To Love After God’s Own Heart (31st Sunday Ordinary B)

The words of St. Teresa of Calcutta have always been very simple. But I find them powerful and radical because they are coming from a true witness of the gospel of love. I would always imagine that generous donors from all over the world come to see her ministering to the poorest of the poor and some would cringe at the sight of her touching and taking care of the lepers and would probably remark, “Eww, I wouldn’t do that even for a thousand pounds!” And Mother Teresa would just smile and, without moralizing, would agree with the rich donor as she would say, “Neither would I.” Then her often quoted words come alive and kick me off my growing complacency as I listen to her once more:  “I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.”

Caring for the unlovable not for any amount of money but for the love of God!  Mother Teresa’s life and words are concrete incarnation of the radical call to love—loving God and loving our neighbour as two distinct but interrelated acts of loving. And it’s true, no one can love the unlovable except when one has a heart that loves God and loves like God.

Today’s gospel (Mk 12: 28-34) reminds us of the two greatest commandments.  As an answer to the scribes’ question regarding the most important commandment, Jesus replies: “This is the first: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! Therefore you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’  This is the second, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

These two are the greatest commandments and therefore ought to be our most fundamental calling as believers and followers of Christ.  Mother Teresa’s life had the power to touch the whole world, believers and non-believers alike, only because she lived by the words of Christ. She took on the demands of love and gave all her life loving God by loving the poorest. Let us then reflect on these two interrelated demands of love as our own calling too.

Love of God.  Jesus reaffirms the words of Moses in our first reading (Dt 6: 2-6) as the most important of all commandments.  To love God, the Lord, is to love him with our entire being: with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  There’s no room here for partial loving. The demand is total.  We ought to love God with everything that we have and are! This means that God has to be the center of our life. It is God whom we ought to seek in life and serve.  His will and his commandments ought to be the principles by which we live.  In the words of Moses, when we keep God’s statutes, we’re going to “have long life;” “we grow and prosper all the more” in the promised “land flowing with milk and honey.”  Loving God with our entire being brings life and abundance. When we have God, we shall not be in want.

Our problem is always our divided and confused heart. We often find ourselves desiring and seeking first what the world promise to give.  We can live and die for money, fame, power, etc. But we don’t see ourselves dying for God. Worse, we treat God, maybe unwittingly, only as a means (in our prayers and petitions for instance) to attain these created things thinking they give meaning to life.  Moreover, many times our heart goes for ourselves. We love ourselves more than we love God. We follow our own design and ignore God’s especially when the two collide.  No wonder, our pursuit for a meaningful life implies endless seeking for material gains and maintenance or increase of our personal glory and power. This idolatrous love for things and self only leads to unspeakable social injustices, violence, and un-peace as can be observed in the realities in our midst right now as we speak.

Again, as followers of Christ, let us take Christ’s words seriously.  To save humanity and the world from self-destruction, we ought to check our priorities and the focus of our love. God has to be our first and highest value and the center of our lives, individual and social. We have to love God above all else and seek first his reign and everything will fall in place.

Love of Neighbour.  A necessary implication of our commitment to love God is to love our neighbour as ourselves.  Again, these two commandments have the book of Moses as their origin. But the Mosaic Law presents them separately and no stress on their interrelationship is made.  Jesus has placed them together and hence, offers a new Christian perspective to loving. In the words of John Paul II: “One cannot love God if one does not love one’s brethren, creating a deep and lasting communion of love with them.”  Christianity will always see these two loves as two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one and ignore the other.

A person who truly loves God also learns to love like God.  Hence, we love not only those who are close to us and those within our circle of friends. Like God who loves and provides for the needs of all without distinction, we are also called to love without distinction.  The neighbour then includes strangers and even enemies as Jesus instructs in another part of the gospel.  Mother Teresa committed her life caring for the unlovable in society—the poorest of the poor, the lepers, the AIDS victims, the abandoned.

Left on our own, we choose whom we love and care for.  We go for those who possess the three Bs: beauty, brain and bank.  We naturally love those who fulfil our fantasies, feed our needs, and make our lives comfortable. “Surround yourself with great people” is our accepted maxim for a successful life. We would shun those who represent the needy in society as we would like to have nothing to do with “liabilities.” Well, we think this way because we have not yet lived according to the commandment of love.

Hence, today we are reminded of our great vocation as followers of Christ-- the vocation to love.  We can make a difference in this world (and Christians are meant to make a difference!) as Mother Teresa has when we take to heart the greatest commandments and live by them.  We need to make God the center of our lives by loving Him with everything that we have and are and learn to care not only for ourselves but also for our neighbours, loving them after God’s own heart.

Perspective of Faith (30th Sunday Ordinary B)

A good friend emailed me this story:

The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him. Every day he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming. Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect him from the elements, and to store his few possessions.

One day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little hut in flames, with smoke rolling up to the sky. He felt the worst had happened, and everything was lost. He was stunned with disbelief, grief, and anger. He cried out, 'God! How could you do this to me? '

Early the next day, he was awakened by the sound of a ship approaching the island! It had come to rescue him! “How did you know I was here?” asked the weary man of his rescuers. They replied, "We saw your smoke signal."

Aahhh… how blind was he to the ways of God! What he saw was his suffering, his loss, his own grief. He failed to see the grace of God working through the flames that consumed his hut and the smoke that rolled up to the sky. He was blinded by his anger.

But indeed, it is hard to see God's ways. Human as we are, we are always short-sighted or blinded by our own personal agenda, self-centered motivations and emotional rage. It is real hard to see, for instance, beyond the suffering wrought by these supertyphoons and Covid-19 pandemic. We see our losses; we face our suffering; we endure our grief. But we are slow to understand all these and even more slow in seeing the hand of a loving and providential God in these darkest moments of our lives.

Hence, it is good to be instructed by the story of Bartimaeus in today's gospel (Mk 10: 46-52).

“What do you want me to do for you?” (v. 51), Jesus asks the blind Bartimaeus. But before we treat Bartimaeus’ response, it is good to recall that the same question has been offered by Jesus to James and John, Zebedee’s sons in last Sunday’s gospel. Their answer betrayed their personal agenda and motives. They asked for privilege and position. We recall that asked with the same question, “What do you want me to do for you?” they gave this straightforward petition: “Make sure that we sit in your glory, one at your right and the other at your left.” And we heard Jesus rebuking them, “you do not know what you are asking.” Last Sunday then we saw how Jesus’ disciples continued to fail to see the meaning of authentic discipleship. They continued to be blind as to the real meaning of Christ’s messiahship. They refused to accept the path of suffering, rejection, powerlessness, and death that the messiah, and hence his disciples, had to go through. What they had wanted to see was the fulfillment of their own personal and political ambitions. They failed to see as God sees. In a word, they were blind like Bartimaeus.

All too often, we are like Jesus’ disciples blinded by our personal motives. Our self-centeredness blinds us to God’s intentions. We see only our own agenda. We look at the world and realities and events through our human lens. No wonder we don’t understand a lot of things. We don’t see beyond the ugly surface of our sufferings. We don’t see what we gain in our losses. We don’t understand when things start to get out of our hands. We simply fail to see God’s hands.

Ironically, Bartimaeus, the blind, can point us the way forward. Mark’s Gospel presents Bartimaeus as the exemplar disciple. When asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus answers, “Master, I want to see” (v. 51).  Jesus heals him and instructs him to go his way. Bartimaeus receives his sight but followed Jesus on the way.

Therefore, like him, we would do well to do three things: First, like Bartimaeus, we have to admit that we are blind in terms of recognizing the ways of God. We have to admit that we need the grace of God to see beyond our self-centered motives and agenda. We have to face the fact that our human way of seeing is often clouded by our grief and anger and, therefore, incapable of discerning God’s ways.

Second, we have to ask God fervently: “Master, I want to see.”  We have to ask God to open our eyes of faith that we may see as God sees, to open our eyes to see through the suffering that life brings and discern God’s intentions and the directions He is leading us to, and to open our eyes to see his hands working even when our hut is burning and when all that we have are destroyed by flood and relentless typhoons.

Third, like Bartimaeus, let us accept both the gift of a new perspective and the task of following Jesus. Discipleship is following Jesus precisely with this new perspective of faith and not with our initial perspective of self-centeredness. This means following Jesus in the path He has chosen-- the path of humble service, total self-giving, and sacrificial death.

Life is a Matter of What You Give (29th Sunday Ordinary B)

Relationship is a matter of giving and taking. Or we all say so. All of us seem to accept this as a matter of fact. Often we say, “In life we ​​must be prepared to give and take.” We say this so often that it becomes a favorite cliché. Do we really mean it? I think I am more to the point when, in my naughty moments, I play with this idiomatic expression and say, “Yes, life is give and take. You give, and I take. ”

“You give and I take” is probably what we really live by. However we verbalize our belief in the principle of yielding and compromise, all too often we are in fact motivated by a self-centered one-way “what's-in-it-for-me” stance. “What can I get out of this?” This is the question we pose, consciously or unconsciously, when we are at the threshold of committing to something.We commit when there's a promise of abundance for ourselves. If there is none, we gladly turn our back to it or at most give our nonchalant commitment only to fade away sooner than we think.

I find the request of James and John in today's gospel reading (Mk 10: 35-45) quite self-centered. Typical of the what's-in-it-for-me attitude. Listen to this: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you”(v. 35). If I were the Master, I would have retorted with my eyebrows raised, “Hey, look at you. Who do you think you are? ” These sons of Zebedee seem to have gotten it all wrong. They follow Jesus for their vested interest. Perhaps Jesus sees this opportunity to unmask the selfish motivation in these two disciples. So, very much unlike my uncharitable retort, Jesus gently asks them, “What do you wish me to do for you?” And how amazingly Jesus succeeds in ferreting out what's lurking inside these two. "Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left."

Oh, how often do we sound like these two in our own prayers to the Lord! "Lord, I've been a good Christian… been faithful to your teachings… so, I ask that you give me this… you give me that." Like these two disciples, we easily tend towards the direction of what I shall call the “what's-in-it-for-me discipleship” —a discipleship that is taken in order to quench the endless thirst for privilege and rewards.

Jesus teaches James and John, and we too, his present disciples, to purify our motivations in following him. Jesus forgives our lack of understanding. He knows how hard it is for us to transcend our selfishness. So he never gets tired of guiding us. He teaches us in today's gospel that to follow him is not to expect the reward of the high and mighty positions. To follow him is to be ready to accept Jesus' cup of suffering and his baptism of death. In other words, to follow Jesus is to follow the path of humility, service, and total generosity. To follow Jesus is to give everything that we have and are.

The question that ought to guide and motivate us in all our commitments as Christians is not“What can I get out of this?” but “What can I give? What can I offer? How can I be of help? How can I make this world a beautiful place for others to live in? How can I serve the least of my brothers and sisters? ” If by God's grace our commitments are governed by these selfless motivations then we can be glad to know that we form the kind of discipleship the Lord wants — the smiling “what-can-I-do-for-you” discipleship.

As a priest, many times I catch myself in the former stance, the 'what's-in-it-for-me' attitude. I serve so that I can get my reward. Often, at the end of the day, even if I get what I expected out of my self-giving, I feel heavy, less joyful. Worse, if I don't get what I've expected, I end up disappointed and henceforth, less motivated. But in the grace-filled moments of my priesthood, when I get up and ask the world “What can I give? What can I do for you? ”, And all I can think of is to share, to give, to serve, to make this world a hopeful place for people to live in, I experience joy in its purity — one that no amount of reward can ever give.

So, I'm inclined to challenge what has become anyway a favorite cliché, ie, 'Life is a matter of giving and taking.' When we follow Jesus, never mind the 'taking' part; I think there's a grain of divine wisdom in believing that life is really a matter of what you give. Try it.

Squatters in Heaven (28th Sunday Ordinary B)

In 2009, several days after the wrath of storm Ondoy, the news on TV sent me deeply reflecting. The news was showing efforts to send the evacuees back to their homes. Several families, though, could not go home even if they were very eager to. They could not go home because there was no longer a place to go back to. They had been squatters for years. When the relentless flood forcibly drove them away, the landowner effectively secured his property and got rid of them.  “At long last,” the owner might have sighed with relief.

If you were in the shoes of the landowner would you have done the same? In times of dire need, when thousands of families, mostly poor, are displaced, hungry, thirsty, sick, afraid, and traumatized, would you do what the landowner did? Would you be so concerned about preserving your possessions that you would even thank heavens for the storm that shooed away the poor out of your sight?

I admit this is a disturbing concern especially for a serious follower of Christ. It is not that easy to let go of one’s possessions in favor of caring for the poor.  Alas! “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mk 10:25). With the realities cited above, it is not very difficult to understand another of Jesus’ unconventional aphorisms.

In today’s gospel (Mk 10:17-30), Jesus challenges the widely held belief of his time that the rich have the favor of God on their side which is precisely the reason for the material blessings they enjoy. The exaggeration Jesus employs is an effective way of calling the attention of the rich who have become complacent and enslaved by their material possessions. A well-meaning and religious rich man may fail to ‘inherit eternal life,’ like the rich man in today’s gospel, when he cannot let go of his material possessions to help the poor and follow Jesus. Discipleship does not consist only in a legalistic adherence to religious precepts and commandments like “Thou shall not to do this” and “Thou shall not to do that.”  For in this sense, discipleship would merely mean NOT DOING anything that is forbidden by God’s law. There is more to discipleship than this. Following Jesus means DOING something—“GO and SELL possessions,” “GIVE to the poor,” “FOLLOW Jesus” (v. 21). The rich man in the gospel went away sad; he could not do what Jesus asked of him “for he had many possessions” (v. 22). This is the essential sadness of the rich!

In plain and simple terms, the message of the gospel is this: Those who have riches have an obligation to care for those who do not. Failure to do this will bar them from eternal life. Material possessions are to be had in the spirit of stewardship.  God is the sole owner of everything. We are his stewards. We have to responsibly take care of whatever is entrusted to us for the good of all. A responsible steward delights in the abundance of material things only because it means greater capacity to share, to serve, to help, to save the needy from the evil of poverty. It means greater opportunity to exercise the responsibility he shares with the Creator in sustaining and providing for his creation.

In the Philippines, where poverty situation is becoming more and more scandalous given the fact of the concentration of the resources in the hands of a powerful few and the fact that this is a Christian country, Jesus’ teaching has clearly not been taken seriously. We are a Christian country which has gotten inured to the disturbing plight of millions of our brothers and sisters in sub-human living conditions. The poor are squatting as if God has forgotten to provide for them. No. God has not forgotten; He has endowed all humanity with the bounty of his creation so that all may have a share for all their needs. It is our greed for material possessions that has caused and perpetuated a greatly skewed distribution of resources in favor of the rich and powerful.

A story to end: A very wealthy man died and faced the gatekeeper of heaven. He was led to a shanty.

“This is your dwelling place,” the gatekeeper pointed out.

The rich man objected, “This is disgusting! This is like the houses of the squatters in my neighborhood!”

“Well,” the gatekeeper replied, “that is the house you prepared for yourself.”

He asked, “How come?! And whose is that fine mansion across the way?”

“It belongs to one of your neighbors.”

“How is it that he has a mansion and I get to live in this shanty?”

“Well, the houses here are made from the materials that people sent up. We do not choose them: You do that as much as you give on earth.”

If we continue to clench our hands because of greed for wealth and material possessions and refuse to heed the gospel’s imperative of making use of these for the needs of the poor, we might not have a place in the Kingdom of God and might end up as squatters in heaven. And it's only fair, isn't?

Love in the Time of Super Typhoons (27th Sunday Ordinary B)

(Photo from www.barangayla.org)

In 1985 the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published in Spanish his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera (Spanish: El amor en los tiempos del cólera). Some reviews consider the novel as a sentimental story about the enduring power of true love. Some say it’s a lot more complicated than that.  In any case, I would like to make an allusion to this great novel by speaking about love in the time of super typhoons. This is about love that is not only unfazed by horrible disasters but even evoked by them.

Ours is indubitably a time of super typhoons as they come one after the other unleashing their wrath punishing us again and again just when we have barely gotten to our feet from the previous blows. In the Philippines, everyone is haunted by the trauma of Ondoy, Sendong, and Yolanda to name a few. They will always remain in our memory as our collective experience of unspeakable devastation even eliciting apocalyptic fear in some of us. Yet these disasters also proved to be peak moments of manifesting the real power of love.

One can look at the sheer cruelty of the disasters and be completely overwhelmed by them. One can simply give up and admit that the end-time is at hand. But what we have observed is exactly the opposite. We have seen people rising above the disasters. We have seen people holding one another’s hands to save one another and even individuals sacrificing their own lives to rescue another. We have seen people going out of there usual comfort zones to be of help. We have seen erstwhile untapped hoarded resources now mobilized for those who need them most. In this time of super typhoons, we see vigilance; we see leadership; we see faith. We experience solidarity and we manifest the greatness of true love in the time of super typhoons.

True love shines magnificently not despite the difficulties but precisely through them. Christianity proclaims this even in the context of marriage. Hence, in today’s gospel reading (Mk 10:2-16), Jesus himself does not believe in divorce as an option when things in marriage get rough and tough. Jesus believes in the wisdom of God. God intended man and woman to be united. Such a unity cannot be separated by human power. “Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (v. 9).

Jesus believes that true love conquers differences. Love unites not separates. Jesus believes that there are no human conflicts that love cannot overcome. If more and more people today clamor for divorce, it’s because more and more people do not truly love. They want the easy way out. In the long run, the easy way out is the way to perdition. Hence, Jesus does not preach the easy way out. He challenges Christian couples to take the hard way, the way of the cross, the way of true love. This is the love that sees them through thick and thin, the love that rises above any crisis in life. This is the kind of love we see in these times of super typhoons.

I would like to share a simple story of this kind of love in marriage that left me teary-eyed. This happened on my visit to anoint a sick friend. I entered his room. He held my hand tightly as I reach out to him. He was lying on his bed unable to move half of his body. He brought my hand to his forehead and sobbed. Then he cried out, “Father, I’m useless now. I’m a burden to my wife!”  Before this prostate problem rendered him paralyzed, I had known him as an active lay Eucharistic minister. He used to be a zealous volunteer to many and varied chore in the Church. Just as he sobbed humbled by his physical condition, his wife approached us teary-eyed but beaming with a joyful smile. She held his numb feet and let her tears flow as she said tenderly, “You are not a burden to me. It’s a joy to take care of you everyday. It’s my chance to show you how much I love you even now that we’re old and sickly.”

I must admit I was envious. Right in front of me was an unfolding of a love so noble I could only wish for in my life. Growing old with someone who has known you, warts and all, and who still cares for you with such a joyful love in the twilight of one’s life is perhaps the greatest prize of a committed marriage.

So whatever the cynics and skeptics say about marriage, the gospel today announces that marriage is beautiful. This doesn’t mean though that it’s all bed of roses. There are thorns too. Even horrible storms! But its beauty lies precisely in the everyday triumphs of a committed love over the challenges that come its way. What I had witnessed in the old couple I’ve mentioned above is a marriage strengthened by love that has certainly weathered super typhoons.