The Gentle God (14th Sunday Ordinary A)

For many of us, it is a matter of course to believe in a powerful God.  We easily associate God with power. After all, the first assertion of our Christian faith is the belief in God, the Father Almighty. So, chances are your own image of God is one who can do just anything you can imagine with just a single snap of his fingers or perhaps, like how Harry Potter does it, with a simple wiggle of his magic wand.  He is a God who can make all his wishes come true no matter what, because if he cannot then he is not God.  This is how our human logic goes. We understand God’s power as his ability to bring just anything into existence. He has a say, therefore, on everything and exercises control over anything.  Hence, an awesome God... one in whose presence we tremble for in his hands rest the very existence of just everything under the sun.

God's power revealed in meekness. But wait a minute. Today’s readings offer us a glimpse of a quite different side of God.  A gentle and humble God.  The first reading for instance (Zec. 9:9-10) foretells the coming of the king as a just savior, meek and riding on an ass rather than on a majestic chariot.  This foreshadows the entrance of Christ to the city of Jerusalem.  He comes on an ass. Not majestic but humble. He brings not war but peace. Furthermore, the Gospel reading (Mt. 11:25-30) reveals the Lord as one who invites those who are tired to come to him for refreshment, for he is “gentle and humble of heart.” 

Can power, on the one hand, and gentleness and humility, on the other, come together?  It appears difficult but yes.  We find the juxtaposition difficult because we easily associate power with ability to dominate and control, with force, with authority, with the ability to make things happen despite all forms of resistance. Here power becomes imposing and far from being gentle.

The real power though, I submit, is not imposition or coercion. It is persuasion.  God’s power is persuasive. He invites. He presents what is good; manifests what is beautiful and true; offers what we can embrace as values. In other words, He attracts. Unlike the coercive power which works from outside by imposing its will, the persuasive power works from within and gently achieves cooperation.  Such is the power of God—the Gentle God. Another term for this persuasive power of God is love.

The Gentle God invites the weary to carry the yoke of love. “Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart” (Mt. 11: 28-29).

Here is a God who invites. He invites not the high and mighty but the weary and those burdened by life.  To them he offers refreshment and rest.  He assures them of his heart which is gentle and humble. But we have to take note that he does not dispense of the yoke to be carried: “Take my yoke upon your shoulders.”  Coming to him for rest does not mean a responsibility-free life.  To have rest in Christ does not mean doing nothing in life.  It means carrying the yoke of Jesus, which is the yoke of love.

The gentle God offers a gentle yoke—the yoke of love as alternative to the imposing yoke of law. The yoke of law renders the people tired and unappreciative of life.  The people of Israel, for instance, had been bombarded with endless laws prescribed by the scribes.  Their lives had been all about fulfilling every letter of the law. The yoke of law became the be-all and end-all of their existence so that they gradually forgot about the loving relationship with God.  The ‘little ones,’ the poor especially, could not measure up to the demands of the law, so they were the ones who found life burdensome.  Life for them was an experience of imposition and coercion that led to their alienation.

Jesus reached out to them by offering his yoke. “My yoke is easy, my burden light.” This is the yoke of love offered by the gentle God. This yoke is inspiring and liberating because it works from within. Jesus’ message then is this:  Learn from me. Carry your responsibilities not because they are imposed upon you.  Carry them not because you are obliged by law. Follow me and carry your responsibilities because of love.  

Our response: Living each day with love in our hearts. All of us who have loved will agree by experience that anything we do out of love, however difficult and demanding, becomes easy and light.  The power of love works from within. It inspires and liberates. Life becomes worthwhile, enjoyable, easy, and peaceful when we put upon our shoulders the yoke of Jesus, the yoke of love.

Do we find life burdensome? Perhaps it would help if we examine what we do. We might have been spending our energies and time to things that are imposed upon us. We need to have a change of paradigm.  Let us approach Jesus and learn from him. Let us live each day with love in our hearts and let everything we do flow from that persuasive power of love.

Or do we find ourselves wielding power vested upon us by our status or position in society? Jesus offers himself as a model.  He invites us to come to him and learn from his gentleness and humility. To be powerful does not always mean being coercive and imposing. Again, change of paradigm—real power works not from outside but from within. It is the persuasion of love we need to exercise. It is the way of the gentle God.

  

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.

The Scandal of Hell (26th Sunday Ordinary B)

Some theologians speak of the "scandal of hell." They ask, if God is a loving God and His love is unconditional, why is there such a thing as hell? How can a faith, which "tells the world of His love," profess, at the same time, a possible state of eternal damnation?

In one of my spiritual talk among the youth, I had this conversation: "All the more that I find myself giving in to sin!" This is the remark of a young lad after listening to my talk about God’s unconditional love. "The more that you priests convince me of the love of God despite my sinfulness, the more that I tend to be lax with my moral life," he explained. "Well, in that case then we have to talk about hell!" I quipped hoping to jolt him out of his complacency.

Truly, God’s unconditional love and mercy is the good news. It’s the central message of the gospel. But hell is bad news for those who consistently refuse to respond to God’s grace and loving invitation.

God invites. Even entices. God always initiates the loving relationship. He never coerces. Coercion is love’s contradiction. Love waits and rejoices at reciprocation. Or suffers from rejection. On our part, we have the capacity to respond to God’s love freely and nurture such a joyful loving relationship. But we are capable too of rejecting his love and live in isolation from Him. When this latter option orients all of our life, we can then admit of the possibility of hell as our own making. Hell symbolizes the pain of total isolation, because of our own choosing, from the love of God.

Jesus resorts to the symbolism of hell in today’s gospel to drive home the point of the seriousness of sin and its consequences. Using Semitic hyperbole, he exaggerates the measures to be taken to avoid sin and its consequences: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire” (Mk. 9:43). The same formulation is used for the foot and the eye. This is a hyperbole, a literary device, which should not be interpreted literally as prescribing self-mutilation. An exaggeration is employed to obtain a jolting effect on the listeners. An exaggeration is an effective warning device. Jesus then may be trying to shake us out of our complacency and giving us the necessary warning lest we end up as victims of our lack of foresight, not seeing the grim consequence of our sins, the damning outcome of our deliberate rejection of his love.

Hell is much less mentioned in theological discourses of today than in those of yesteryears. In fact, some Christians deny its existence as it is a contradiction of our faith in God who wills that all may be saved. Contemporary theological discussions on hell, however, maintains it at least as a possibility—a logical consequence of a sinful life. It is a consummation of a life lived in sin—egoism, hatred, lust for power, pride, tyranny, etc. It is forged through a gradual day-to-day hardening of sins in one’s heart and finally cemented by the person’s definitive rejection of God as there can be no more room for love in such a heart that has totally succumbed to sin.

To preach about hell is to send warning against complacency—pretty much like the point of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” We ought to change our sinful ways. We need to examine and reorient our wasteful and irresponsible lifestyles. We need to evaluate and change our exploitative ways of relating with one another and with nature… Lest we precipitate the course to which we are already heading—global destruction! We all could use an ultimatum. The language and symbolism of hell may just do the trick of awakening us.

Having said this, I would like to stress once more that Christianity’s central message is God’s love and not wrath. Christian spirituality has to be a positive response to God’s invitation to a loving relationship with Him and with all of creation. As such, it is a joyful way of life. It is not out of guilt that we serve and try to be kind. It is not out of fear of hell that we tremble to worship God. We love because we are invited to be part of a loving communion. We love because we are powerfully attracted to Him who loves us unconditionally. We love because God is love and love cannot thrive in cold isolation.

The prayer of St. Francis Xavier, especially the Filipino rendition, never fails to move me. My deepest desire is to make the prayer my own. It’s my wish too for all of you, my dear friends. May we come to love Him not for the reward of heaven nor out of fear of hell. We love Him because He loved us first.

Hindi sa langit Mong pangako sa akin
Ako naaakit na kita’y mahalin.
At hindi sa apoy, kahit anong lagim,
Ako mapipilit nginig kang sambahin.
Naaakit ako ng Ika’y mamalas,
Nakapako sa krus, hinahamak-hamak.
Naaakit ng ‘Yong katawang may sugat,
At ng tinanggap Mong kamataya’t libak.
Naaakit ako ng ‘Yong pag-ibig,
Kaya’t mahal kita, kahit walang langit
Kahit walang apoy, sa ‘Yoy manginginig.
Hwag nang mag-abala upang ibigin ka.
Pagkat kung pag-asa’y bula lamang pala,
Walang magbabago, mahal pa rin kita.

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.