Follow Me

Reflection on Gospel of Luke 9:51-62

In many respects Jesus was like the other rabbis of his time in Palestine. But In many other respects, he was totally unlike them. One clear difference between Jesus and the other rabbi was in the way he recruited his disciples. In those days, if anyone wanted to be a disciple of any rabbi, he simply applied to him. In other words, the disciple chose his own rabbi. The very opposite was the case with Jesus. His disciples did not choose him; he chose them. And that is just what he said in John 15: 16: "You did not choose me, no, I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last…"

We see that clearly demonstrated in our Gospel passage of today. One man said to Jesus, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus did not want that man to follow him, and so he tactfully fenced him off with the excuse that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

But the same Jesus wanted two other men to follow him. So he called them to do just that. When they tried to make their own excuses, he would have none of it. He told them to simply drop whatever other agenda they had, and follow him. The meaning of that is that the following of Jesus does not admit of any excuses; it demands total commitment. It is not possible to follow Jesus by half measures; it is all or nothing. That is exactly what first disciples of Jesus did, when they left everything and followed him" (Luke 5: 11).

The Christian life is a call to discipleship, a call to follow Jesus. All of us who are baptised are beneficiaries of that call. As in the case of the early disciples of Jesus, we did not choose him; no, he chose us. That is to say, we are Christians, not because we wanted to be Christians, but only because Jesus made us so by his own deliberate choice. His reasons for choosing us are known to him alone. Whatever those reasons may be, I believe we ought to be grateful to him for choosing us.

Now that we have been chosen, we must remember that Jesus does not take any excuses. He demands total commitment of his followers. We must follow him completely with all that we are and all that we have. That is to say, we must place our very selves and all our possessions at his disposal, to do with as he pleases. That, in part, is what Jesus meant when he said, "If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23).

To follow Jesus completely also means that we shall not live or act in ways that compromise our call to discipleship, in ways that contradict our Christian faith. Our way of life and the activities we engage in must square with the faith we professed at the time of our baptism, when we rejected Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises, and said that we believed in God, the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Who do you say I am?

Reflection on Gospel of Luke 9:18-24

After being with his disciples for some time and teaching them, Jesus wanted to know from them what people were saying about him: "Who do the crowds say I am?" They must have been hearing what people were saying, good things and others that were not so good. Tactfully, they chose to tell him only the good ones. Some people were saying that he was another John the Baptist, others that he was Elijah, yet others were saying that he was the re-incarnation of one of the ancient prophets. They did not tell him that some people were calling him a glutton, drunkard, friend of sinners, even Beelzebul, prince of devils. Jesus himself knew that people were calling him those other things too. All that did not really matter much to him.

What mattered most to Jesus was what his own disciples were thinking and saying about him: "But you, who do you say I am." Peter answered on behalf of all of them: "the Christ of God." The word "Christ" translates the Hebrew "Messiah", which means "the Anointed One," There were many anointed persons in the history of the Jewish people. Priests were anointed, kings were anointed, certain categories of prophets too, were anointed. But the Jews had been told that one specially anointed person was going to come. He would not be just another anointed person, but the Anointed One, the Messiah. He would come to set his people free from their subjugation to spiritual and temporal forces. Peter’s reply meant that he recognized Jesus as that unique Anointed One. Jesus did not deny it. But he gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about it. The reason was that people had a completely different idea of the of the promised Messiah than Jesus represented. They believed that the Messiah would be a warrior, a general of some sort, and he would lead his people out in battle against their enemies and conquer them.

Jesus was not that kind of Messiah. Rather, he would be the kind of Messiah that the prophets had foretold, like Zechariah in today's first reading. His own Messiah, ''the Son of Man, was destined to suffer grievously and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and be put to death, and to be raised up on the third day." It was through suffering, death and resurrection that this Messiah would set his people free.

Having spoken about the kind of Messiah that he was, Jesus then invited his disciples to follow him along the road of suffering, the way of the cross. They could not follow him in any other way. If they chose to travel another road than that of suffering and the cross, they would not be following him. They might be following other masters, but definitely not Jesus. If they thought to save their lives by avoiding suffering and the cross, that was exactly when they would lose their lives (their souls). But if they were prepared to lose their lives by embracing suffering and the cross, then they would save their lives.

It follows that suffering and the cross are essential to Christianity. A Christianity without the cross does not exist; it has not yet been invented. If-someone is trying to self us a brand of religion devoid of the cross, it is not Christianity. You will not find Christ there. You can never find Christ without his cross; Christ and his cross are inseparable. Therefore any religion or ideology that is devoid of Christ is not his religion, the one he founded; it is not Christianity. If we are Christians, and wish to remain so, we should embrace the real thing, Christianity with the cross in it, and not settle for a mere palliative, an analgesic or emotional stimulant pretending to be Christianity.

Forgiving Lord

Reflection on Luke 7:36-8:3

Jesus was a guest at the home of a Pharisee named Simon. So, he was not an enemy of the Pharisees after all. He had nothing against them as persons. He only disagreed with many of their attitudes ways of doing things. Simon had failed to extend a courtesy to Jesus that was customarily given to invited guests. In those days, in Palestine it was customary to pour water over the feet of one's guest before he entered your house. Simon did not do that, perhaps out of contempt for Jesus. He was not being a good host. One wonders why he even bothered to invite Jesus at all.

We can imagine that the other guests at table with Jesus were Pharisees too and other respectable persons in the community. All of a sudden, an uninvited woman barged in and proceeded to shower unusual attention on Jesus. "She waited behind him at his feet, weeping, and her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them away with her hair; then she covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the ointment." Trouble was the woman in question had a bad name in the town. Everybody in the town knew it, so that no self-respecting person would associate with her. Jesus was likely not an inhabitant of that town. So, he might not have known the kind of person she was. But, then, if he was a prophet, as many people believed he was, he should have known it by some special insight. Since he did not seem to know, then he could hardly have been a prophet. He was an impostor. So Simon thought, until Jesus sprang a surprise.

The surprise was that Jesus knew what he was thinking. Only a prophet could do that. A mere man could not. So, Jesus might be a prophet after all. Simon and maybe other guests might have been prepared to concede that to him. But they were not prepared to concede that he was divine. Prophet, yes, divine,-definitely not! That was what Jesus implied by saying to the woman, "Your sins are forgiven." Only God could forgive sin. Jesus was not God. So, he was blaspheming. So, they thought, and they were put off by him.

Later on the disciples of Jesus and subsequent generations of his followers would know that he was not blaspheming. They would learn that he was a divine person, Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. As such, he was quite capable of forgiving sin. That was something Jesus did time and time again, like when he forgave the sin of a paralytic before curing him of his paralysis. (Mark 2:1-12) Indeed, Jesus said that was why he came into the world: "I have come not to call the righteous but sinners." (Mark 2: 17)

Jesus' attitude in this regard was the same as God's attitude in the Old Testament, as we can see in the first reading (1 Sam. 12:7-10, 13). King David had committed two of the most despicable sins of his time and all time. After committing adultery, he attempted a cover-up to conceal the result of his sin. He tried to induce Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife. When Uriah, unwittingly, refused to play ball, David compounded his sin with the murder of an innocent man, whom he had earlier cheated of his wife. David deserved to roast in hell for his double crime. God sent the prophet Nathan to confront him with his sins. No sooner did David confess, "I have sinned against the Lord" than Nathan said to him, "The Lord, for his part, forgives your sin. You are not to die." God forgave him just like that. He exacted no price beyond the death of the illegitimate child Bathsheba had conceived from him.

Such is the character of our God. He is not a God of vengeance, as some people would want to make him out to be, and the Pharisees definitely made him out to be. He is a forgiving God. The ancients might have conceived of him as "an avenging God". Today's first reading and gospel story tell a different story, that he is a forgiving God. People had better get used to that, including all the Pharisees in every age.

The Bread of Life

Reflection on Luke 9:11-17

What is the greatest treasure of the Catholic Church? It is the Holy Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. No wonder the Second Vatican Council described it as "the source and summit of the whole Christian life" because in it the faithful "offer the divine Victim to God and offer themselves along with it." The Council also said that "the most blessed Eucharist contains the Church's entire spiritual wealth, that is Christ Himself, our Passover. and living bread." All that is to say that the Holy Eucharist is quite simply Christ himself. Or again, as the Catechism puts, the Holy Eucharist is the “true Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ”, under the appearances of bread and wine.

The Catholic Church dares to take Jesus at his words. Sometime during his public ministry, Jesus made a quite astonishing pronouncement. He told his audience that they would have to eat his body and drink his blood in, order to have life in them, and anyone who ate his body and drank his blood would have eternal life (John 6:51-58). Many of his listeners were, quite naturally, put off at the prospect of having to eat his flesh and drink his blood since they were not cannibals. As a matter of fact, many of them began to go away, saying, "This is intolerable language. How can anyone accept it?” (John 6:60).

Jesus did not call them back to offer an explanation or to I say that he had been misunderstood. Instead, he insisted that he meant exactly what he said: they would have to eat his body and drink his blood. Take it or leave it! Even the Twelve (Apostles) did not know what to make of Jesus’ pronouncement at the time. But they elected to stay with him, whatever he meant by his statement. Simon Peter spoke for all of them. He said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal life, an we believe…” (John 6:68).'

Only at the Last Supper, when Jesus took bread and said, "This is my body, which is for you”, and he took the cup filled with wine and said, “This is the new covenant in my blood”, did the Apostles finally understand what Jesus meant on the earlier occasion. What he meant was that they would have to eat his body and drink his blood in the forms of bread and wine. But the bread and wine would no longer be bread and wine. They would have transformed into the real body and blood of Christ. They would still have all the physical characteristics of bread and wine, but the real substance of bread and wine would have given way to the body and blood of Christ. That is the process Catholic theology has traditionally called Transubstantiation.

From the onset, Jesus meant the Holy Eucharist, the Sacrament of his Body and Blood for the spiritual nourishment of his followers. He told them to eat and drink. By doing so, they would draw life from him (John 6:57). That is to say they would live with the very life of Christ. They would be able to say with St. Paul, " ... I am alive; yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me" (Gal. I 2:20). That life of Christ in them would ensure that they live eternally, precisely as he had promised.

All that is what makes the Holy Eucharist the Bread of Life for us Christians. If we only understood it for what it really is, none of us would ever let an opportunity to, partake of it pass us by. And if there was any obstacle in the way of our partaking of it, we would leave no stone unturned to remove it.

One God, Three Persons

Reflection on John 16:12-15

Faith in the Blessed Trinity is central to the Christian religion. It is impossible to be a Christian and not believe in the Trinity. But the Trinity is a profound mystery, perhaps the most sublime in all of Christianity. The word mystery suggests that we do not know and we cannot know an awful lot about the Blessed Trinity. One thing we do know is that there are three Persons in One God. Jesus revealed that to us in several texts of the Gospels. The Apostle Paul teaches extensively about it. One thing we do not know and we cannot know is how there are three Persons in One God. Therefore, whereas we know that, we do not know how. Therein lies the mystery of the Blessed Trinity.

Mystery though the Trinity is, we do have some very profound lessons to learn from it. The first lesson is that God is community. God is not individualism or isolation. God is a community founded on love. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father. Their love is not a sterile one. Out of it proceeds the Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son then love the Spirit, and the Spirit loves them both. Their mutual love is so strong, so compelling that it ensures their unity in the one Godhead. The strength of their love is such as to ensure that the three Persons are but one God, not three gods.

The Trinity is a unity in diversity. The Father is distinct from the Son, the Son is distinct from the Father, and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. Each retains his identity in the one Godhead.

Jesus prayed that his followers would be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:11,21). Therefore, the Trinity was to be the model of the unity of his followers. In that case, we can deduce that Jesus intended his followers to be a community of persons. That is what we call the Church. They were to be a community founded on love. Any attempt to base the unity of the Church on grounds other than love, such as doctrine, laws, rules and regulations would run counter to the will of Jesus. Of course, there would be doctrines, there would be laws, rules and regulations. But these would not be the basis of the unity of the Church. The only valid basis is love.

The Church would also have to be a unity in diversity. The Church's unity should not mean uniformity. That is to say, there should be room in the Church for legitimate differences in expressing and living the same faith. The faith (Creed) would be the same, but people's expression and living of it might differ from one culture to another, from one generation to. another. In other words, while there would be oneness, in essentials, there could be legitimate differences in non-essentials.

All these things are the basis of the Church's teaching on a wide range of subjects, like Church unity, Ecumenism, and Inculturation, among others. Our understanding of the Blessed Trinity is at the root of them all.

Come, Holy Spirit

Reflection on John 20;19-23

Easter is the most important celebration in the Christian calendar. Easter is not a one-day celebration, It is not even a one-week celebration. It is a fifty-day celebration. It begins on Easter Sunday and ends fifty days later on Pentecost Sunday. If Easter is the most important Christian celebration, Pentecost is the second most important, not Christmas, never mind all the fanfare that goes with Christmas.

Pentecost is important for several reasons. One of them is that it is a celebration in honour of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. The Holy Spirit is God, one in Being with the Father and the Son, and equal to them in every respect. Any celebration in honour of any of the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity must be important because it is a celebration in honour of God.

Another reason why Pentecost is important is that it marks the day on which the Church was first introduced to the world, the day on which the Church was launched, to use a familiar local expression. The first beginnings of the Church were during the public ministry of Jesus, when he gathered disciples around himself and formed them into a community around his person. The actual birth of the Church was on Calvary, while Jesus hung on the cross, in fulfillment of his prophecy, "And when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all people to myself" (John 12:32). But the first public outing of the Church was on the day of Pentecost, after the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles (Acts 2).

Jesus had promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples on several occasions during his public ministry. One of those occasions is recorded in John 16:13. There Jesus told his disciples, "But when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth." Many of the things Jesus said and did during his time on earth were incomprehensible to his disciples. Those things simply went over their heads. That is why Jesus had said earlier on, " ... but the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you" (John 14:26). It was only by the light of the Holy Spirit, after Pentecost, that the disciples began to comprehend all that Jesus had said and done. It was even by the light of the Holy Spirit that it finally dawned on them that "Jesus is Lord."

The Book of the Acts of the Apostles has numerous accounts of what the early Christians were able to accomplish through the power of the Holy Spirit. That is why that book is sometimes called the "Gospel of the Holy Spirit." Since that time, and for over two thousand years, the Church has gone on to accomplish many more great things through the power of the Holy Spirit. Right now, as you read thisret1ection, the Holy Spirit is working his wonders in and through the Church.

But it is not only in the Universal Church that the Holy Spirit is at work. He is at work in the lives of individual believers as well. When we were baptised, we received the Holy Spirit. At confirmation, the gift of the Holy Spirit was reinforced (confirmed) in us. But the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in us may not manifest unless we are, first of all, aware of that presence and that action, and secondly, we make our available for their manifestation in us. That is why we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle In them the fire of your love."