1.  Year B / Holy Week / Palm Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 50.4-7 / Psalm 21.8-9, 17-18a,19-20, 23-24 (R/v 2a) / Philippians 2.6-11 / Mark 14.1-15.47

    Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.(Philippians 2.5-8)

    Here is St Paul describing Jesus’s sacrificial life. Emptying Himself, taking on human likeness, humbling Himself to die on the Cross — in all these ways Jesus revealed God’s sacrificial love for us. 

    This truth resounds in the readings of Palm Sunday and Holy Week. They draw our attention to how Jesus lived a sacrificial life for others in His preaching and teaching, His healing and forgiving, and most of all in His death on the Cross. 

    In Jesus, God reveals the purpose of human life: to live a sacrificial life as one’s total self-giving to God and one’s total service for all to have life to the full. This is how God wants you and me to live. God gave us Jesus to show us how to live, love, and serve like Him.

    We know how much we struggle to do this well. Our sinfulness is the starkest reminder we fail again and again. Every sin expresses our fault and failing to love one another. Yet, in everything we hear and see, we remember and celebrate in Holy Week, God demands that we acknowledge His sacrificial love for us, and more so, how good it is. 

    Humble self-emptying is how Jesus expressed God's sacrificial love throughout the Gospels. He constantly called his disciples to imitate his self-emptying in our lives. Today He calls us to do likewise. When we do this in our lives, we make God’s mercy come alive for others, and through such compassion for them, God saves us too. Yes, God's love saves all.

    “Isn’t loving another sacrificially about giving up, putting aside, letting go of me and my needs?” you might ask. “Doesn’t self-emptying myself lead to death, like Jesus?

    Paradoxically, there is no other way to eternal life but through death. Indeed, there is no other way to be raised into Easter life than by self-emptying and loving sacrificially and totally. This is Jesus’ way. This must be our way to imitate Jesus as His disciples. Only this way of life makes us credible to bear Jesus’ name and be called Christian.

    Doesn’t it make sense now to embrace the crosses in our lives as Jesus embraced the Cross in his life? For God works through our crosses that we can care and uplift the needy, forgive and reconcile with those hurt, and encourage and restore the outcast. Yes, even our cross to be more welcoming, accepting, and affirming of those in SJI, students and teachers, who need us to create life-giving spaces for them to be supported to learn, to be cheered on to find their voice, and to be accompanied to grow up better.

    Jesus’ Cross and our crosses are therefore not instruments of burden, pain, and death. They grace us for humble sacrifice and greater love. Ultimately, they assure us of God's redemption. 

    In Holy Week the drama of Jesus’ self-emptying will unfold. He will be betrayed and tortured. He will suffer and die. He will rise again from the dead. We will not just see and hear this played out in liturgy and sacrament, prayer and song. We will in fact participate in it and experience the sombreness of Maundy Thursday, the pain of Good Friday and the joy Easter morning brings. We will therefore move with Jesus from suffering into death and then be raised with him into resurrected life. This is the arc of our Christian life, and it leads us, like it led Jesus, to God alone.

    Today we commemorate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11.1-10). We remember how the Jews waved palms, shouted Hosannas, and threw their cloaks down before a donkey carrying Jesus to welcome him as King. Their cloaks were costly not because they were expensive but because they dignified them with wellbeing. Yet, they generously gave their own cloaks up for Jesus. 

    Jesus himself first laid down a cloak so previous, so divine, and so beautiful before us. It was a cloak He shared by being one with God. He laid it down to be one with us. That cloak was his divinity – His divinity in love for us and in love to save us for divine life. 

    What about us? What cloak of ours will we lay down to welcome Jesus as our Saviour? What self-emptying should we make?

    The best thing we can do this week is to be silent and prayerful before Jesus. As we walk with Him each day to the Cross, let us pay attention to the ways he sheds, even more, His dignity as God made man. May we then we will come to know the goodness of God’s self-emptying love to save us and all. What loving response can we make in return? Only this: to empty ourselves for God by dying with Jesus to sin and death, and, letting God raise us up with Him to the fullness of life.

    Shall we?



    Preached at SJI for the Year 5 retreat
    Photo: ncronline.org (internet) 

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  2.  

    Year B / Lent / Week 5 / Sunday
    Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34 / Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15 (R/v 12a) / Hebrews 5:7-9 / John 12:20-33


    “They will all know me, the least no less than the greatest – it is the Lord who speaks – since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.”

    These are the Lord’s hope-filled words to the people of Israel and Judah that we hear in the First Reading. Though these people broke the Lord’s earlier covenant he had given them upon freeing them from Egypt, the Lord promised them a new covenant. Such is the heart of God – mercifully caring to save His people. 

    The Lord’s promise as recounted by the Prophet Jeremiah is the assurance we need in these final weeks of Lent. We do because God, through the Church, is now inviting us to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Do we recognise God’s invitation? Do we want to reconcile?

    Some of us may fear coming to this sacrament because we judge our sins are too grievous for God to forgive. Some may be ashamed to confess the same sins again. Some, disappointed that our Lenten efforts are dismal or nought, may choose to wait for a later time. For others, past hurts experienced during Confession make it too painful to come again. Whatever our fears, shame or hurts are, God is longing for reconciliation. God simply desires to forgive us, love us into His life again, and live with us all the days of our lives. It is good to remember that “there is no person who is beyond recovery, no-one is beyond recovery. Because God never ceases to want what is good for us, even when we sin!“ (Pope Francis, Angelus, September 11, 2016).

    “Deep within them, I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts.” The Lord says this today not only to Jeremiah and the Israelites but to us. We know this Law of the Lord. It is Love. It is written in our hearts. It gives us the confidence to come to Confession. Many of us believe God’s love will forgive us without reservation. Yet we struggle to come to Confession.

    We have all experienced God’s mercy to forgive in Confession. We also know it to be true in our prayer and worship. Consider how we experience this especially in the Eucharist that all of us come to every Sunday.

    It begins with the Penitential Rite. We acknowledge God’s mercy that forgives our sins. His mercy makes us worthy to enter the sacred mystery of the Eucharist and to celebrate it as God’s own – redeemed and beloved. 

    In the Liturgy of the Word, the readings constantly remind us of God’s forgiving love and our need for it. “Create a pure heart in us,” we pray in the Responsorial Psalm today and we are consoled in the Second Reading that God’s mercy in Jesus — through his prayer and entreaty to God, his submission and self-sacrifice to God’s will — saved us for eternal life. In the Prayers of the Faithful, we humbly acknowledge our need for God as sinners.

    In the Communion Rite,  we are especially reminded of how merciful God is to us. We all pray at the Our Father, that God “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” No matter how forgiving we are or are not, we know in our hearts that we come before God as sinners in need of mercy. This is why we pray with the priest that God “Look not upon our sins, but on the faith of your church,” before we exchange the Sign of Peace. This is why we chant “Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” This is why even the priest asks for God’s mercy before Communion: “by your most holy Body and Blood, free me from all my sins.”

    We all desire God’s forgiveness because we believe it heals. We confess this belief in our response to the priest lifting up the body and blood of Christ and saying, “behold him who takes away the sins of the world.” Our response is the most human way we can acknowledge God: in humility and honesty, we admit that although we are unworthy, the word of God will heal us. At Communion, we receive Jesus, the Word of God, literally into our bodies and our hearts to be transformed anew as God’s creation even though we have sinned.

    Who is this God who blesses us at each Eucharist, Sunday after Sunday, Mass after Mass, with the graced experience of being forgiven in God’s mercy, embraced back into God’s life, nourished with God's Word, and transformed again to be God’s new creation? A God who loves us as his own. 

    A God who is also faithful. Once in ancient times, God kept his promise to Jeremiah and the Israelites. At every Eucharist we participate, God keeps this same promise by making real and true these words He once said: “I will be their God and they shall be my people…and I will remember your sin no more.” (Jer 30:34). 

    If this is our God, isn’t it time to reconcile with God?




    Inspired and adapted from the writings of Fr John F. Kavanaugh, SJ

    Photo: diocese of Raleigh (internet)
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  3. Year B / Lent / Week 4 / Sunday
    Readings: 2 Chronicles 36.14-16, 19-23 / Psalm 136.1-2, 3, 4-5, 6 (R/v 6b) / Ephesians 2.4-10 / John 3.14-21


    “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

    John the Evangelist records Jesus speaking these words to his disciples. Today they are meant for us as we continue our Lenten journey.  They demand we look up – up to the Cross.

    Christians know the cross no longer expresses torture and death. It symbolizes God’s sacrificial love in Jesus on the Cross. By dying for us, he makes God’s promise to save us and give us eternal life real. This is why we can hope in the Cross. 

    Today, Jesus is directing our gaze to this sight of love divine, of love excelling every human need, imagination or hope, and yes, of God’s fidelity and love that is indeed ours to have and to hold. We have every right to rejoice each time we look at the Cross. Such delight, the Church insists, is the right attitude for us to approach Good Friday. In the face of evil and suffering, betrayal and death that is Jesus’s passion, we can look up from these to the glory of God’s abiding goodness on the Cross – in the person of Jesus.

    Looking up also matters at this halfway mark in Lent. Many of us may have spent much time and effort thus far focusing on our unworthiness. We might have because we have come to know our sins and our sinfulness more honestly. We might also do because we are more ashamed for our lukewarm and half-hearted Lenten efforts.

    Today Jesus demands we look up and see God’s saving love for us. We do not see it in the brass serpent Moses lifted up for the Israelites to look at and be healed in the wilderness. We look up to see no other than Jesus on the Cross. In Him alone we know God and recognise the depth of this truth at the heart of Christianity: “For God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son so that everyone who believes might not perish but might have eternal life” (John 3.16)

    Yet, don’t we all find it difficult to hear, welcome and accept this Good News of God’s salvation when we are in sin? Don’t we tend to bluff ourselves that we are sinful and cannot get out of the cycle of making selfish decisions, practising bad habits, and wallowing in sin’s darkness? This is how evil grips us to itself like it did on the people of Judah in the First Reading: they committed iniquity upon iniquity, sin upon sin. Such sinful action keeps us apart from God.

    Yet God wants to be one with us. God does this with mercy. We know this mercy. It is not information in our heads. It is a fact in our hearts. We have all experienced God’s mercy each time we go to Confession, every time we are forgiven by family or friends, and all the time that we come to Eucharist. Indeed God’s mercy is rich, lavish and boundless because of his great love for us, St Paul proclaims, for “even when we were dead in our transgressions,” He brings us to life with Jesus (Ephesians 2.4-6).

    If we can confess this truth, particularly in our sinfulness, we take that crucial first step again in repentance. A first step, a second step, more steps. Slowly they move us onward in conversion. Each step, in turn, deepens our belief in God’s great love for us and our salvation.

    Indeed, this is a very good reason for us to keep looking up in the remaining weeks of Lent. Looking up to the Cross, and through it to the promise of Easter. Looking up beyond these to Jesus himself in whom, through whom and with whom we see God. In Jesus then we come to appreciate and know how worthy we are to God who simply wants to love and save us as His beloved. 

    Indeed, today’s readings announce Good News. They proclaim that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that has prepared in advance, that we should live them” (Ephesians 2.10).  Is there any reason then for us to ever forget God or remain silent with no praise today and every day?



    Preached at the SJI Catholic Retreat
    photo: www.lordsguidance.com (Internet)

     

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  4. Year B / Lent / 3rd Sunday
    Readings: Exodus 20:1-17/ Responsorial Psalm: 19:8, 9, 10, 11 (R/v John 6.68c) / 1 Corinthians 1:22-25 / John 2:13-25


    ‘Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market.’

    These are harsh words Jesus speaks. They are his lament, filled with dismay and anger, at how the Temple, God’s dwelling place, has become a marketplace. He drives out the traders, scatters the coins, and overturns tables of goods for sale. 

    We might look at this scene and think of it as another story about Jesus, one that disturbs us because this is not the kind of Jesus we are familiar with – a loving friend and an encouraging teacher. If we do not pay attention to it, we would foolishly lose out on the gift being offered. Today’s Gospel reading is another grace Lent is offering us for conversion.  

    St Paul teaches that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in us, whom we have from God (1 Corinthians 6.19). I believe we all know this as Christians. Our everyday choices and practices however may corrupt our bodies as God’s temple. Consider our bad habits, sinful addictions, hurtful actions towards others, and failings to live in God’s ways. Don’t these make our lives soiled, stained, and spoilt – much like the marketplace in today’s gospel story than the holy temple God wants to inhabit? We know how the poor choices we make keep us away from God, as they also make us and our lives unattractive to others, like the Temple turned into a marketplace where worshippers cannot find God anymore.

    All of us, myself included, need to hear Jesus’ strong words and witness his tough actions. We know how messy our lives can be, like the marketplace Jesus encounters. His words and actions in today’s gospel reading are the grace we need to clear out the messiness of sin, overturn the soiled tables of addiction, and throw out our lukewarm discipleship. 

    If we are really open to encountering Jesus in this way it will be painful. Yet this comes with a promise we know from the many times we have had those ‘no pain, no gain’ experiences. What will we gain? The spiritual right to celebrate The Saving Mystery of Life which is our rightful focus from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday.

    “Take this out of here,” Jesus demands the traders and money-changers do. Hearing this, I wonder if we will readily clear out the cluttered, sin-filled mess that is our lives and open ourselves even more to Him this Lent. Maybe if we do, we can stop and listen to Him who is God’s Word that gives us life. If we don’t, the pressures of life can have a hold on us; they can lead us far from life with God.

    To really let Jesus come and dwell within us as God’s Word we must humble ourselves. Instead of asking for signs to help us prove God, we need to turn to Jesus himself as our crucified Christ, as St Paul reminds us today. For in Him, particularly, through his death and resurrection we come to know the wisdom and strength of the God of life for us, not the foolishness of his death.

    Yes, in Him alone we experience the immense love of God for you and me. This is why we can believe in Jesus. The theologian Hans Urs von Bathasar writes that gratitude moves us to believe in God. Indeed Jesus's saving action, including his words and actions today, is a good reason for us to embrace conversion. This is why we should make our lives less the marketplace it can easily become and more a home for God and God’s Word to abide in us.

    Let us do this, shall we?



    photo: thenivbible.com(internet)
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  5.  
    This homily was preached at the Courage Ministry's Retreat for Men (26 to 28 February 2021)

    Year B / Lent / 2nd Sunday
    Readings: Genesis 22.1-2, 91, 10-13, 15-18 / Psalm 116.10, 15, 16-17, 18-19 (R/v 116.9) / Romans 8.31b-34 / Mark 9.2-10


    “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to Him.”

    Here is God speaking to Peter, James and John after they experienced Jesus’ transfiguration. God’s words must have consoled and assured them about who Jesus is in the revelation they witnessed – he is their teacher and friend and indeed the Christ. He is God’s anointed one, with them and for them. God’s words must therefore have been significant and meaningful for them.

    God’s words must also be so for Christians in Lent.  Today, they remind us to focus our gaze especially on Jesus who through his death and resurrection saves us for life with God. He is our Saviour. 

    God’s words are indeed equally significant and meaningful for us this weekend at our Courage Retreat. Like the apostles, we have climbed up to this place to pray.  In prayer, we recognise Jesus as God’s beloved Son and the goodness of his work that proclaims God’s love.  Through prayer, we come to know Jesus's singular desire to saturate our lives with the fullness of God’s love and life. Indeed, Jesus’ transfiguration is not words we read about or we hear proclaimed. It is in fact our very own experience of being with Jesus in this retreat as our Christ and savouring God’s goodness in him.

    On the mountain, at the Transfiguration, the apostles experienced an ‘a-ha’ moment. With eyes of faith, they recognised Jesus as God’s Beloved Son sent to save the world. They also began to grow in awareness of who they truly were to Jesus — his friends — and what their lives were really for — loving service for all in God’s ways. Now it makes sense why Jesus makes this assurance at the Last Supper:  “I call you friends, no slaves, because everything I have learned from my Father God, I have made known to you” (John 15.15).   

    Isn’t this also our experience during this retreat? Of Jesus revealing more to us of himself as Our Saviour? And also of our worthiness to be his friend and disciple, no matter our failings and sinfulness? 

    Lent calls us to repentance and conversion. Simply put, it invites us to transform our lives. We might think that ‘carpe diem’ (seize the day) is the right disposition we need to do this. Transformation, we think, depends solely on us and our efforts. This is false. It only bluffs us into making ourselves the saviour of our lives. 

    Christian faith offers us a more humble and grace-filled perspective. It acknowledges God’s action in bringing about our transformation. We hear an echo of this in Richard Linklater’s film, Boyhood, when the main character, Mason Evan Junior says, “let the day seize us and move us on its ebb and tide.” Wise words: they should remind us that we live and move and have our being in God. If we really want to be transformed, we must give God permission to help us do this. Repentance, conversion and transformation are first and foremost God’s work. Our role is to cooperate.

    A constant theme in our retreat is letting God seize us and move us in his ways. This is how we become saturated with the life of God in us.  Our lives will be like this when we seriously meditate on the ways Jesus lived his life as God’s Son among God’s people. For many in the apostles’ time, and for us today, Jesus is the way, the truth and life for all to be one with God and live as his disciples to serve everyone.

    This is why God’s declaration that Jesus is his Son, the Beloved, matters. God points us to imitate Jesus. This is also why God’s command that we listen to Jesus matters. He wants us to let Jesus’s words inhabit our hearts to give us life and be our guide.

    Last Sunday, Jesus insists that the time of fulfilment is now. This is the time for us to change and turn our lives around and live in God’s ways again. Today’s gospel reading explains this urgency: Jesus’ transfiguration promises that our human lives, however, broken and soiled they are, will be transformed into better by Jesus. His death and resurrection transfigure us to become God’s new creation. This is the Good News Lent keeps heralding through its readings and the Easter dawn it keeps focusing our gaze upon. 

    As men with same-sex attraction, it can be challenging to say, “yes” to surrendering control and letting God lead and transform. But God has a plan for good, and it is far better than we can ever imagine it to be. Abraham discovered this truth when he climbed up the mountain to sacrifice Isaac. Grappling with obeying God and loving his son, Abraham was anguished, anxious, and afraid. Yet he trusted God and only desired to do God’s will. And God seeing Abraham’s trust met him in loving assurance. Isaac was spared for God provided a ram for the sacrifice instead.

    Today, God makes the same invitation to you and me to trust him and his plan for us. God will transform us this Lent. He will do this especially on this hilltop of our retreat here. God desires nothing less than to transform us to be with his beloved Son, Jesus, to listen to him and to bring about His reign on earth.

    Will you and I let God transfigure us for his plan and his pleasure?



    Preached at the 2021 Courage Retreat for men 
    photo: rnli.org (internet)
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"Bukas Palad"
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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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