There shall be no flood to destroy the earth again.”

Here is God promising Noah and his sons that He would never again destroy anything He created. This is Good News. We need to hear this loud and clear now. It matters because we are making our Lenten observances amidst continuing contagion and sickness, uncertainty and fear.

Those battling floods and struggling through deserts have similar experiences. Many fear floodwaters overwhelming and drowning us. Many fear getting lost in deserts and suffering dehydration. We pray not to experience these.

Today’s readings however invite us into these very experiences of dread, particularly of death we cannot escape. Such is how human life ends.

Yet God is with us in life. Noah, his family, the animals on the Ark struggled through the Great Flood and its devastation. Its waters stripped everything away. They still experienced God’s fidelity and care. After the flood, God expressed this love fully in the covenant He made – never to destroy life again.

And God keeps his promise using water itself. Water gives life and sustains it. It purifies, cleans, and refreshes. “The rains are showers of blessings,” we say.

Scripture and liturgy remind us how true this grace is in Baptism. Jesus submerged himself in the water at his own baptism and rose from it. He did not drown; he lived. We celebrate this truth with every baptism.

Jesus’s action also prefigures the Paschal Mystery Lent prepares us for. Jesus entered into suffering and death on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and through it, he rose to life again at Easter. We participate in this same movement with Jesus on those holy days. This should remind us that God’s covenant is true. Death, where is your sting? Truly, life in God abounds.

Going through to the other side helps one survive the desert. Death comes to those who stand still. One needs to find water and a path out.

Scripture tells of the Hebrews who spent 40 years in the desert. After being led out of Egypt, they had to make it through the desert to get to the Promised Land. They had to keep on moving forward to get to this other side and life there. Through it all, God kept faith with them: He led, nourished, and protected them to arrive there.

In today’s gospel reading, God’s Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. There he was with the wild beasts. He prayed, fasted, and prepared for ministry. There he was tempted by Satan and overcame him. There he was looked after by angels. Through it all, God remained faithful and present in Jesus’s life.

What if God is inviting us this Lent to enter into the wilderness of our lives – into those spaces of spiritual emptiness, of sinful habits, of needed conversion — to meet him there? Will we trust God and enter — not just to repent and change our lives but to let God really love us first of all?

Floods. Deserts. A Pandemic. Each a space of dread and death. Each also real in our everyday life. Like facing floods, we may be drowning in work, stress, and anxiety. Like getting lost in deserts, we may be parched of prayer and dried up without enough generosity to share and care. Like struggling with this pandemic, we may be infected with sinful habits and addictions.

Will we enter these spaces in our lives this Lent — to stare death itself in the face – and to pass through them, transformed, to Easter on the other side?

We can for it is Jesus himself who makes this invitation. Let us permit him to lead us onward because, as Paul teaches, he has taken on our sins, wrestled with evil and death, and overcoming them, he has gained for us the fullness of life with God.

Indeed, “the time has come,” Jesus says. We should heed his call today. All Jesus wants is to walk with us into these spaces and get us through to God’s side.

Will we let Jesus?

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
Photo: ‘crossing the bay of mont saint-michel, normandy’ by thierry seni

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 6 / Sunday

Readings: Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46 / Responsorial Psalm: 32:1-2, 5, 11 (R/v 7) / 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1 / Mark 1:40-45

"Of course I want to!" he said. "Be cured!"

Here is Jesus curing the leper immediately after his plea. Jewish law demands that lepers dwell apart but Jesus reaches out, touches this man, and restores him to the community. Jesus’ action reveals God’s saving love to the leper. It proclaims God’s love for all, including outcasts. This is today’s Good News.

In the Gospels, the sick, the downtrodden, and the discriminated like the leper want Jesus’ healing. With compassion, Jesus looks beyond the diseased surface of the leper’s body. With love, he sees deeper into the person this leper is — made truly in God’s image. This is why he heals and saves the leper. This is today’s Gospel story.

We live in a world with many narratives that tell another story about why and how these people are side-lined and excluded. They look different, and so, the thinking is that they must be intrinsically different. Collectively these narratives stereotype people who are different as outcasts. Some of these include people of other faiths and cultures, the disabled and aged, foreign workers and immigrants, criminals and prostitutes, homosexuals and transgender people, and always the poor and uneducated. Sometimes, these outcasts are our own family.

Many in society and some in Church fear these people and the difference they embody. These are today’s outcasts. These are lepers, they self-righteously identify. These can contaminate us, they narrow-mindedly claim. These are unclean and must dwell apart, they prejudicially insist. Today Jesus’s action of healing the leper reminds us how wrong and unjust these attitudes and actions can be.

Yet isn’t this our own, shameful narrative sometimes? “They are the bad ones,” we say, quickly with our judgment, fast with our condemnation. But did we reach out to understand them and their struggles? Where is our empathy?

We think and act like this, I suspect because these narratives insist that looks matter. What counts as valuable in our society is looking good, looking right, and looking like everyone else. If we are fixated on looks, my question is: what about our beliefs as Christians — that God created everyone in his image, all are welcomed, and Jesus saves everyone?

To many, you and I appear normal. We do not look like those outcasts. We look good, successful and Christian. But let’s be honest: it’s only the surface of who and what we are that others see. We know our inner defects and bad habits. We struggle with our addictions and sinful ways. We hide our failures, jealousies and fakery. We cover up all these and pretend we are unlike the outcasts.

If we are humble enough, we know we are like these so-called outcasts. We need healing too — like the leper who suffers and those who condemn others as outcasts.

Today’s gospel then invites us to enter the mystery of our own defects and disabilities, hidden or otherwise. It really invites us to make the prayer of the leper our own. ‘If you want to, you can cure me.” When we admit our need for Jesus’ healing, we take that necessary step towards transformation.

Isn’t our desire to be transformed for better why we come to Eucharist? Not because it is Sunday obligation. Rather, as St Augustine teaches, we come to “Believe what we see, see what we believe and become what we are: the Body of Christ."

If this is your reason for coming today, then, this prayer we recite at every Mass before Communion can come alive: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” Indeed, all who come to Jesus will be transformed.

In faith, we know Jesus will always heal us. His action encourages us to no longer fear the visibly different and outcast amongst us. Instead, Jesus’s healing, especially in Communion, empowers us to look again at those we label outcast, leper and other, and see them more clearly as one like us, God’s own. Then, our hearts will be moved to reach out and heal them. Indeed, they are patiently waiting for us to reveal Jesus’ compassion. They are straining to hear in our words and see in our actions that care, this hope Jesus promises coming to life for them, “Of course I want to. Be cured!”

Who should we reach out to today and heal with Jesus’s help?

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: gulfnews.com

bukas palad

with open hands, we give what we have first received. and with open hands, we receive what we will divest, once again. this is blessing itself: the giving and receiving of life and love, the sharing of faith and God.

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