Year B / Ordinary Time / Thanksgiving Mass for School Year 2021
Reading: Jeremiah 31:7-9 / Psalm 34 / Mark 10:46-52
“I will always thank the Lord, I will praise God’s name” (Psalm 34.1).
This refrain from our Responsorial Psalm expresses our reason for today’s Thanksgiving Assembly. To thank God for this school year. In the Catholic faith, Mass is also called Eucharist. Eucharist means thanksgiving in Greek. It is therefore good and right that we begin our Thanksgiving in God’s holy presence.
What can we thank and praise God for?
We might struggle to do this in this pandemic year. This isn’t the school year we had hoped for. We still wear masks. We still keep a safe distance from each other. We still can’t camp or have school trips overseas. Recess is in classrooms. Some fell sick. Some were mandated to stay at home because of Covid, and missed exams. Many struggled. All of us feel tired, even overwhelmed, and may be anxious about next year.
But haven’t we been blessed too? Like these ways. Passing exams and being promoted. Getting a good grade for projects and papers. Winning those games and competitions we could take part in. Celebrating still our school events even via zoom. Gathering every morning for prayer and assembly. Being surprised now and again with Ice Cream Day and National Day breakfasts. And yes, for having good friends and teachers, faithful colleagues, and loving families who helped us get through this year.
Yes, all these are good reasons to give thanks. And so is the hope of a new year to come, our 170th as St Joseph’s Institution (SJI).
Our readings speak about difficult, challenging, even painful experiences. The Israelites are in exile in the first reading. Bartimaeus is struggling with blindness in the gospel reading. These readings also reveal God’s saving action. God reached out to gather the Israelites back as a nation. Jesus healed Bartimaeus and he could see.
Hasn’t God also reached out and saved us this year? In moments when we faltered and failed because we were weak? On days when everything seemed to go wrong? When difficult people pained and hurt us repeatedly?
It is always easy to celebrate God’s goodness in our successes and progress, in what we have done right, in how others treat us well, forgive us for our mistakes and give us a second chance. We delight in this goodness. And saying ‘thank you, God’ is easy.
But as we look back on this year, can we see God's goodness in our weaknesses and limitations, our mistakes and faults, even our sinfulness, and still give thanks? Maybe we can if we begin to see how we have grown up, become better, matured in wisdom, and allowed ourselves to be more compassionate and selfless this school year.
This growing up and becoming a better person is how God has made us whole and good. For St John Baptist de la Salle, making us whole and good is how God saves us in everyday life.
Three questions can help us appreciate how God did this for us.
First, were we weak enough to recognize our need for God?
If we did, were we surprised that God came to us repeatedly to be with us and to labour for our wellbeing and happiness? If our answer is ‘yes,’ then we have learned that our weakness is grace. Weakness is the very space God labours in us to make us better persons.
Isn’t this how we’ve learned from our weaknesses and mistakes throughout this year? Truly God cared for us.
Second, were we broken enough to let God shape us to serve others?
We come to school to learn and grow up. School helps us do this in a special way: by breaking, shaping, and forming us anew to become the persons God wants us to become -- always better than we are. School is the right place for this. Here we are broken of our small-mindedness and arrogance, of our selfishness and individualism, of our hard-heartedness and fixed mindsets.
Broken again and again so that we can become learners who are friends, teachers who accompany selflessly, and a community who cares for each other as brothers and sisters. Ultimately we are broken to become like Jesus. In the Catholic faith, Jesus in the Eucharist is God’s bread blessed, broken and given to transform many lives for good.
Whether we are Catholics or not, didn’t God break us in order to use us this year to help others become better, live life happier, and care for them so that together we all have made it across this school year’s finishing line?
Third, were we brave enough to let God open our eyes like Bartimaeus and to follow Jesus’s way?
Jesus cured Bartimaeus’ blindness. Through this year, I believe God ‘cured’ us too of the different ways we are blind. Blind to learning new things. Blind to caring more selflessly for others. Blind to contributing to others because we prefer grabbing from them. Blind even to our giftedness and potential to be the best whenever we choose mediocrity and the same old, same old. Yes, haven’t we been ‘healed’ in some way this school year?
Doesn’t this healing make us braver to live more in Jesus’ way of loving all and serving everyone? If we are, then we will begin school next year more grown-up, more sensitive to those in need, more open to being friends, and more hopeful to becoming a stronger SJI community.
Yes, did we allow God to meet us in our weakness, brokenness and need to be brave this school year?
If we did, can we now marvel at how good God was and is in caring for everyone in SJI, teacher and student alike? Doing all this to really prepare us to celebrate our 170th year with fresh eyes. To look forward, no more backward, to the promise of all that God wants to bless us and bless SJI with.
If you ask me, God’s good work in our lives and in SJI is the miracle we must give thanks for this year. God’s good work to come in our 170th year is also worth our thanks and praise ahead of time. This is a startling way to believe and live in God – ahead of time, expectant of God’s future good for us. This is a blessed way to live. Let pray and make this our SJI way forward.
Why would God do all this? So that we can share in the same family resemblance we have. You and I know it by the common name we bear – Josephian.
Such is the love of God for you and me. Strong in our weakness. Providential in our challenges. Faithful in enabling us to grow up and be better always. This is God’s love for us now and always.
Yes, this is why we have much to be thankful for as this school year ends in SJI. Thankful for what we received. But thankful even more for God in whose holy presence we abide.
Amen.
Peached at SJI
photo by adrian danker, sj, september 2019
Add a comment