Doors (21st Sunday Ordinary C)

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In her book, Open the Door, a contemporary spiritual writer, Joyce Rupp creatively explores the many and varied ways through which the image of a door can help us in our inner journey to our true selves. At first, she invites her readers to open the door of their hearts in order to discover the still unraveled beauty and truth within them and even to encounter the Divine Presence within. Later, she counsels them too to have the courage, at some crucial points in life, to close the door as a decisive act of leaving behind everything that hinders their growth towards authenticity and fuller union with God.

There is, indeed, a time to open and a time to close the door. An open door invites and welcomes; a closed door protects that which is cherished inside and excludes the unwanted. This gives us insight into the spiritual rhythm of opening and closing the invisible door of our hearts.

The image of a door is used by Jesus in today’s gospel reading (Lk 13:22-30). To the question whether only few people will be saved Jesus responds quite obliquely with the images of a narrow door and a closed door:

“Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough. After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door, then will you stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us’” (v. 24-25).

Image of a Narrow Door. The image of the narrow door conveys both opportunity and difficulty. It invites yet it suggests some degree of struggle. Hence, approaching the narrow door is not by a leisurely walk as strolling in a park. It demands resolve and commitment to give one’s best to be able to enter.

The door to salvation is open for all. Everyone is invited to enter but is reminded of the necessity of striving hard as the passage to salvation is made difficult by our proclivity to sin. God’s grace and mercy is offered for all but our blind sinful inclinations may continue to reject this precious gift; our self-centeredness and foolish pride continues to glorify nothing but ourselves; our attachment to things, power, and fame may rob us of our freedom to choose God. Hence, Jesus warns us of this tendency to be complacent and evokes our free commitment to choose God as our fundamental orientation in our everyday life.

Image of a Closed Door. The closed door further conveys a day of definitive reckoning when those who persisted in their evil deeds will be excluded from the kingdom of God.  “And there will be wailing and grinding of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves cast out” (v. 28). With the image of a locked door, Jesus delivers his caution with a twist of irony for those who tend to live with an easy assurance of salvation out of privilege. Jesus warns that those who have enjoyed proximity to the master, those who “ate and drank” in his company, will not be acknowledged by the master after all because of their evil deeds. They will be locked out. While people from afar, from the east and west, from the north and south, will have their place at the table in the eschatological banquet.

Salvation, then, is not a matter of privilege given to chosen elite who enjoyed familiarity and physical proximity to the Lord like the Jewish people. Salvation is an invitation given to all people, i.e. even to the gentiles. What it requires is a personal response. The theological question concerning the number of those who will be saved is not actually important after all. What matters most is the existential striving and personal commitment of every person to respond to the invitation through his moral decisions and actions in life.

The Door of our Hearts. It is not farfetched, hence, to say that the image of the narrow or closed door may appropriately represent the door of our hearts. More often than not, we are the ones making it difficult for God’s love and mercy to enter our hearts. Many times we shut Him out because we desire other things in life; we close the door of our hearts because we are afraid to let God take control of our lives. So exteriorly we try to live as near as possible to God but our hearts remain distant.  We carry the name of Christ as his baptized disciples and we spend our time in pious devotions calling him, “Lord, Lord…” but we never care to discern in our hearts his will, much less, to live it out in loving obedience.  

Joyce Rupp asks her readers to open the door of their hearts. Let us open our hearts to God. We will be surprised how well He fits in, for His love and mercy is our heart’s ultimate delight. Rupp also reminds of the necessity of closing the door.  Let us then muster our courage to close the door of our hearts to our self-centeredness and pride and to all our hurts caused by sin.

  

The Fire of Jesus (20th Sunday Ordinary C)

Fire is dangerous. We all learn this important lesson early on in life. In my case I learned it with fear and trembling as a helpless child having to witness the small town of Ipil being razed in fire. I saw this awesome power of fire not only once. Ipil was set on fire again on mysteriously the same date, May 11 of one of the ensuing years. And this was not it. On April 4, 1995, as a grown-up, I survived the “Ipil Massacre” during which the town was set ablaze once more by the Abu Sayaff terrorists and was reduced to ashes.

It’s no small wonder that I and many others would have a hard time dealing with Jesus of today’s gospel (Lk 12:49-53). Jesus announces his mission of setting the earth on fire: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (v. 49).  What?! Is this really Jesus speaking?

The Danger of Discipleship. Our difficulty most probably stems from a sanitized image of Jesus. We have gotten used to seeing Jesus as kind, meek, and merciful. We would imagine him probably as gentle and soft-spoken. And we have come to love Jesus the nice guy. What more, for many, they prefer to deal exclusively with the cute Santo Niño as he is absolutely adorable and fun to relate with. With this favorite but deficient Christological view, we certainly cringe at the thought that Jesus and what He stands for is actually dangerous. And unless we face the truth that Jesus’ mission is dangerous, we will never see the meaning of today’s gospel and we will never know Jesus deeper and hence we will never become his true disciples.  

While gentleness and compassion especially towards the lowly and the suffering are truly Jesus’ qualities, He was nonetheless firm and disturbing towards the self-righteous and the conceited. For the oppressors of the little ones, Jesus was indeed dangerous. His eventual lot on the cross speaks volume about how the world wished and plotted to put off the dangerous fire of Jesus. Jesus’ friends and close followers had a real sense of the danger of standing for Christ and his message.  But they embraced him with total dedication. John the Baptist lost his head. Peter was crucified upside down. Most of the apostles and disciples were persecuted and died as martyrs. Hundred other followers ended up as Nero’s torches.

Today, we tend to turn a blind eye to this disconcerting aspect of Christ and his message. We want a cozy type of discipleship. We want security and comfort. We pray only for blessings. We don’t want a share of the cross. The first homily of Pope Francis was more to the point as he warned his audience: "When we walk without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, and when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly; we are bishops, priests, cardinals, Popes, but not disciples of the Lord.” Pope Francis surely inspires us. He is on fire.

Transformative Christian Message. Fire is not only dangerous. It is also an awesome force of transformation. Nothing that fire touches remains ever the same. Whatever is set on fire is bound to change. Each time the town of Ipil was set on fire, the town was never the same again. The old structures were consumed and turned into ashes. But new and better structures arose later.

Jesus and his message are transformative. Jesus disturbs and calls for change. When He declares how He wants to see the earth ablaze and announces that He brings not peace but division, Jesus is saying: “Do not think that I came to leave you in peace, no, I came to disturb, to upset and to change things. The world will never be the same after I have thrown fire on it” (John Fuellenbach, Throw Fire).

The dangerous fire of Jesus is meant to consume the world’s old structures of sin dominated by evil, self-centeredness, pride, greed, injustices, etc. And how we all should wish with Jesus that these were already blazing so that transformation may come! How we all should wish that the new structures of grace were put in place, that love reigns with justice and peace for the people of God. How we all should feel the anguish of our Lord until the reign of God takes hold of the entire world.

Spirituality of Social Transformation. Are our hearts burning with the fire of Jesus? We can only answer yes when we courageously embrace the danger of being a follower and when we assume the same transformative vision of Jesus. Many a Christian have grown cold and bored because they just want to stay in the safety of their comfort zones concerned solely about the good of the self.  Again Pope Francis warns the Church of this same sickness and wishes her to risk:

“We need to come out of ourselves and head for the periphery… It is true that going out onto the street implies the risk of accidents happening… But if the Church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age… and if I had to choose between a wounded Church that goes out onto the streets and a sick withdrawn Church, I would definitely choose the first one.”

To have the fire of Jesus in our hearts is to be disturbed, shaken, and awakened from the slumber of our passivity or even apathy in the midst of the world’s sinfulness and neglect of the weak. Kindling the fire of Jesus in our hearts is an invitation to a spirituality of social transformation—a spirituality that brings the rich resources of our Christian faith outside the confines of the beautiful adoration chapels onto the streets, the slum, the malls, the halls of power, and everywhere. This spirituality is dangerous and risky. But we have to embrace it, as did the close friends of Jesus, if we were to be faithful to the Lord who wishes to set the earth on fire and to see it blazing.

Vigilance (19th Sunday Ordinary C)

What would you be doing if today were to be your last day?

Perhaps you would drop all your non-essential preoccupations and spend your precious time, instead, with your loved ones to tell them you love them. Or visit your friends and thank them for the joy and support they have given you throughout life. Ask forgiveness from those whom you have caused pain and forgive those who have hurt you. Donate your possessions to those who are in need. Entrust everything to God as you spend silent moments in prayer. Etc.

When we are given a deadline in life, we gain a new perspective. We see things—the essential things—more clearly. And we gain a sense of urgency to fulfill these essential things lest we end up with irremediable regrets. But the problem is we don't often have a sense of deadline in life. We peacefully live with the illusion that we always have more time to do what is important, so that many of us have developed a ma ñana habit, eternally postponing for tomorrow what we ought to do today. Still some of us resort to sloth, or the " Juan Lazy " way of life, having less and less enthusiasm and energy for life's purpose and mission. Still others wait for the last minute to act, so they are always panicky and stressed rushing things in order to beat the deadline as it comes.

Vigilance. The gospel today (Lk 12:32-48) gives us that sense of deadline by reminding us of the coming of the Son of Man. Biblical scholarship suggests two meanings of this coming: One is the Parousia which is the second coming of Christ as our Judge to put a conclusion to the narrative of history and the other is the coming of our Lord in our personal death to conclude our earthly pilgrimage. In the parable of the servants awaiting their master's return from a wedding (v. 35-38), the servants are exhorted to be vigilant and prepared for the hour of the master's coming. The subsequent parable of the unexpected coming of a thief (v. 39-40) makes the point clear that the moment of the coming of the Son of Man is unknown: "You must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come" (v. 40).

Hence, we know there is a deadline but we don’t know when exactly is that moment when we will have to face our ultimate Judge either as a people or as an individual. The message then is clear: We must be prepared at all times. This is what vigilance means. Our universal call to holiness, to goodness, to human responsibility, to integrity, to love must be heeded not at the eleventh hour of our lives. In the first place, we often do not know when the eleventh hour is. Our call has to be heeded every day. We ought to fulfill what kind of persons we are called to become each and every day of our lives.  We cannot afford to procrastinate and decide to be good, generous, honest, holy and loving when we are already old and about to die. Our invitation is to develop habitual dispositions of goodness, integrity, holiness and love. This is how we make ourselves prepared always for the coming of the Lord.

Our initial question about what we would do on our last day is after all not a good question to start with. For it is not what we do on our last days that we are asked to be concerned about. That we should hurriedly catch up on doing important matters on the eleventh hour just betrays our lack of enthusiasm, sincerity, and commitment to our responsibilities as we moved on with life. Rather, it is what we have become at the end of our lives that counts most as we face our Judge. The process of becoming is not done on a single day or on the last day. The process requires every day. We become the kind of persons the Lord calls us to be as we commit to the values of the Kingdom every single day of our lives. This is vigilance.

What kind of person you shall have become when the Lord comes? This may guide and inspire us better to be faithful to our commitments every day.

Faithfulness and Prudence of a Steward. The last of the parables in today’s gospel (v. 42-48) suggests that upon his arrival the Master looks for his faithful and prudent steward. If He finds him being so, the Master will put him in charge of all his property. But if that servant abuses his Master’s trust, the Master will come unexpectedly and will mete out severe punishment and will assign this worthless servant “a place with the unfaithful.”

We are asked to become a faithful and prudent steward. What have we been entrusted with by the Lord? It is important that we understand that whatever is given us is meant for the service of God’s people. The authority, wealth, talents, skills, and other charisms we may have been given ought not to be abused through irresponsibility and self-centeredness. All of these are entrusted to us that we may serve well. We have to develop them and use these gifts every day not only for our own good but for the good of others and for the greater glory of the Master.  

When the Master arrives unexpectedly, be it on Judgment Day or on our own personal death, may we be found ready and worthy to be entrusted with all God's heavenly treasures, ready and worthy to recline at the table of God's heavenly banquet.

Of Vanities and Foolishness (18th Sunday Ordinary C)

Somebody sent me this piece of thought via facebook : The three stages of life—Teens. You have all the time and energy but no money; Workers. You have money and energy but no time; Oldies. You have money and time but no energy.

If the meaning of life were to be sought in purely materialistic terms, there is the inevitability of ending up with a pessimistic conclusion: Life is absurd and tragic. When the Dalai Lama was asked what surprised him most about humanity, he said: “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

The pessimism of Qoheleth in the first reading (Eccl 1:2; 2:21-23) expresses too the meaninglessness of man’s toil and anxiety of heart, as he would just leave his property to another who has not worked for it. For Qoheleth, “all things are vanity!” This pessimism propels us to search further for the enduring meaning of life. If material things and preoccupation with them leave our life in vain, what, then, makes a meaningful commitment and occupation in life?

The gospel reading (Lk 12:13-21) further presents what comprises our human folly. Christians ought to be wary of these three related forms of foolishness: Greed, Hedonism, and Materialism.

Greed.  Jesus, in the gospel, teaches the crowd: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions” (v. 15). Greed is a selfish insatiable desire for more material things, more wealth, more possessions. At heart, it is a disordered love for created things. It is not farfetched, then, for St. Paul to regard greed as a form of idolatry (Col 3:5). Greed is foolishness because it loves deliriously the wrong object. This disordered love leads to frustration and not satisfaction: “Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction“ (Erich Fromm).

Hedonism. The parable of the rich fool alludes too to the foolishness of the hedonist philosophy in life. The character in the parable hoards his bountiful harvest in his new and larger barns and plans for a life of comfort and pleasure. The rich fool says to himself: “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!” There are people who subscribe to a philosophy that glorifies pleasure as the principle of a meaningful life.  Yet experience tells us that pleasure are passing and does not makes us truly happy. Making it the ultimate goal in life leads to suffering because it only ushers us to an endless cycle of frustrating attempts to satisfy our desires. The cycle can lead to destructive patterns of addiction and all of life may be wasted.

Materialism.  The parable concludes with the reminder of the foolishness of materialism: “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” (v. 20).  Our contemporary lifestyle is materialistic. We are made to believe, by way of advertisements, that a good life is one that has acquired the latest gadgets, cars, and stuffs. Hence, we get up every day pursuing “earthly treasures,” accumulating more and more of material things.  We ignore the deepest longing and spiritual yearning of our hearts, hence we are never happy. And we will never be, as long as we persist in our foolish quest: “Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God” (v. 21).

In both the first reading and the gospel, the death of the man whose life is preoccupied with material pursuit exposes the vanity and foolishness of such preoccupation. Death, indeed, reveals to us what is essential. It gives us a clear perspective. I would like to suggest two Christian perspectives discernible in our readings today as our invitation: Christian Stewardship and the perspective of freedom.

Stewardship.  Material possessions and wealth are not evil in themselves. Rather, they are gifts entrusted to us by the abundance of nature and God’s providence. They have instrumental value. They are a means to our end, not our goal itself. They help us fulfill our mission. When material things are entrusted to us, we are invited to be a responsible steward. In the spirit of gratitude and generosity then, we are to share what we have been given to those who are in need.  Sharing becomes our way of loving. And we don’t love things; we love God and neighbor.

Freedom.  In this materialistic era, Christians ought to heed the gospel’s invitation to grow in freedom—freedom from and freedom for.  We need to be freed from our greed which enslaves us to our material desires. When our possessions possess us, we become slaves and no longer responsible stewards. We need to grow in our freedom from our inordinate attachments to created things. This allows us to be free for the Creator himself.  Real freedom is freedom for God, that capacity to choose God as our fundamental option and to love God above all else with ease. We are invited to grow in this ability to commit to “what matters to God,” to expend our energies in toiling for what endures—the real treasures in heaven.

When life is unreflected, it is not worth living. But when it is lived according to the gospel values, life finds its enduring meaning. It ceases from becoming a pitiful affair of vanities and foolishness.