bukas palad: June 2021

Jun

27

Homily: Restore

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 13 / Sunday
Readings: Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24/ Psalm: 30:2, 4, 5-6, 11, 12, 13 (R/v 2a) / 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15 / Mark 5:21-43

“To be – for this he created all” (Wisdom 1.14)

To be alive. To be filled with life. To be able to share life. For this, God created all. This is the Good News we need to hear, particularly at this pandemic time. It resounds throughout today’s readings. We can indeed rejoice because “God did make man imperishable, he made him in the image of his own nature” (Wisdom 2.23). Yes, God created us for life.

Yet there are times when we experience lifelessness. Be it suffering or despair, confusion or disappointment, hurt or depression, and mostly when we sin, we know we are not fully alive – not really living as God would like us to.

The women in today’s Gospel reading remind us of this. Life is flowing out of the haemorrhaging woman's body. Life has gone out of the body of Jairus's daughter.

Yet, there is faith that life is indeed for them. The haemorrhaging woman reaches out to Jesus. Jairus comes to Jesus for his daughter. In response to their faith in him, power goes out of Jesus’s body, restoring them to life.

We resonate with both stories. We know God bestows life. We believe Jesus’ healing and forgiving actions gave life. Every day, we experience Jesus’s Spirit enabling us to live as God’s own. Even our desire to seek life and our struggle to stay alive is the blessed assurance that we are meant to live.

Isn’t this why we come to Eucharist to be fed and go to Confession to be forgiven? Isn’t this why many advocate for life, be it to save the unborn, protest against war and terrorism, fight unjust discrimination and demand the death penalty ends? Indeed, God commands that everyone should have life to the full.

Do we value God’s gift of life seriously? Maybe we don’t sufficiently because we are too comfortable with the goodness of Jesus as Saviour in our own lives. This is the maintenance attitude some of us have, and all of us also sometimes have.

We forget Jesus’s teaching: that God gives life. This should embolden us to make life better for ourselves and for all. The Samaritan woman realized this when she recognised Jesus as Saviour and proclaimed Jesus to all (John 4.4-42).

In seeking Jesus, Jairus and the sick woman should challenge us to live fully. They are not Jesus’s disciples. Yet they have faith in Jesus to heal and trust he will restore life. And Jesus does. Is our faith as strong and bold as theirs?

For Pope Francis, Jesus’ life-giving actions for the women teach that “no one should feel as an intruder, an interloper or one who has no right. To have access … to Jesus’ heart, there is only one requirement: to feel in need of healing and to entrust yourself to him” (Angelus, 1 July 2018).

Indeed, Christians must entrust ourselves to Jesus who shows us how to care for the life of others and Creation. Then what we hear today will flourish – that God created all things to exist and they are wholesome (Wisdom 1.14).

Christians have an obligation to care for all creation and everyone responsibly, especially those in need. Sharing what we have with those who have not is one way to care. For St Paul, in the second reading, this is how we strike a balance in society: everyone will have enough to live as God intends – saved, loved, redeemed.

Mercy must be our uniquely Christian way to do this. This can be challenging. As challenging as the demand this poem entitled “Advice to clergy; note to self” makes. It is for me, as I hope it will be for you, a good reminder that what we preach or pray for, we should not do so in words but really in deeds. Listen:

Today is World Refugee Day
If you are preaching … David,
do not forget his great grandma.

If you are preaching sea storms,
do forget those
who are facing rough crossings
and overfilled boats.

If you mention how the US
loves its Father’s Day,
do not forget families
broken at its southern border.

If you pray … well anything,
do not forget, ‘on earth
as it is in heaven.’

Indeed, the promised life in heaven is what Jesus made real on earth for all. As Jesus’s disciples, this is our task for everyone. It begins by letting Jesus take our hand to give us life like he did with the little girl.

Do we have the faith to touch and be touched by Jesus, and let him restore in us whatever is dead to life?

Preached at St Ignatius Church
photo: www.healthline.com (Internet)

Posted 27th June 2021 by adrian danker

Labels: Breaking Open God's Word

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Jun

12

Homily: How It Is

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 11/ Sunday
Readings: Ezekiel 17.22-24 / Psalm 91.2-3, 13-14, 15-16 (cf. 2a) / 2 Corinthians 5.6-10 / Mark 4.26-34

“This is how it is...”
Jesus would begin today’s gospel story with this phrase if we were reading it from my favourite translation.

We often react to the phrase “This is how it is” with a shrug of the shoulder, a sigh of resignation, an air of acquiescence. There’s a sense that things are just the way they are, nothing will change.

But Jesus uses this phrase in a refreshing way. He invites us to appreciate the kingdom of God anew in our lives, and, more so, God’s action that makes this possible. “This is how it is,” Jesus says, “with the kingdom of God.”

Jesus describes the kingdom of God in many ways. It is like a hidden treasure in a field that one finds or a fine pearl that one sacrifices everything for (Matthew 13.44-46). It is like a net cast into the sea only to catch all kinds of fish (Matthew 13.47). It is like a wedding feast that a king calls everyone to when his guests refused to come (Matthew 22.2-14).

Today Jesus compares God’s kingdom to seeds growing, grain harvested, and plants sheltering. Using two parables, He teaches us that God’s kingdom is possible when our work cooperates with God’s work.

A man plants the seeds and God’s action gives life, nurtures growth, and produces fruit. As people of faith, this is surely the Good News that God’s kingdom is assured – the scattered seed will yield a rich harvest and a tiny seed will grow into the largest plant. This is how it is – really is with God! We give our best. God will do the rest. And it will be very good.

Indeed everything God does is to bring forth life. This is not a promise to know now or wait for at a future time. This is God’s action, here and now, like when He plants the cedar on the mountain and creates a forest in the First Reading: “As I, the Lord, have spoken, I will do” (Ezekiel 17.24).

On earth, Jesus made God’s kingdom visible and fruitful to everyone He encountered. In everything He said and did, He revealed God and God’s goodness in their midst. This experience must have impacted John the Evangelist so profoundly that he proclaimed: “From His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” (John 1.16). Aren’t we receiving these same graces today? Isn’t Jesus’s Spirit labouring for our good?

Our simple successes each day and the big ones now and again are possible when we cooperate with others. Imagine how much more God’s kingdom can be in our midst if we really cooperate with God? Bringing God's kingdom to life is first of all God’s work. Our task is to reveal God to one another in loving, forgiving, reconciling, and sharing life. God chooses us for this. Are you astounded?

Jesus tells parables to everyone; not all understand. To his disciples, he explains everything. Like them, Jesus’s Spirit works in us through the catechism we learn, the spiritual reading we do, and the scripture we pray to learn the deeper meaning of the parables. They are not lovely stories of birds, plants, and nature. They are to challenge us to wrestle with the demands of God’s kingdom – to conversion, to following Jesus, to make God’s kingdom visible and alive.

The problem is that we sometimes hear Jesus’s parables and say, “this is how it is.” When we do, the message remains the same old one. We act like the ignorant and stubborn. When we proudly assert we know the Scriptures better than others, our interpretations become self-righteous and rigid. We live like the arrogant and domineering. When we claim we have discerned their meaning but live without listening, dialoguing and caring like Jesus, the parables remain just words, not God’s life-giving Word. We become hard-hearted and foolish.

Today Jesus confronts us who are too familiar with the parables. He demands we open our ears to hear anew, our eyes to see afresh, our hearts to experience and know yet again what he is really proclaiming – that with everything in our lives, God’s ways are not our ways, and they are indeed for our good. This is how it must be for anyone professing himself a Christian.

Do we dare live in God’s ways?

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo by Kylo on Unsplash

Posted 12th June 2021 by adrian danker

Labels: Breaking Open God's Word

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Jun

6

Homily: For Life

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 10/ Solemnity of Corpus Christi
Readings: Exodus 24.3-8 / Psalm 115.12-13, 15, 16bc, 17-18 (R/v 13) / Hebrews 9.11-15 / Mark 14.12-16, 22-16

“Take, eat, this is my body. Take, drink, this is my blood.”
These are Jesus’ words and actions in the Gospel reading. They are not just a remembrance for us. They come alive at every Eucharist and we partake of them.

Indeed when we take and eat and drink we are proclaiming loud and clear what the Israelites said to Moses: “We will observe all that the Lord has decreed; we will obey.” Indeed we must because every Eucharist celebrates the gift of God’s own self – Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross makes this gift possible. He lived and loved sacrificially because he trusted God completely. Participating in Jesus’s sacrifice at the Eucharist allows us to trust God like Jesus did.

We need to trust like this because we are prone to sin even as we aspire to be saints. St. Paul reminds the Romans that “Where sin has increased, grace has abounded all the more” (Romans 5.20). Have we not experienced this redeeming love of God in the Eucharist? “The Eucharist,” Pope Francis says, “is not only a reward for the good but also the strength for the weak and for sinners. It is forgiveness and sustenance which help us on our journey.”*

Scripture is filled with stories of God accomplishing His loving plans even when humankind failed to trust Him. God brought the Jewish people to the Promised Land in spite of their failings. The risen Jesus returned to love his disciples even when they failed him and fled. Hasn’t the Lord been keeping an eye on us to save us no matter how many wrong turns we’ve made in life?

Mercy sums up God’s actions in these stories. Mercy is God’s singular desire to never allow us to be satisfied with anything less than Himself.

Maybe this is what Jesus learned when he fed the people with five loaves and two fish. It is never enough to feed them, even with abundance. Indeed, bread is not enough. What they needed, like we need, is Jesus himself. Jesus who is God’s word to fill our minds. Jesus who is God’s bread to nourish our bodies. Jesus who is God for us because no one can do without God for life.

I imagine this is how Jesus probably came to understand himself as bread, for he knows he is indispensable for us. "I am the living bread that came down from heaven,’ Jesus proclaims, “whoever eats this bread will live forever” (John 6.51).

Bread becomes food when it dissolves in us to nourish. It becomes one with us. In Communion, Jesus invites us to make real in our lives what he himself did on the Cross – give everything, all that he is, to everyone. When we do, we can give ourselves to all, including those who hurt us and we have hurt. And we can do this like Jesus is for us – as bread broken to give life.

Isn’t selfless self-giving what lovers do? Loving totally to give all of themselves to the other. If you and I want to love like this, there is a cost: it will be our complete surrendering, our entire undoing, our total disappearance into the other. We will no longer be ourselves; we will be one with the other.

Indeed Eucharist accomplishes this for each of us, as Jesus does by giving himself to us. Listen:
On the Feast of Corpus Christi, in a small village in Germany, a priest carried the monstrance with the sacred Host in procession. Little girls tossed flowers; there was endless singing and clouds of incense. The next morning a young reporter from the local newspaper interviewed the priest. "Why Father," he asked, "were you carrying that beautiful little mirror through the streets yesterday? What was the significance?" The priest explained: “not a mirror at all, but perhaps the Mirror we need. The fragile, sacred Bread is truly God who mirrrors for each of us how we can see one another and ourselves – fragile, vulnerable, and truly worthy of reverence by one another.”
Today, we receive Jesus in communion and know his love. Then with Jesus, who should we give ourselves to for them to also savour God’s love?

*Address to the 2015 Indian National Eucharistic Congress

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: philippe lissac (internet: alethia.org)

Posted 6th June 2021 by adrian danker

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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.

Homily: Restore

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Homily: How It Is

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Homily: For Life

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