Reflection from Friar Nicholas

TUESDAY, TWENTY FOURTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 12:12-14,27-31; Ps 100; Lk 7:11-17 God has visited his People Returning to the theme for the week, faith and work, we quickly note that Christian faith defines a condition for God’s work in us, individually and collectively. That is to say that just as faith opens a way for our relationship with God, it is also a provision God made in each faithful to be able to work through him. So, the nature of our faith defines the limit of our interaction with God, that is, the extent we can connect to him. Better still, it limits how much God works through and with us. Back to the questions our Lord asked his disciples on Sunday, we see that the two questions were to probe the disciples' faith and push for their greater participation in his life and ministry. Their answer on who the people hold him to be was not wrong; he is a prophet of God. He could have been John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. That was there t

SAINTS CORNELIUS, POPE, AND CYPRIAN, BISHOP, MARTYRS 1 Cor 11:17-26,33; Ps 40:7-10,17; Lk 7:1-10 Faith and Tradition from the Lord The two questions our Lord put to his disciples in yesterday's gospel helped us to understand and see the difference between what the people are saying about the identity of Jesus Christ and what ought to be our knowledge of him. We can also make the same distinction between the tradition that came to us and our actual understanding of the tradition and our practice of it. The disparity between these two is what St. Paul attempts to point out and correct in the first reading. He found the practice of the Eucharistic communion in the Corinthian community in total divergence from what he received from the apostolic tradition and passed on to them. “The point is, when you hold meetings, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you are eating, since when the time comes to eat, everyone is in such a hurry to start his own supper that one person goes hungry whi

SUNDAY, TWENTY FOURTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Isa 50:5-9; Ps 116:1-6,8-9; James 2:14-18; Mk 8:27-35 Who do you say I am? Our Lord puts an important question to his disciples in the gospel. By extension, the question is also directed to each of us. The first question is about the people's perception of him. “Who do people say I am?” Our Lord understands that our views about things are mostly shaped by those around us. What we believe about Jesus Christ and the way we relate to him are informed by what we hear from people and see people do around us. Our prayer life, for example, is usually shaped by the prayer life of people around us. So, our lives are shaped to conform to the way of the people around us. There is nothing wrong with this, for all of us grew up in a culture. Culture is the way of life of a people about their reality. We must not live on the general view and cultural life, but each of us must validate and authenticate what we have received to build a personal und

THE EXALTATION OF THE HOLY CROSS Numb 21:4-9; Ps 78:1-2,34-38; Jn 3:13-17 The Cross and the Mystery of Jesus Christ The holy Cross of Jesus Christ is part and parcel of the mystery of Jesus Christ. Hence, we celebrate the feast of the exaltation of the Holy Cross as an opportunity to highlight this constitutive aspect of the salvation Jesus Christ won for us. When we speak of a cross, we refer to everything unpleasant to our human nature, which, therefore, forms part of the punishment that comes to our human nature for our sins against God’s infinite goodness. It follows that suffering, as a cross, entered into human history at the very moment of the fall of our first parents Adam and Eve. Taking the testimony of the word of God in the book of Genesis, God decreed sufferings, pains, and death as a punishment for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when they listened to the voice of the tempter in disobedience to the word of God. We locate the objective cause of human crosses in si

ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM, BISHOP, DOCTOR 1 Cor 9:16-19,22-27; Ps 84:3-6,12; Lk 6:39-42 Focussing on the Prize The analogy of competitors in a game is what St. Paul put before us today to illustrate our Christian duty of living the Gospel. The passage makes it clear that as attendants to the bridegroom, we have the only option of graduating to brides in our Christian vocation. As he had already warned us of our limited time to achieve this expected perfection, he pressed the message home with today's message. The Gospel preaching is a duty we must take up and is not optional. “I do not boast of preaching the gospel, since it is a duty which has been laid on me; I should be punished if I did not preach it! If I had chosen this work myself, I might have been paid for it, but as I have not, it is a responsibility which has been put into my hands.” It is a commitment to the life of God that we must live and make progress in living every day. To be negligent about our most important dut

THURSDAY, TWENTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 8:1-7,11-13; Ps 139:1-3,13-14,23-24; Lk 6:27-38 Becoming Sons of the Most High The Gospel living is a heavenly lifestyle that cannot be initiated or imitated by our fallen human nature or evil spirits. This statement conforms with our Lord’s statement that salvation is impossible to human nature and beyond any other nature outside the divine. Based on this, we have insisted that the new life that commences in us at our commitment to the word of God is a sharing in the life of God. If God had not given us the gift of divine life, it would have been superfluous for our Lord to urge us to be perfect as our heavenly Father. Even more, he would not call God the Father our heavenly Father in this unique and restricted sense he used in the Gospel passage today. “Instead, love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return. You will have a great reward, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the u

WEDNESDAY, TWENTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 7:25-31; Ps 45:11-12,14-17; Lk 6:20-26 The Passage of Time and our Marriage to the Lord When the Pharisees and scribes challenged our Lord on the fact that his disciples were not fasting and praying as they and the disciples of John the Baptist were doing, he gave them an answer that we can understand only in the light of the mystery of Christ and his Gospel. St. Paul’s consideration of the celibate option for the Christians throws much light on the Lord’s response to the Pharisees and scribes. Our conversion to Jesus Christ should colour every other engagement in this life. According to Paul, the major focus of our attention must be Jesus Christ. Because of this primary and defining vocation of a Christian, our Lord compared his disciples to attendants to the bridegroom. We are to attend to Jesus Christ, the word of God, first before anything else. Based on this bounden duty, Paul encouraged any Christian man or woman to opt fo

TUESDAY, TWENTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 6:1-11; Ps 149:1-6,9; Lk 6:12-19 Power for our healing and Salvation We have established that faith is a necessary condition for our regeneration in Jesus Christ. The gift of faith is God’s offer of new life to our souls that are dead in sin. Faith assures our reception of a spiritual life in Christ and keeps us connected to the Holy Spirit who nourishes the new life with what truly belongs to Christ. This connection or communion with the Holy Spirit is very essential for the growth of our spiritual life. As we read in the Gospel, that power was coming out of Jesus Christ and healing the people gathered around him to listen to his teachings. This illustrates the general or regular setting for the life and growth of a Christian. We must always gather around Jesus Christ to listen to him, for his word is our heaven/spiritual food. It is gathered around him that the Holy Spirit renews our spiritual and physical life. “People tormente

MONDAY, TWENTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 5:1-8; Ps 5:5-7,12; Lk 6:6-11 The Yeast of Evil Within Contrasted with the life of faith, which is genuinely God’s life in our soul, is a life arising from faithlessness. This life is that of our unregenerated nature wounded by the original sin of Adam and Eve. Our unregenerated human nature is capable of many natural goods it can achieve in various spheres of life. Many confuse these goods to be the same as Christian goods achieved at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They are not the same, for the principles of these two categories of goods are different. They may be the same materially but differ essentially because of their principles; that is, their beginning and the end for which they are done. Those who propose and uphold the ability of our unaided human nature to achieve this set of goods are proponents and believers in humanity, and their religion and philosophy are called humanism. Many people come to the Church every S

SUNDAY, TWENTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Isa 35:4-7; Ps 146:7-10; James 2:1-5; Mk 7:31-37 Faith Receives Eternal Inheritance Faith is the foundation of our spiritual life and the firm establishment of our relationship with God. Hence, the Letter to the Hebrews says it is impossible to please God without faith because those who approach him must believe that he exists and rewards those who seek him. Based on this importance of faith, we have reflectively concluded from the scriptures that the relationship between the faithful and God is nothing less than that of the Father and sons. We would usually say that the faithful are sons in the Son because their status of sonship derives from that of the only Begotten Son of God. The basis for this derivation is that the first encounter with God is through his word, which represents the Son of God. Hence, we proclaim in the creed that the Eternal Word is God from God and Light from Light. It is the word of God that reveals God the Fathe

SATURDAY, TWENTY SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 5:6-15; Ps 145:17-21; Lk 6:1-5 The Convolution of Spiritual Blessings The reason for us to be connected to Jesus Christ, the Eternal Wisdom, through our participation in one Holy Spirit, who is communion, is to make the convolution of blessings possible. By convolution of blessings, we mean an operation in which one gains what another loses. Convolution in our spiritual sense means offering the merit of our spiritual work for the good of another soul(s). The spiritual space making convolution possible on the largest scale is the incarnation of the Eternal Word, which makes it possible for God to pour out the Holy Spirit on our human nature. Hence, the redemptive effects of the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ work by convolution on us who profess faith in him. By our profession of faith in him, we received baptism into his death, became members of his body, and children of God, sharing the same Holy Spirit.

FRIDAY, TWENTY SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 4:1-5; Ps 37:3-6,27-28,39-40; Lk 5:33-39 Eternal Wisdom as our Bridegroom We are foolish in the Christian understanding and morality when we set out a course of action or a way of life by ourselves and for our benefit. On this basis, St. Paul contrasted the wisdom of this world with the divine wisdom. To be wise in the Christian way is to take our course of action from the Lord or his Gospel. As we concluded yesterday, the word of God is to take flesh in us from the moment of our conversion to Christianity. This incarnation takes place deep within our hearts first. The incarnation happens at the moment of conversion, when the Holy Spirit, through the word of God we heard preached to us, convinces us of the divine love made manifest in the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. From that conviction and the corresponding decision to give ourselves to God to do his will, a new spirit is generated in us and joined to the indwelling Holy Spirit

THURSDAY, TWENTY SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 3:18-23; Ps 23:1-6; Lk 5:1-11 The Foundation of Foolishness and Wisdom We continue our reflection by considering wisdom to be the indwelling of the word of God in the heart of a Christian. The Holy Spirit sounds the depths of God. When the Holy Spirit regenerates a man, his spirit sounds his depths. It follows that man does not know himself without the Holy Spirit. The regeneration of man happens only when he accepts the word of God and commits his life to it. This commitment is a new birth, which our Lord explained to Nicodemus. Because the new birth commences with our saying yes to the word of God and no to self, it is the incarnation of the word of God in a Christian. Here, the fiat of each Christian resembles that of the Blessed Virgin Mary when she conceived the Eternal Word. Thus, the incarnation that happened objectively for all with the fiat of the Virgin Mary happens subjectively for each of us at our fiat to the word o

WEDNESDAY, TWENTY SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 3:1-9; Ps 33:12-15,20-21; Lk 4:38-44 We are fellow Workers with God In yesterday’s reflection, we concluded from the scripture that the spirit of a man knows him deeply, for it sounds his depths. The same thing applies in the case of God; the Spirit of God reaches the depths of God. But while God and his Holy Spirit are self-existing, man’s spirit is generated and sustained in being by the Holy Spirit. When disconnected from the Holy Spirit, the human spirit dies, leaving our innermost part in total darkness. The spirit of a Christian must continuously unite with the Holy Spirit to draw life from him. We refer to this as being in a state of grace. This union or communion is not and must not be kept dormant or inactive. It is a participation in which we receive spiritual life from the Holy Spirit and actively live the divine life. Just as a flame results from the interactivity of fire or heat and wood, the flame goes out when

ST GREGORY THE GREAT, POPE, DOCTOR 1 Cor 2:10-16; Ps 145:8-14; Lk 4:31-37 The Spirit Searching the Depth of God The heavenly life that commences with our acceptance of the word of God and commitment to God is remarkably different from natural life. It starts with an introspection. The introspection is the only way to discover our nothingness and the darkness that dwells within us when the word of God is not illumining us. Thus, the inability to look inside is the greatest undoing of the modern time and the souls who imbibe the contemporary lifestyle. Without looking inside, we can never discover that we are empty and that the external reality is an illusion. This description is another way of expressing the death of worldly souls, expressed in their way of living. This experience is what St. Paul means by saying: “After all, the depths of a man can only be known by his spirit, not by any other man, and in the same way the depths of God can only be known by the Spirit of God.” For