Empty Tomb (Easter Sunday ABC)

On the 26th of February, year 2010, the last Jesuit missionary who left the Prelature of Ipil (in the Province of Zamboanga Sibugay) after serving for 43 years in building up the Christian communities, passed away. Fr. Angel Antonio, SJ, was well loved by the people he had served because of his simplicity, self-giving, and his gentle and loving manner of shepherding the flock. He died in his new assignment as spiritual director and confessor at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Cagayan de Oro City. On his death, the people of the Prelature of Ipil expressed their ardent desire to have the remains of Fr. Angel buried in Ipil as he had been their pastor practically the whole of his life... 43 years! However, to their dismay, the decision to have his burial in Cagayan de Oro City prevailed.

At the funeral mass, the words of Archbishop Ledesma moved many of the people from Ipil almost to tears. He said something to this effect: “The people of the Prelature of Ipil loved Fr. Angel so much that they wanted him to be buried there. Since it is not going to happen, it will not be a surprise if the people of the Prelature of Ipil put up an empty tomb for their beloved pastor.”

An empty tomb for a beloved pastor! The idea moved me to tears of joy having in the back of my mind its hopeful Easter connotations. The empty tomb, once created, will be a powerful reminder to the people that their pastor lives. He continues to live in their hearts; he lives in the love of God.

In the eyes of Easter faith, the empty tomb brings home the message that death has not the last word. Life triumphs! The eyes of Easter faith see so much meaning in the emptiness of a grave because of two kinds of vision: The vision of love and the vision of hope.

The Vision of Love. The gospel reading (Jn 20:1-9) this Easter Sunday recounts how the disciples discovered the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene first sees the stone already removed from the tomb. Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved come next to witness after having been informed by her. While they share the same experience, the gospel writer highlights the fact that it is the beloved disciple who comes to believe: “He saw and believed” (v. 8). While the others do not understand as yet the meaning of the empty tomb, the beloved disciple, who has had a strong bond of love with the Lord, sees through the emptiness the truth that the beloved Master is alive. His heart is sensitized by the experience of Jesus’ love to grasp quite easily through the sign of the empty tomb the Easter truth that the beloved Master lives.

Love begets faith. Hence, I would like to believe that the depth of the joy of our Easter celebration depends so much on the quality of love we have shared with the Lord and with one another. A heart that has grown fonder to the Lord each day is one that will certainly rejoice in the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection. The flock who shared among themselves and with their pastor so many years of loving will certainly see through the sign of the empty tomb that their pastor, Fr. Angel, lives.

The Vision of Hope. There is more to the empty tomb than just an historical or archaeological import. The empty tomb is a theological illumination of the anxious groping in the darkness of Good Friday which is disturbingly expressed by the dying Messiah himself: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Good Friday, with its impenetrable darkness, easily leads to despair. The empty tomb of Easter, however, opens up the eyes of hope and dispels the defeatist summon to despair. The empty tomb reveals that God does not abandon whom he loves even at times when he is frighteningly silent. It turns Easter into a season of hope, a season that heightens our awareness of God’s presence in spite of the evidence of his absence.

How many terrible stories of suffering and brokenness I’ve heard in my ministry! Oftentimes, I wonder how people manage to move on given the miserable and hapless situations they are in. But they do move on even if their unsettling questions remained unanswered, their burdens not lifted. It is in these people that I actually encounter existential hope. They are the Easter people who, while struggling in life, have seen the empty tomb as a guarantee that suffering and death have been vanquished; everlasting joy and life triumph. The Messiah lives and is victorious!

This season of Easter then is an invitation to cultivate love, to make our hearts sensitive to the presence of the Risen Lord among us. It is a summons too to see beyond our suffering and move on in life with hope.

Do This in Remembrance of Me (Lord's Supper)

When a person is dying, he gains clarity of understanding about what is essential. About what matters most. About what is important in life. And before he dies, he sees to it that what he has grasped so clearly be communicated to the people he cares about. He tells them what matters most even as a farewell message.

One way to see the great significance of what we are celebrating now in this liturgy is to contemplate it as the last wishes of Jesus who was about to face his death. On the night before he died, he left his disciples with farewell words. Farewell words and gestures. On this night he revealed to them what matters to him. The desires of his heart.

On the same night he was betrayed, Scripture says, Jesus took bread and cup, gave them to his disciples as his body and blood. He said to them, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The Last Supper, the eucharist, is important for our Lord. He wants all of us to gather in this meal; and in this celebration, to remember him.

Notice that there is a significant parallelism between this and the account of the first reading on the jewish Passover meal. In the Jewish Passover meal, a lamb is slain. The lamb’s blood is smeared on the doorpost of the houses of the people of God to save them from death. The lamb’s flesh became their food that night. And the people of God were to commemorate this meal year after year… so that they would not forget… so that they will always remember for ages to come that Yahweh their God loves them and have saved them.

On the night before Jesus died, he offered himself as the Lamb of God. His body and blood was to be the supreme sacrifice so that death, the ultimate result of our sins, will never, ever, touch us his beloved.

My dear friends, whenever we gather to celebrate the eucharist just as we do now, the Lord is inviting us to remember the essential truth that God loves us dearly and continues to save us from the clutches of our sins. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Jesus says to us. Perhaps in a very personal way, he is saying to you and me just before he dies, “I want you to know and to always remember…always… how much I love you.”

Another desire of our Lord could have not been communicated more clearly. By the washing of the feet, He shows his ardent desire that just as he loves us so much, we also have to love one another by serving and caring for one another.

While they were at supper, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Peter was kind of uneasy with Jesus’ gesture. Yes, he was uneasy because washing feet is a lowly task of a servant. Jesus is his Master. How could he let him stoop down and wash his dirty feet! It was indeed an awkward scenario for the disciples. But Jesus did not feel awkward doing this. Why? Because he had been doing that all his life. All through out his ministry, he had shown his deep concern and love for the people. He was always with the poor, the sinners, the outcast, the oppressed. He served them with compassion. He was always in the business of washing feet. No. Not the well-pedicured… but the dirty feet.

So that just before he died, he made sure that his disciples would see this with clarity. After washing their feet, he addressed them saying, “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

To love is to serve. This evening, the Lord wants us to remember that.

My dear friends, as we continue this celebration, I invite you to approach this event with a contemplative heart. A heart that sees in the rituals and symbolic gestures the presence of our Lord. When we continue with the act of washing the feet, let Jesus, who is about to die, be present in our hearts and let us feel and experience his intensity, his urgent desire to tell us about what is important. Love, in its most active mode, is serving one another. This is essential.

When we break bread and drink from the cup, let us experience once again, that same self-sacrifice he did at last supper. Let us remember him, the Lord… him who loves us dearly so as to lay down everything. This is his request before he died… “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Wounds that Truly Hurt (Passion Sunday B)

We have to live with the fact that it is people we love that we hurt and that can hurt us the most. Wounds inflicted by enemies make of us a warrior, even fiercer than we ever had been before.  But wounds caused by a loved one send us sobbing in real pain and helplessness to a corner. And it is the inner wound in our being that truly hurts more than the physical wound that we endure momentarily. Physical wounds heal naturally leaving only some scars for reminder.

But often, we readily take notice of the external wounds oblivious of the greater pain that cuts deep inside.  Once I facilitated a Lenten retreat among lay leaders and Eucharistic ministers.  To help them begin with a proper disposition, I let them watch Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. The film was in Aramaic but people understood it just the same and they were moved because of the graphic presentation of the passion of Jesus Christ. Many sobbed while watching Jesus receiving the blows and lashes.  Their hearts went with him as they saw the gaping wounds all over his body. Some could not stand watching the horrible manner with which Jesus’ torturers crucified him. The torture was too much. Perhaps, it was intentionally portrayed so by the film-makers to highlight the suffering of Christ and to evoke remorse from the viewers. In this aspect, the film is a tremendous success.

However, the film may put us into the risk of not noticing the real pain that Jesus endured the most as we can be transfixed by the gaping wounds, horrible bruises, and trembling hands nailed onto the wood. The gospel of Mark in today’s readings (Mk. 14:1—15:47) narrates the passion of Christ in a rather plain-spoken manner, characteristically devoid of descriptive details. Mark is contented for instance in reporting quite plainly that “they crucified him and divided up his garments by rolling dice for them to see what each should take. It was about nine in the morning when they crucified him.” That simple. No mention of blood spurting.

The simplicity of Mark’s narration however allows us to notice the wounds inflicted not by Jesus’ enemies but by his loved ones.  Let me point out four wounds that must have truly and deeply hurt him:

The wound inflicted by a kiss. A kiss is the sweetest greeting between friends. Judas turned this gesture into an act of betrayal.  Jesus had to endure being betrayed by one of his closest friends, a member of his most intimate circle of followers. Jesus was sold by a friend.  The kiss left no physical mark of wound; but it certainly cut deep inside the heart of the betrayed.

The wound inflicted by words of denial. “I don’t even know the man you are talking about!” Mark reports Peter saying this at the third instance of his denial.  Peter was the most trusted and depended on by Jesus among the apostles. Jesus even gave him the name, Peter, which means rock, because Jesus believed in his strength of character and his leadership.  With Peter’s denial, Jesus again must have experienced deep wounds that truly hurt him. There were no marks of lashes left by the words of denial; but certainly the pain of rejection reverberates deep inside.

The wound inflicted by false accusation and conviction.  The very people who chanted the Hosannas as Jesus entered Jerusalem are the same people who later demanded his crucifixion.  From the words of blessing—“Hosanna! Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord!”—to the words of curse and unfair conviction—“Crucify him! Crucify him!” How painful it is to see people who once believed in you now hand you over to death like a criminal!

The wound inflicted by the silence of the dearest of all. The Father was everything to Jesus. He was Jesus’ source of meaning and being. It was to Him that Jesus had complete trust and obedience. During this horrible moment of Jesus’ passion, however, the Father, the dearest of all, was silent. Distant. Tolerant of all the evil deeds inflicted upon his beloved Son. When Jesus was about to die, he cried out what must have been the most excruciating pain he had to endure as a man and as a Son: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The wound of total abandonment by the beloved Father was perhaps the greatest suffering Jesus had to bear.

Such is the suffering of Jesus Christ. His physical wounds were nothing compared to what lashed and cut him at the core of his being.

We have the capacity to hurt the Lord because he loves us. We hurt him with our betrayal. We hurt him with our denial. We hurt him with our false accusation and conviction. We hurt him when we give him a cold shoulder when he calls us.

We hurt each other too with these same wounds. We have to remember that the wounds inflicted by people dear to us are the most painful. On this Passion Sunday, we are invited to a humble examination of our way of loving.  We may have been inflicting wounds on one another. We are invited too towards the only way of healing these deep wounds—the way of forgiveness and reconciliation.

“I love you Lord... and I hurt you... I hurt too people I love. Please... forgive me!”

Unless We Die (5th Sunday Lent B)

Our natural instinct is self-preservation.  We protect ourselves from harm and, as much as possible, from death.  Dying is something we avoid thinking about. We dread it because it is destructive.  But much as we want to deny it, death is a process we will certainly all go through. The death of Jesus Christ on the cross, when we give it a serious look, transforms our attitude and the meaning we give to death. 

The story of Richie Fernando, a young Filipino Jesuit missionary in Cambodia, can help us gain an insight into this Christ-transformed understanding of death.  Before ordination to the priesthood, Richie was sent to Cambodia and worked as a teacher in a technical school for the handicapped.  He loved his students and allowed them to share with him their stories. He would write to a friend in the Philippines and express his joy in giving his life in the service of the handicapped:  “I know where my heart is, It is with Jesus Christ, who gave his all for the poor, the sick, the orphan ...I am confident that God never forgets his people: our disabled brothers and sisters. And I am glad that God has been using me to make sure that our brothers and sisters know this fact. I am convinced that this is my vocation.”

On October 17, 1996, one of Richie’s students, Sarom, a landmine victim who had been feared because of his disruptive behaviour and had been asked to leave by the school authorities, came to the school for a meeting.  Out of anger, he pulled out a grenade from his bag and moved towards a classroom full of students. Richie came up behind Sarom and restrained him. While struggling, Sarom dropped the grenade behind Richie and that instance spelled the death of the young missionary.  In trying to save the lives of others, Richie gave up his own.  

Richie’s life, I believe, was characterized by self-giving.  Before his untimely death, he had been dying every day to self with his decision to give his life in the service of the poor and the handicapped of Cambodia.  His death was a culmination of a life totally given to others and to Jesus.

Today’s gospel reading (Jn 12:20-33) offers us the clearest illustration of the relationship between dying and attaining new life: “Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Dying and rising to new life is central to our Lenten celebration which allows us to reflect on the paschal mystery of Christ. Jesus Christ is the grain of wheat.  He has to submit himself to death that he may conquer it by his resurrection. This is at the heart of Lent.

A disciple of Christ has to be like him, a grain of wheat ready to give up everything in dying in order to usher in the fullness of life.  The true following of Christ is not easy.  Real discipleship is not cheap. The way is costly. Discipleship requires our dying to oneself every day. Following Christ does not right away mean offering one’s life big time on the cross. The magnanimity and courage of the heart to give up everything in death do not come to us automatically as part of our nature.  What is natural to us is self-preservation. Self-sacrifice is transcending what is natural with the aid of grace. It has to be nurtured by our decisions to die a little each day by way of our acts of self-denial.  When we forget ourselves because our concern is the welfare of those who need our service and love, we have died to our selfishness.

Death for a believer, therefore, is already a consummation of a life spent in daily self-offering.  The destructive nature of death then, as in the destructiveness of the cross of Christ, is overcome by freely embracing death in self-giving just as Jesus Christ embraced his death in total surrender to the will of the Father. 

Our Lenten journey to Easter reminds us that there is no escaping the process of dying in our way to everlasting life.  We cannot eliminate the cross on our way to glory. There is no such thing as Christianity without the cross.  In fact, the way of the cross is the only way Christ has chosen to take in order to bring new life to all. The way of the cross is the Christian way of life and the way to life.

Richie Fernando gave up his life that all those whom he loved, his handicapped students, may have life.  His death culminated his earthly life characterized by daily self-giving.  He has lived the fullness of life that a faithful disciple could wish for.  Like Richie, we are invited to go beyond our self-preserving instinct.  We are called to transcend our self-love.  Dying each day to our selfishness and egoism liberates us to care for and serve others.  This is, perhaps, the greatest paradox in life: When we die each day in self-giving, it is when we gain the freedom to live our lives to the full. And when in death, we surrender humbly and trustingly everything to God, death loses its sting and eternal life shines brightly.

“The man who loves his life loses it, while the man who hates his life in this world preserves it to life eternal.”

Gratuitous Love (4th Sunday Lent B)

Gratuity is an uncommon word as the concept itself is quite strange in this profit-oriented society.  In this era when economic gain seems to be the be-all-and-end-all of life, we easily acquiesce to the principle that nothing comes for free.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch, we say.  Everything has a price.  Everything has to be paid.  Even in the theological exposition of the “economy of salvation,” the expiation framework easily makes sense to most of us:  The cross of Christ is some kind of a payment for our sins. To be saved from sin, someone has to pay the price. This logic we understand quite readily.

The readings today, fortunately, offer us another way of understanding the mystery of our salvation.  The readings invite us to see our relationship with God from the point of view of God’s gratuitous love.  For this we need to let go first of our fixation to concepts like profit, interest, price, payment.  We need to accept the principle of gratuity:  The best things in life are for free.  The nearest common concept to gratuity, I think, is gift-giving.  But again, even this concept has been tainted with self-interest as in the case of our exchange-gift-Christmas-party favourite.  We give and expect to receive.  All too often, we are robbed of the joy of pure giving when we fail to receive what we have expected to.

Something is gratuitous when it is offered unwarranted, undeserved, unmerited.  It is pure gift. Not demanded nor bought.  God’s love to us is gratuitous. This is illustrated in our first reading (2 Chr 36: 14-16, 19-23), when God inspired Cyrus, the King of Persia, to free the Israelites from Babylonian captivity.  This loving act of deliverance was unmerited by an unfaithful people.  Despite their sins, the people of Israel were restored to their own land.  St. Paul expresses this in the second reading (Eph 2:4-10) with more clarity of insight into God’s undeserved love and mercy: Brothers and sisters, God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ... For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast (vv. 4-9). 

Clear as daylight. We did not deserve to be cared for.  We were sinful, unfaithful, hard-headed, proud, and selfish. Despite these, we were saved from the very sins that had brought death upon us.  Such is the greatness of God’s love. Gratuitous indeed!

Moreover, today’s gospel (Jn 3: 14-21) highlights God’s love as his own initiative of giving up his only Son that we may have eternal life: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. The Son of God is lifted up on the cross as God’s ultimate act of sacrificial love.  Through this sacrificial love, our enslavement to sin has been broken.  Selfishness has been overcome by total self-giving.  And by Christ’s resurrection, death is vanquished; eternal life dawns for all of us who believe.  And all of these come to us for free.  It’s pure gift.  If there’s one thing we can be sure of about what God is not, God is every inch not a businessman!

In this season of Lent, we may do well to heed these following invitations:

Conviction.  Are we convinced of the gratuity of God’s love for us? Isn’t it the case that often we are practically incredulous of God’s capacity to love us despite our unworthiness? In our relationship with God, we allow our sense of unworthiness to get in the way.  We still think that we can only come to God when we are worthy; so, when we are not (which is often the case), we keep God at bay.  Lent is an opportunity to strengthen our conviction about God’s gratuitous love for us.  It is God’s grace which makes us worthy of him. We need to surrender to this truth and there can be no stronger proof of his unconditional love than the fact that, by God’s initiative, his beloved Son was lifted up on the cross... that we may have life.

Celebration.  A true disciple of Christ has all the reasons to be joyful. This season invites us to celebrate the joy of being loved gratuitously.  This is an invitation to a joyful spirituality, living each day with the delight that the new life in Christ brings, living in a loving relationship with God with utmost confidence in God’s unfailing fidelity, if not in our own capacity to be faithful.  May this season help us to truly relish with joy our freedom from sin and death won for us by Christ through his cross and resurrection. 

Commitment.   We have been loved unconditionally.  God loves us not because we are good.  God loves us despite ourselves. He loves us warts and all. His love is not because of our merit.  His love is pure gift.  Every day we receive his grace and we experience his mercy as gift. This experience of gratuity invites us to a commitment to self-giving, to be a man-and-woman-for-others, to serve without asking for reward, to give to those who cannot give back. 

May the Lenten discipline transform us into the effective signs of the presence of God’s gratuitous love amid this society which puts a tag price to just everything.

God’s Temple (3rd Sunday Lent B)

In Fr. Niall O’Brien’s best-seller prison diary, Revolution from the Heart, this Columban missionary unfolds the story of his twenty-year mission in the island of Negros.  Central to this story is the struggle of the “Basic Christian communities” for liberation from poverty and oppression in the times of Marcos dictatorship.  I remember reading the portion when Fr. O’brien went for his sabbatical and found himself in the gigantic and elaborate Church edifices of Europe. There he couldn’t help but notice the paradox: Huge and intricately ornamented churches but very few people to worship God.  Back in Negros, the barrio chapels were just a little better than crudely built shacks, but they were packed with the communities of the poor worshipping the Lord and drawing from one another the hope they so badly needed in the midst of oppression.

True worship springs from a community of people inspired by the Spirit of the Risen Lord.  Worship is not tied to physical location like a well-ornamented temple.  There can be no authentic worship in an empty shrine. We can claim this truth now because Jesus has revealed it to his followers through the mystery of his death and resurrection.

The gospel reading of today (Jn 2:13-25), Jesus’ cleansing of the temple of Jerusalem, lends itself to a better understanding of the real temple where God can truly be worshipped. After driving out with a whip the sheep and oxen being sold inside the temple area, after overturning the tables of the money-changers telling them to stop making his Father’s house a marketplace, Jesus was confronted by the Jews with a demand for a sign: “What sign can you show us for doing this?” To which Jesus answered: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

The Jews of course could not understand.  Jesus was no longer speaking on the natural plane. His reference to the temple was no longer the material edifice.  It was naturally impossible to rebuild in three days a massive temple constructed for about forty-six years.  Jesus was speaking on the spiritual plane.  The temple which was to be destroyed and later be raised up was his body.

The gospel of John uses this incident as one of the signs.  This is the sign of substitution.  Jesus replaces the material temple where God, as the Jews used to believe, dwells and is exclusively worshipped.  Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the temple is superseded by the new reality of a “Spirit-filled” Christ.  Jesus Christ is the new temple. By his resurrection he becomes the locus of the presence of God. And this truth revolutionizes the way we experience and worship God.  We encounter and worship God whenever and wherever we gather and pray in the name of the risen Lord as a people.  Our relationship with God is no longer dependent on a particular location.  God is not confined to the temple or cathedral. God dwells in us.  St. Paul says: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16).

Some implications:

In our pastoral concerns, according to PCP II’s vision, the building up of the communities of disciples or the basic ecclesial communities should then take precedence over our concern for church edifice and its beautification. The two, of course, do not necessarily contradict.  It gives a lot of joy and comfort to the worshiping community when our church buildings are spacious, clean and beautiful.  But, again, they are only beautiful in as much as there is a community that brings life to authentic worship.  Let us not allow our priorities (time, resources and energy) to be skewed on favour of inanimate edifice to the detriment of our task in community building. Several times I celebrated the Eucharist in the simple chapels of the barrios and they are the best experiences of worship I ever had.  It’s not because of the location or building but because of the Spirit of the Lord who is alive in the community.
  

Our worship does not end in the church where we celebrate the liturgy.  We are the temples of God.  Our life and all that we do outside the church must also be an expression of our worship.  We see then a continuity of our liturgical celebrations in the church with our day-to-day life.  We worship God in and outside the church, by way of piety and by way of charity and commitment to social justice. Our participation in the Alay-Kapwa Lenten campaign is part and parcel of our meaningful worship.

In this season of Lent, therefore, we are invited to encounter and worship God, first, in our meaningful liturgical celebrations that usher us, as a community, into a deeper relationship with God, second, in our commitments to social charity reaching out to the poor and needy members of the community, and third, in our personal sanctification as the temple of God by way of repentance, striving to become worthy of God’s presence in our hearts.