A SUITABLE FASTING FOR THE BRIDE

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. We were supposed to feed the new spirit with the spiritual food and drink that is the word of God subsequently. Continuous feeding and exercise of the newborn in prayer and good works directed by the Holy Spirit would grow the newborn to maturity, causing its life to extend to every faculty of our souls, both spiritual and physical. The above describes the spiritual path to growth and maturity.

The ideal described above is rarely the case; it happens only in a few favoured souls. There are nuances introduced by our inherited and acquired weaknesses. These nuances are responsible for what St. Paul explained in the first reading about stewardship. “People must think of us as Christ’s servants, stewards entrusted with the mysteries of God. What is expected of stewards is that each one should be found worthy of his trust.” Thus, the wisdom of a Christian is to follow the directives from the Holy Spirit. A Christian is a steward in Paul’s description and must do the bidding of his Master. By doing the will of the Lord, he is considered a wise and trustworthy steward to be rewarded by the Master. A Christian does not live to please another person, for that would be to live with worldly wisdom. It is by maintaining our respective instructions or gifts and good works assigned by the Lord and supervised by the Holy Spirit and those entrusted with the gift of hierarchy that order and harmony are fostered in the Church of Jesus Christ. Even when we obey those the Lord entrusted with the gift of authority or hierarchy, we obey them not to please them but to please the Lord through the Holy Spirit of communion. “I will not even pass judgment on myself. True, my conscience does not reproach me at all, but that does not prove that I am acquitted: the Lord alone is my judge.”

In this regard, the Pharisees and the scribes judged the life and actions of the disciples of our Lord wrongly. They judged them using their tradition of fasting and prayer, which falls under the wisdom of this world. They based their judgment on how things are done and not on the will of God. They and the disciples of John the Baptist were practicing popular spirituality. The vocation of a Christian is not to practice popular spirituality but to do the will of the Father. When others were fasting, they were eating and drinking because that was the will of the Father for them. “Surely you cannot make the bridegroom’s attendants fast while the bridegroom is still with them? But the time will come, the time for the bridegroom to be taken away from them; that will be the time when they will fast.” The Lord’s analogy of the bridegroom and his attendants is very apt and deeply spiritual. A Christian is called to attend to the bridegroom, the Word of God. By constant attendance to the word of God, we nourish the new spiritual life in us until it matures into a bride for the bridegroom. Then, she would long, desire, and pant for the bridegroom until she is wedded eternally. This is the new wine describing the Christian spirituality. It is spiritual and deeply interior; it cannot fit into the former religion of only rituals and formalities. We pray for the grace to reclaim the spirituality and interiority of Christian worship.

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, the grace to renew our commitment to your word which we professed at our baptism, so that feeding our spirits rightly on your word and sacraments, we may grow in prayer, in true spirituality, and be filled with desire to be united with Jesus Christ your Son.