A Disturbing Commandment (30th Sunday Ordinary A)

It is so easy to spiritualize concrete social problems like hunger and poverty by doing nothing about them except to pray for those who are suffering.  That is why many of us can be misled to believe that to fulfil our Christian obligation it is enough to express our love of God by our devotional piety.  We make sure that we go to Church for our prayers, devotions, and religious observance. 

Loving God by way of our pious activities is of itself praiseworthy as long as this does not lead us to spiritual escapism—meaning, the tendency to withdraw from the hard realities of life and seek easy solutions in devotional spiritual practices.  When we are confronted with the real needs of our poor neighbours and we offer no commitment in helping them in whatever way we can, our prayers may be a form of escape from the inconveniences of offering concrete and helpful solutions, our devotional piety may actually be devoid of authentic love of God.

Others may move towards the opposite direction.  They may be so consumed by the horror of human suffering that they commit their whole life in the service of the suffering neighbours and altogether forget about God.  Therefore, no more need for prayer or going to Church. This is the pitfall of activism. This happens when our love of neighbour does not stem from our love of God.

Today’s gospel (Mt. 22: 34-40) presents to us the two greatest commandments and allows us to see that the indissolubility of their essential connection is the foundation of an authentic Christian moral life. “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all you heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (vv. 37-39).

Love of God and love of neighbour have to be seen as intersecting demands of love lest we fall into the traps of spiritual escapism, on the one hand, and of activism, on the other.  The Catechism for Filipino Catholics explains this interactive relationship between these two commandments of love in three levels:

As Christians, then, we know, first, that our genuine human love is a participation in God’s love. “Love consists in this, not that we have loved God, but that He has loved us” (1 Jn 4:10). Second, through Christ and the Spirit, God is really present in both our neighbour’s and our very own loving. “If we love one another, God dwells in us and His love is brought to perfection in us” (1 Jn 4:12). Thus, our love for our neighbour contains within it a direct orientation to God. Third, our explicit love of God clearly brings out our deepest love of neighbour (CFC, par. 944).

Hence, one is a liar when he claims to love God whom he cannot see and not love his fellow whom he can see.  

Once, I was heading on foot to a chapel in Marikina to celebrate an anticipated mass as a guest priest. It was almost dark. While passing by a food chain, I smelt something repulsively foul as I saw the garbage was being scavenged by what I thought were dogs.  I was taken aback when I realized that they were not dogs. I saw a man, a woman and a child eating the left over thrown into the garbage.  The picture of a family having dinner in that garbage with its stomach-turning stench would haunt me until now. That evening while the community who invited me was celebrating Eucharist in praise of God’s name, a family was trying to survive by eating the community’s refuse. During the homily, I made mention of what I saw and how I was tremendously disturbed. How can we profess love of God as a community when all at the same time we just accept as a matter of fact a family to be reduced to such subhuman living conditions? The chapel was very silent. Probably we were all disturbed.

I realized today’s gospel is actually disturbing.  The commandment of love disturbs our otherwise complacent life.  Love, after all, is inherently disturbing.  When we commit to respond to God’s love, we find ourselves challenged to reach out not only to God but to those who need our love badly.

I was not bound to stay with the community for I was a passing guest priest.  But, at the least, I was able to share my feeling of disturbance.  The community ought to be disturbed so that the love they have for God may become the very force that propels them to respond to the hunger of their neighbours.

We all individually seem to be helpless in front of the magnitude of the call to love our neighbour.  But again, we can and we ought to face the challenge of loving our neighbours as communities.  This is the value of forming organizations.  Our religious organizations ought to empower each of us to respond to the challenge of loving—that through the love of God shared together by all members, they may have the collective means to respond to the neighbours’ evident hunger for love.

Love of God and love of neighbour are at the heart of our Christian moral life. If we take them separately and unrelated to each other we end up impoverishing the power of love.  Love becomes lame, unable to respond to the challenge of authentic change in our communities. But taken together, they make for the most disturbing principle that propels all Christians to live according to the vision of the God of love.

Kristiyano Ako, Kaya Makabayan! (29th Sunday Ordinary A)

 “Kristiyano ako, kaya makabayan!”  I saw this slogan around the Ateneo de Manila campus when I was studying at the Loyola School of Theology.  If I’m not mistaken, the slogan was crafted by the Jesuit’s social movement, Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan (SLB). “I am a Christian and therefore a responsible citizen.” Faith in the God of Jesus Christ draws us to love our country by becoming responsible citizens. Our vertical loyalty to God is our motivation for our horizontal responsibility to our land and one another.  Loyalty to God is not just incompatible with love of country; more so, it is the very inspiration of the faithful to become agents of transformation in our land.

I submit that this is one constructive interpretation of the spirit of Jesus’ words in today’s gospel (Mt. 22: 15-21).  Outsmarting those who put him under the trap of choosing between loyalties to either God and the Emperor, Jesus gives an elusive answer but with a sound logic of its own when he says “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

One easy interpretation of this passage tends to see in these words the radical autonomy between political and religious spheres. These two spheres, in this view, may not be in opposition with each other but they have nothing to do with each other.  This is “to-each-his-own view” or the “two-kingdom theory.”  But this interpretation which simply juxtaposes the two spheres would imply that Caesar and God are of equal footing.  This is very unlikely because it is horrible to see Jesus proposing equality of authority between God and the emperor.  No! That’s the height of blasphemy!  Jesus has been clear and passionate about reserving the absolute sovereignty of God and his Kingdom. Everything else for him is secondary.

While we render basic respect to our earthly rulers, as it is demanded by the common good in the temporal order, we’ve got to uphold that respect under our total submission to the sovereignty of God. In the words of Roland J. Faley, TOR: “The response to God must be total, not in any way divided. Questions of civil authority are secondary, even peripheral.  In submitting totally to the sovereignty of God, the concerns of lesser authorities will be met. But allegiance to God must be seen as absolute.”

God’s will for humanity and the social order must be the vantage point from which we ought to cooperate with other necessary authorities in ensuring the common good.  God wills that we all live in peaceful, harmonious, just and loving communities.   Therefore, a Christian who believes in this loving God is necessarily a responsible citizen ever ready to throw his hat into the ring of nation-building.  The aim is to build our societies according to God’s design.  Measures that run contrary to God’s precepts will have moral repercussions.  

I’m aware that proclaiming God’s sovereign will is, at the least, unpopular particularly these days when societies are becoming more and more secular and even, I say this with shivers, Godless.  I think humanity has come to the height of its arrogance by relegating to the sidelines the God who sustains everything believing that humanity’s intelligence and creativity is sufficient.  The more power a sector of humanity wields, the more arrogant they become. And what is the result of this arrogance? See for yourself.  Look around.  I have a feeling that almost everything is falling apart.  When we realize how broken this world has become, it’s funny we ask “Where’s God?” “How can a loving God allow these things, these sufferings to happen?”

An appeal then to those who remain faithful to God:  Let our loyalty to God’s will propel us to become responsible citizens... not arrogant citizens... citizens who continue to hold God’s vision as our direction for establishing a truly humane society, respecting and cooperating with rightful and conscientious authorities.  Let us not be the cause of the brokenness of this world because of our human conceit.  Let us be the source of healing instead.  With unwavering faith only in God, we toil and pray that the Lord may heal our land—this includes Caesar or whoever represents him in our contemporary system of governance because, he likes it or not, he could use some sincere prayers.

“Kristiyano ako, kaya makabayan!”  God bless us.

God's Disappointment (27th Sunday Ordinary A)

As a young priest then, I had been given a rare opportunity to start a parish out of a rural community. The enthusiasm of the parishioners was its greatest asset.  But the material and financial resources needed to begin though gave me anxious and sleepless nights. I wrote to friends asking for help and, you see, the blessings came in pouring! Hence, the parish gradually took off quite decently. This privileged experience of being blessed with supportive friends awakened in me a deep sense of gratitude and faith in the abiding presence of God. Once in the silence of the night, I prayed in tears thanking God for the privilege.

Blessings are meant to stir up in us the sense of gratitude, service and worship. But I am aware too that blessings and privileges can lead us to opposite directions. They can be intoxicating like any other good things in life.  They can lead us to a sense of entitlement instead of gratitude. When this happens we begin to demand rather than serve; we crave for more blessings and privileges no longer as a gift but as a matter of right. We enjoy and love them even more than we enjoy and love the Giver Himself, the God of providence. If we allow this to happen, we end up a real disappointment to God.

Jesus, in today’s gospel (Mt. 21:33-43), narrates another parable to express his disappointment with the religious leaders and elders of the people of Israel.  The Parable of the Tenants is a criticism of their leadership. Symbolized by the tenants, they were the ones entrusted with the care of “the vineyard”-- the chosen people of God.  The privilege of being the guardian of the elect people of God intoxicated them.  They began to act as if they own the vineyard. They refused to give an accounting of their produce to the owner and worse, they rejected and killed the owner’s emissaries and even the Son himself.  The parable shows the fact that the Jewish religious leaders forgot their true mandate—to bring the people of God to authentic worship and fidelity to God’s covenant with them. They were so blinded by their revered religious position that they rejected the prophets’ call for reform. They rejected even Jesus and his proclamation of the Kingdom of God. In short, they were a real disappointment.  The privileges given them ought to be revoked: “Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit” (v. 43).

The privilege of the special election of the people of Israel was supposedly a blessing that ought to bring out a grateful response that leads to faithfulness in God’s will.  But, alas, this did not transpire. They were so engrossed with the privilege and their sense of entitlement that they grew oblivious of the God who elected them and made them special.

Moving beyond the original intent of the parable, I believe we can appropriate its challenge for us today.  Are we not disappointing God with how we manage every form of blessing and privilege he has entrusted to us? Looking around, I’m afraid I have to say that God must be disappointed.

God shares with us his abundance.  Wealth is a gift and a blessing. It ensures that we all live in dignity. But people tend to hoard this blessing only for the elite few. The gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. So that some are living in luxury while others are subjected to subhuman conditions for want of basic necessities in life.  God’s abundance is also manifested in creation. If we look at our natural resources, we have exploited it without qualms. Our unbridled consumerism and wasteful lifestyle are taking their toll on the sustainability of creation. Did we not hear it said that we need four planets like Earth for us to catch up with the on-going feverish demand of our consumption?

God shares with us his power and authority.  These are necessary for the service of the common good. But look how we have been misusing these blessings as the very force that sustains and builds up the culture of corruption in every nook and cranny of the corridors of power. See how we have transformed these very blessings into a Machiavellian principle of oppressing the weak in order to perpetuate self-aggrandizement. 

God gives us the blessing of human sexuality that we may have the capacity for intimate relationship and to be God’s co-creator.  But we have allowed this sacred gift to deteriorate into a lucrative commodity in pornography and prostitution.  We want to enjoy the pleasure it brings but we deliberately avoid the procreative responsibility for which it is naturally meant. And what more, our societies have enshrined into law the basis for contraceptive mentality and culture of “safe sex” in the guise of concern for the plight of the poor!  

We can go on and on with a litany of blessings and privileges God has conferred on us and come to an honest assessment that God is most likely disappointed with us. It’s good to ask this on a personal level:  What are the blessings and privileges that I am enjoying in life? Have these led me to a grateful disposition and hence to a loving service of God’s people and intimate relationship with God?

Let us not push God to the end of his rope.  When God is disappointed with us, we ought to remember that He who confers can take back the blessings and privileges when these no longer serve their rightful purpose.