A Blessed Easter Life (2nd Sunday Easter B)

Travelling through the highways of Mountain Province in 2006 helped me appreciate the gift of sight and of faith; and discern their distinction.  A friend of mine, a priest from Baguio, invited me to do a little excursion to the northern region to have a breath of fresh air away from studies.  After a couple of days chilling in his place, the City of Pines, we decided to go to Sagada and Bontoc. Going up on an off-road jeep at mid-afternoon, we were soon passing through the highway known as the highest point of elevation. It was just before sundown. The altitude gave me the excellent vantage point from where to see the breath-taking grandeur of the mountains around me. Seen against the background of the retiring sun, the whole scenery filled my eyes with sheer delight of witnessing greatness, beauty and melancholy all at once.  A couple of days later, coming back at dawn, we were passing through the same place again, only this time, at sunrise. The sight was exhilarating. The colossal and expansive mass of mountains highlighted by the gentle rays of the morning sun held me spellbound.  Soon, I was misty-eyed and felt like exploding.

My eyes witnessed an awesome scenery. But there was something unseen that kept my heart pounding and burning with unexplainable sense of jubilation and admiration. It was something I believed in:  Beyond what met my eyes was a strong and undeniable presence. It was the presence of Him who is Himself Beauty, Grandeur, Might, Intelligence, Purpose, and Graciousness. The Creator.

The gift of sight is a delight. But most of what is essential in life are unseen. They are believed.

Today’s gospel (Jn 20:19-31) proclaims this truth: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (v. 29).  The blessedness of Easter is not so much the delight of seeing as it is the courage, the peace, and the faith of someone who believes!  This is discernible in John’s account of what happened in that closed room as the risen Lord appeared to his fearful disciples.

In the gospel reading, the risen Christ appeared to them and freed them from three obstacles to a blessed Easter life: The paralysis of fear, the alienation of guilt, the anxiety of doubt.

Freedom from Fear. The death of the Master on the cross on Good Friday sent the disciples to hiding. Out of fear, they holed up in a room afraid of a possible crack down on the followers of the crucified Messiah. Today’s gospel, however, recounts how Jesus dispelled their fear by offering them his peace: “Peace be with you.” Jesus’ appearance threw away the paralysis caused by fear and, once again, enabled them to rejoice in freedom and, more importantly, to possess the courage to embrace the mission of proclaiming the gospel.

We can always hide in fear; stay safe in our comfort zones; live with a non-committal attitude in life. But the Risen Lord invites us to believe in the blessedness of Easter life—a life characterized by courage. The courage to engage in the challenges of life.  The courage to move on after a door is closed, venturing into the newly opened windows. The courage to proclaim in whatever we do the greatness of God in our lives.

Freedom from Guilt.  The disciples were guilty of running for their own lives and abandoning their Master.  Aside from the paralysis of fear, they were also alienated by their guilt. So as Jesus dispelled the fear of the disciples, he proceeded in breathing into them the Holy Spirit, to become the source of forgiveness:  “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained” (v. 22-23).   Hereafter, the apostles and their successors would be Jesus’ representatives in the world to impart his peace by absolving the guilt of those who repent.

We can helplessly succumb to our weaknesses and live in the alienation of guilt, heightening each day our feeling of unworthiness.  But a blessed Easter life summons us to live in God’s “ocean of mercy.”  Today is the Feast of Divine Mercy. But the happiness of the one who believes in the Risen Lord is the joy of feasting in God's mercy not just today but all the days of one's life.

Freedom from Doubt.  The encounter between Jesus and Thomas demonstrated how Jesus overcame doubt. Jesus yielded to Thomas’ obstinacy showing the latter the evidence he was looking for as a requirement for his belief. Thomas went down in history as the doubting apostle; yet when we come to think of it, his scepticism saved us from our own doubts. Thomas had disproved any theories that suggest the resurrection as mere hallucination of the part of the apostles. He had seen the Risen Lord in his own eyes in the very terms he demanded. Hence, his proclamation of faith, “My Lord and my God!” can also be ours. Our only difference with him:  without seeing we believe. And blessed are we.

A blessed Easter life is living in faith and confidence that God is victorious. The risen Lord has conquered sin and death. He offers us grace and life. There is no use dwelling in our paranoia and the unsettling anxieties over the uncertainties in life.  We can let go of our compulsion to be in control of everything. We can be happy. Just believe.  Let God be God and let us have a blessed Easter life.

Rainbow After the Rain (1st Sunday of Lent B)

There’s a rainbow after the rain. So we say along with the poets.  This poetic solace has done the trick since the time of Noah’s covenant until the dawn of global warming when climate change has apparently altered the rules: There are just more rain now after a downpour.  Luzon had Ondoy a few years ago; and a couple of years later, Mindanao was caught asleep as Sendong’s downpour caused a ravishing flash flood carrying along heavy logs from the mountains of Bukidnon.  

I had a chance to visit the “Tent City” in Cagayan de Oro during the Diocesan Clergy of Mindanao Convention.  Hundreds of families displaced by typhoon Sendong were temporarily relocated at the site. The night before our visit, it rained.  Once more, the families living in the tents were flooded!  When we arrived the following day, some men were digging canals around the area as the clouds were becoming dark again! Shouldn’t these people be given a rainbow to see instead of another dark formation of clouds?

What happened to the covenant made by God with Noah and those who were saved from the great flood?  The first reading today (Gn. 9: 8-15) reminds us of the establishment of the covenant that never again shall a flood devastate the earth.  The rainbow has been designated as the sign of this covenant. Has God forgotten the covenant?

Some people attribute the calamities to the “act of God.”  But biblical faith has proclaimed God’s fidelity.  God is a faithful God.  He remembers and upholds the covenant.  It is humanity, the other end of the covenant, who easily forgets.  We, the people of God, have consistently been unfaithful to Him.  The floods and calamities they bring are not from God but are the direct and inevitable consequences of our recklessness and mindless exploitation of the abundance of God’s creation.  We have become the greedy destroyer of nature and have turned our back to God’s invitation for us to be a responsible steward of the integrity and beauty of creation.

I consider them today’s prophets who defend our environment and call for a radical change in our lifestyle.  Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is a prophet’s voice shouting in the wilderness.  But like all other prophets, today’s prophets continue to experience being brushed aside.  We hear the message and the warning but we don’t truly listen.  This was the same dynamics as in the time of Noah.  People continue with their business-as-usual attitudes.  I’m truly afraid that unless we listen, unless we learn our lessons, unless we change our ways, unless we act collectively and with responsibility, there will no longer be rainbows. There will be just rain. Heavy downpour.  Calamities after calamities. As we are beginning to see in fact.

Lent is a season of repentance.  Once again we hear Jesus’ message in today’s gospel (Mk. 1: 12-15), “Reform you lives and believe in the good news!”  The season of Lent can be for us the time to really examine our lives and to honestly see how we have allowed sin and evil to dominate our decisions and activities. This is a season when we evaluate how much of our ways have contributed to this impending destruction, how much of our greed and our capricious demands have supported an obstinate drive to exploit the earth’s natural resources to the point of destroying her irreversibly.

It’s easier to see now that reform should be both in the personal and social levels.  The change of heart necessarily begins with individual and personal lives.  It cannot happen any other way.  However, salvation involves not just individuals but communities.  We need to reform as a people.  We need to change our ways as a society.  That is why we need to listen to prophets, to read the signs of the times, to discern God’s direction towards salvation.  We need conscientious leaders to galvanize reformed and committed individuals toward responsible change.  And we badly need this soon...  before it’s too late.

Lest we lose hope, we are assured by our readings that God has been and is always victorious against evil and sin in the world.  The 40-day flood in Noah’s time was God’s act of washing away sin and evil from the earth in order to forge a new beginning.  In the second reading (1 Pt 3: 18-22), Peter tells us that we are now saved by a baptismal bath which corresponds to the great flood: the waters of baptism washed away all that is sinful in us and we enter into a new life, a new covenant relationship with God. In the gospel, led by the Spirit, Jesus is tested by Satan in the desert for forty days.  And He is victorious over Satan.

We enter the season of Lent for forty days too.  Let us allow the Holy Spirit to lead us into this desert experience.  Like Jesus at the beginning of his messianic activity, let us be docile to the action of the Holy Spirit who demands an interior preparation for us to enter into a truly life-changing process of reform.  It is the Spirit who saw Jesus through his suffering, death, and resurrection.  It is the same Spirit whom we ought to allow seeing us through the challenging demands of this transforming desert experience.

The ultimate assurance of hope of course is when we look ahead after everything has been said and done, we see the glorious victory of Christ awaiting us and this cosmos.  God does not forget the covenant indeed. The Risen Lord and only He is the definitive and unfading rainbow after the long and heavy rain.

Faith and Friendship (7th Sunday Ordinary B)

I met a doctor in a convention.  Her commitment to the service of God’s Kingdom was amazing.  Later, her testimonies revealed to me that she was not always that way.  She used to be a typical product of modernity believing more in her medical expertise than in God.  She used to treat her patients as mere bodies with illness. Compassion was not her virtue. She would treat them only if the price was right. What changed her was the invitation of her friends to join a religious organization. Gradually, with the support of the organization she encountered God and henceforth became a different person.  She began to see her medical profession as an opportunity to serve the poor.  For countless times, she called on her colleagues to organize medical outreach programs in order to serve those who had no means to visit the hospitals. She would diagnose and prescribe medicines but deep inside her she would pray for the healing of her patients. “I will always look back with gratitude to that time when my friends led me to discover God in my life,” she exclaimed.

Faith, as a response to God, is necessarily personal.  It cannot be vicarious.  But almost always, we seldom realize, we come to an encounter with God not on our own strength and capacity but through the help of other people, of our family or friends who are there to lead us or just support us when we are yet weak.  While God waits for our personal response to Him, He does recognize the faith of the community to where we belong and allows that faith to work “miracles” in awakening our own faith.

In today’s gospel reading (Mk 2: 1-12), we hear the story of a paralytic whom Jesus forgives and cures on account of the faith of his friends:  While He was delivering God’s word to them, some people arrived bringing a paralyzed man to him. The four who carried him were unable to bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, so they began to open up the roof over the spot where Jesus was. When they had made a hole, they let down the mat on which the paralytic was lying. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” 

A paralyzed man could not, by himself, approach Jesus who was surrounded by a crowd who, perhaps, were pushing and shoving to get near him.  Surely, he needed people to carry him to Jesus.  Blessed was this man who had with him some committed friends who were ready to do just everything to allow him that life-changing encounter with the Lord. On many other healing occasions, Jesus required the faith of the person.  In this particular event, Jesus was moved by the faith of the friends. So, “when Jesus saw their faith,” He forgave him and made him whole again.

People are spiritually paralyzed by sin. This generation has been so inured by the gross immoralities around that it has lost its sense of sin. All the more that people do not care about their spiritual life. This is paralysis. The gospel then is an invitation for many of us to cultivate such “faith of the friends” of the paralytic and be able to embark on a mission to reach out to those who cannot approach the Lord on their own. 

Cultivating in us the faith of the paralytic’s friends may entail, among many others, two things:  Acquiring empathy and developing committed action.

The faith of the friends certainly was characterized by empathy.  This is sensitivity to the needs of the paralyzed friend who is unable to act on his own.  Oftentimes, we are consumed by our own spiritual needs; we fail to understand the struggle of people around us.  We don’t see that people around us could use our support.  Developing empathy increases our capacity to see beyond our own needs.  This allows us to understand the needs of other people and so to put aside our own agenda and take on as our own those of others who silently cry for support.

Clearly a faith characterized by empathy leads to committed action.  The friends of the paralytic did not give up and leave him when they were confronted with the crowd that barred them to Jesus.  On the contrary, they looked for ways and means to bring their friend to Jesus.  Faith without action is dead.  When Jesus “saw their faith,” it was their commitment to act on behalf of their paralyzed friend that amazed the Lord.  We need to develop in us this commitment to act lest our promised prayers for friends who are in need of our support are in fact our way of escaping from the call to do something.

Who may be that paralyzed friend whose needs silently beg for our empathy and whose helplessness asks for our commitment to act on his behalf? Who is out there whom we can lead to have a life-changing encounter with the forgiving God?