Reflection from Friar Nicholas

MONDAY, THIRTEENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Amos 2:6-10,13-16; Ps 50:16-23; Mt 8:18-22 The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his Head It is very intriguing to read that a great crowd of people were following our Lord, and yet he replied to the scribe who came to him to promise his followership that he had no place to lay his head. We can easily surmise that the great crowd means eager friends of Jesus Christ. But that is not the case. Many people follow Jesus Christ for their own needs and desires and do nothing to aid the fulfilment or accomplishment of the mission of the Messiah. Many of us made a commitment to follow Jesus Christ as the scribe in the gospel, who came to him to pledge himself to follow him, but we follow him on our terms instead of his, that is, doing the will of God. Many enter religious life and make a profession of religious vows, but they end up looking after their interests and do not follow the Lord’s will. This is what Jesus expressed in his response to the scr

SUNDAY, THIRTEENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  Wis 1:13-15,2:23-24; Ps 30:2,4-6,11-13; 2 Cor 8:7,9,13-15; Mk 5:21-43 Jesus Christ made himself poor, to make us rich The Book of Wisdom offers an insight into God's relationship with his creation. God called things into existence and did not intend their death and decay. They were made to be sustained in being by the all-powerful word of God. Because the word of God is God himself, communicated to what he brought into existence, it is a sure support and solid foundation for all creation. Hence, since the will of God for all that he created was good and is expressed by his word, it follows that no created thing was created with evil or death, for the word of God that called them into being defined their essence as good. The cause of death in created reality is not the will of God but the disobedience to God’s will. “Death was not God’s doing, he takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living

SOLEMNITY OF SAINTS PETER AND PAUL Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  Acts 12:1-11; Ps 34:2-9; 2 Tim 4:6-8,17-18; Mt 16:13-19 On this Rock I will build my Church We celebrate the solemnity of the apostles Peter and Paul. The celebration offers us an opportunity to reflect on their faith and the pivotal roles these great apostles played in establishing the Church. The meditation of their faith comes as a summary of the week-long reflection of the training of the spiritual man and the building of the spiritual house on the rock of profession of faith in the word of God. Peter’s confession of faith in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ is the archetype of a Christian confession of faith in Jesus Christ. “When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi he put this question to his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say he is John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ ‘But you,’ he said ‘who do you say I am?’ T

ST. IRENAEUS, BISHOP, MARTYR Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  2 Kings 25:1-12; Ps 137:1-6; Mt 8:1-4 Faith admits us to the Real Presence of God The divine presence is present everywhere and every time. But we can only enter the presence of God by choice and through the exercise of faith. Though faith is a gift we receive from God, God communicates the gift with the revelation of his real presence. God’s self-communication is always accompanied by the possibility of human persons receiving since it is the purpose of our existence and wellbeing. But God’s self-communication does not impose itself on us; it is only a gift to be received or rejected, given our free will. The possibility of entering his divine presence, where there is fullness of redemption, remains open to everyone. In this sense, we believe that the grace of conversion is always open to every sinner, given God’s infinite mercy. The encounter between our Lord and the leper instantiates this understanding for

  THURSDAY, TWELFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  (Optional Memorial of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop and Doctor) 2 Kings 24:8-17; Ps 79:1-5,8-9; Mt 7:21-29 The fall of the House built on Sand We have established that the Christian religion and its attendant spirituality is nothing given only to the physical or senses. Christianity is a revealed religion and has its foundation in the spiritual realm. The reason is that the head of the Church is Jesus Christ, who is spiritually and mystically present with her at all times and in every place she exists and professes her faith. In addition, Jesus Christ lives in each Christian by the Holy Spirit he shares with them. By the Spirit, he regenerates each of us who form part of his body. In this spiritual sense, the Church is more than her physical manifestation. She is present in every soul, formally or informally, regenerated by faith in the truth of God, who accepts and lives the will of God. The

  WEDNESDAY, TWELFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  2 Kings 22:8-13,23:1-3; Ps 119:33-37,40; Mt 7:15-20 The Spiritual Man produces good fruits The most intricate training of the spiritual man consists in our development of a spiritual life or inner structure patterned on Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word. The pillars of the inner Temple of God must arise on the articles of faith contained in the divine revelation. According to St. Gregory of Nyssa in his Treatise on Christian Perfection , the three aspects of the Christian life: deeds, words, and thoughts are made noble by controlling them by divine revelation. The conclusions of the mind must draw on faith. “So when one of these results in our acting or speaking or thinking, we must make sure that all our thoughts, words, and deeds are controlled by the divine ideal, the revelation of Christ. For then our thoughts, words and deeds will not fall short of the nobility of their implications.” If this i

  TUESDAY, TWELFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  2 Kings 19:9-11,14-21,31-36; Ps 48:2-4,10-11; Mt 7:6,12-14 God upholds his City for ever We go further on the theme of this week’s reflection, namely, the training of the new man. Because the new man is truly born in the image and likeness of God, he lives off the Holy Spirit of God. His constant vision of God establishes his ways on the stable plan God made before we were conceived. Because God’s plan and establishment can never totter, the new man lives in the City of God within each believer in Jesus Christ. Established by the word of God, the City is a heavenly and spiritual reality that gradually takes on a material or concrete representation each day as we model our daily living on the word of God and not on the variations and variabilities of this present world. Thus, we have affirmed that when we fix our vision on Jesus Christ, the author and goal of our faith, our lives remain solidly secu

THE BIRTHDAY OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  Isa 49:1-6; Ps 139:1-3,13-15; Acts 13:22-26; Lk 1:57-66,80 Called and Sanctified in the Womb Our Creator knows us completely, but we do not know him. His knowledge of us is the cause of stability in our lives. But our lack of knowledge of God, our ignorance of his complete knowledge of us, and his divine plan for our days, before we were conceived, are the causes of the fear in the face of the variations in the material world. In the case of John the Baptist, God’s foreknowledge was revealed to him or confirmed while he was still in his mother’s womb. This singular privilege is what Isaiah prophesied in the first reading. “Islands, listen to me, pay attention, remotest peoples. The Lord called me before I was born, from my mother’s womb he pronounced my name. He made my mouth a sharp sword and hid me in the shadow of his hand. He made me into a sharpened arrow, and concealed me in his quiver.” Notice t

SUNDAY, TWELFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  Job 38:1,8-11; Ps 107:23-26,28-32; 2 Cor 5:14-17; Mk 4:35-41 Experiencing and Knowing Jesus Christ in our Tempest There are differences between the old man corrupted in Adam and the new man regenerated in Jesus Christ through our baptismal profession of faith into his death and resurrection. When considered through the principles and objectives of this present life, the old man lives to preserve and conserve his natural life which must surely die because of the sentence of condemnation hanging on him. He is hopeless about the next life for he has no hope of immortality that was lost through sin. On the other hand, the new man, when considered through the principles and objectives of the present life, lives for death and hopes in the life that will follow death, just as Christ Jesus died and rose again. The old man originated from the earth through the power of God but looks forward to the material end

  SATURDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  2 Chron 24:17-25; Ps 98:4-5,29-34; Mt 6:24-34 You cannot serve both God and money Prayer and the desires of our hearts have the same origin, for prayers are desires expressed to our God. Thus, many people do not connect to the Lord’s prayer because it does not express the deep yearning of their hearts. In other words, any Christian who has no spiritual or interior life would find the Lord’s prayer not suitable for his kind of prayer. As we explained in yesterday’s reflection, every aspect of the Lord’s prayer contains a germ or seed of a part of the divine revelation by our Lord Jesus Christ. So, if our regenerated spirit is dormant, we would not draw our lives from the Lord, who is the Spirit. We can only live a heavenly life through the Holy Spirit communing with our regenerated spirit. If we are not drawing our life from deep within, which is our spiritual part, then we are drawing it from without.

  SAINT ALOYSIUS GONZAGA, RELIGIOUS Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  2 Kings 11:1-4,9-18,20; Ps 132:11-14,17-18; Mt 6:19-23 Store your Treasure in Heaven Those who are made citizens of the heavenly City by baptism into the death of Jesus Christ and now living his risen life have their hearts set on the City of God and its treasures. As we have seen in our reflection yesterday, this informed the structure of the prayer taught by our Lord to his disciples. Each aspect of the prayer we have highlighted is a seed for an article of the divine revelation in the Gospel message. God planted these seeds in our consciousness through our profession of faith. The meditative recitation of the prayer of our Lord, and other prayers modelled on the Lord’s prayer or some aspect of it, subsequently causes these aspects of divine revelation to germinate, grow, and develop in our lives as individuals and as a community of believers. We can easily recall what happened in the Christian commun

THURSDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  Eccl 48:1-15; Ps 97:1-7; Mt 6:7-15 God knows what we need before we ask Him The subject of prayer is very central to Christian faith and spirituality. Prayer is a vital operation and one of the core activities of a Christian. Prayer originates in our renewed spirit. United with the Holy Spirit, the renewed spirit cries out for pure spiritual milk from the heavenly Father. Because our spirit is born of the Holy Spirit, he discerns our deepest needs and makes them known to the Father through Jesus Christ in sighs and groans too deep for us to articulate in words. This is usually the situation during our spiritual infancy. We can learn something about prayer from physical birth, where a newborn baby gradually learns the language and begins to articulate its various needs formerly expressed only through cries and babbling. The mother, the family, the community, etc are all involved in grooming the baby

WEDNESDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  2 Kings 2:1,6-14; Ps 31:20,21,24; Mt 6:1-6,16-18 Seeking the attention of God in Genuine Spirituality From the discourse on the duty of a Christian to love his enemies and pray for his persecutors, the Lord takes us to the subject of our interior disposition that connects us immediately to God. The key in the teaching of our Lord on this matter is the centrality of God in the life of the redeemed. This theme runs through all aspects of his sermon on the Mount. It formed the very basis of the Beatitudes, which revealed various attitudes or virtues of a Christian that attract special blessings or graces of God directly to his soul. What makes the Christian religion unique among other religions is the direct relationship with God that a Christian has through Jesus. The basis of this relationship is that the Christian religion starts with the note of death to self and invitation or openness to the ind

TUESDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  1 Kings 21:17-29; Ps 51:3-6,11,16; Mt 5:43-48 Love your Enemies and Pray for your Persecutors The elegance of the new City of God, which the Father constructs on the foundation of the sacred humanity of his Beloved Son, is deducible from its foundation Jesus Christ laid with the New Commandments. His sermon on the Mount contains this foundation upon which he constructed the mystical City. The sermon is the foundation in that it is the summary or principle of the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, on earth. Since the life of the Son of Man is that of the Eternal Word of God in his human nature, it follows then that the foundation is the Eternal Word of God. He also laid down the precepts of charity as the high wall surrounding the mystical City of God. They form a high wall to keep the old and corrupted human nature away from the holy City. The Lord revealed this to his disciples when the rich man

MONDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP  1 Kings 21:1-16; Ps 5:2-3,5-7; Mt 5:38-42 Offer the Wicked Man no Resistance We continue with the sermon on the mountain of our Lord Jesus Christ. The sermon is the foundation of the City of God, or the Church of the living God, just as the Laws Moses gave was to form the foundation of Israel as the People of God. Our Lord restructured the foundation of the new City in line with its mystical nature. Hence, the recurrent pattern of his teaching is the line: “You have learnt how it was said: ... But I say this to you: …” The Lord himself explained why this new foundation is necessary. It is because an old wineskin cannot contain the new wine. The fresh wine will burst an old wineskin, and the skin and the wine will be lost. The reality of grace, which is in abundance in the New dispensation, would overwhelm the narrow structure of the Old Law due to its incompleteness. But the New encompasses the Old a