Reflection from Friar Nicholas

SAINT PIUS OF PIETRELCINA (PADRE PIO), PRIEST Prov 30:5-9; Ps 119:28,72,89,101,104,163; Lk 9:1-6 The Vineyard of the Son of God The vineyard of the God of the hosts is the Son’s inheritance. The Son is one with the Father and knows the Father’s will. Thus, he cultivates the vineyard to the Father’s taste. The vineyard is his inheritance, for all that the Father has belongs to the Son. The Son is the Word, and the Word was with God from the beginning; through him all things were made. Since all things were made through him, all things will be restored to the Father through him. John tells us that the Word enlightens all men who come into the world. Therefore, the Son calls and instructs all who are employed to work in the vineyard. We are the vineyard of the Lord; the work to be done in us must be carried out with the Son’s specification. To be unwilling to work in the vineyard is to attempt to usurp what is not ours, but the Son’s inheritance. To put it simply, our temporal lives...

TUESDAY, TWENTY FIFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Prov 21:1-67,10-13; Ps 119:1,27,30,34-35,44; Lk 8:19-21 Our Employment in the Vineyard We are the vineyard of the God of Hosts. God seeks out all who are willing and eager to earn the day’s wage and employs them in the divine vineyard. God employs all who are employable and willing to work in his vineyard. Being part of God's vineyard implies that our primary work is within us, cooperating with God's grace to become members of Jesus Christ, the true vine. God employs us, as cooperators, to do his work within us and to work with us round and about us. Hence, God requires all who enter his service to die to self ritually and intentionally through the sacrament of baptism. Without this sacramental initiation, we cannot gain access to the Lord’s vineyard and take part in the work therein. This is the initial contract God agrees with us. We give ourselves in his vineyard, and God remunerates us with a denarius, the wage for a day’s l...

SAINT MATTHEW, APOSTLE, EVANGELIST Eph 4:1-7,11-13; Ps 19:2-5; Mt 9:9-13 The Physician for the Weak and the Sick Celebrating the feast of Saint Matthew the Evangelist, a former tax collector, allows us to delve deeper into the meaning of our Lord’s parable of the workers in the vineyard. As we noted in yesterday’s reflection, as the landowner, God goes about in search of willing and ready labourers to employ in his vineyard. To work in the vineyard of the Lord, the Church, means to cooperate with God’s grace in building the Church. Thus, God does the fundamental work within our souls, for we make up the vineyard of the Lord as members of the Church. Being in the marketplace, the world, makes us all weak and sick because of sins. The Lord himself seeks and finds us to bring us into his vineyard. Saint Augustine distinguished between the weak and the sick in his sermon on pastors. “Weak men are those who appear to be zealous in doing good works but are unwilling or unable to endure...

SUNDAY, TWENTY FIFTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Isa 55:6-9; Ps 145:2-3,8-9,17-18; Phil 1:20-24,27; Mt 20:1-16 The Reward of Eternal Life God made us in his image and willed from all eternity to bless us with his own life. The divine gift would make us like God. This was the decision of the Triune God from the very beginning, when he said in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” Making man in divine image means giving him free will, which arises from the rationality of our nature. Our rationality demands that we freely choose to be like God. To be truly free to make the decision, man needs the enlightenment of knowledge of God, which comes from the Word of God. Man’s knowledge of God requires time to engage with the Word. But the Word is God. Man needs to be guided to divine knowledge through creation, which manifests God’s glory and his divine attributes. For this reason, man needs to work in God’s vineyard to discover himself through knowledge of creatures and be...

SATURDAY, TWENTY FOURTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 15:35-37,42-49; Ps 56:10-14; Lk 8:4-15 Making Profit from the Gospel Our Eucharistic celebration, which we understand as a ritual presentation of the Gospel of salvation, mediates the coming together of the Gospel as revealed divine truth and our human life on earth. The revealed truth, the Gospel, is spiritual life; our human life on earth is death because of the corruption of sin. The Eucharistic liturgy provides the occasion for the mingling of the two, so that life will gradually swallow death, and light will chase away darkness. The Eucharistic celebration is comparable to a seed nursery where the seed of the Gospel is first sown and nurtured in us in a controlled spiritual ambiance before we carry it to our different life situations. In the Eucharistic liturgy, we are supercharged with divine grace conducive to the growth of spiritual life. The liturgical ambiance, replete with divine words, gestures, sacramental signs, an...

SAINT JUAN MACIAS, RELIGIOUS 1 Cor 15:12-20; Ps 17:1,6-8,15; Lk 8:1-3 The Church and the Gospel In our previous reflection, we highlighted the relationship between the Gospel and the Church. We consider the Church as the Gospel believed and lived. We enrich our membership in the Church through a deeper understanding of the Gospel, and we understand the Gospel more through a better participation in the life of the Church. The core of the Church’s life is the Eucharistic celebration. The Eucharist is the font of the Church’s spirituality and life. As we noted yesterday, the Eucharistic celebration outlines our redemptive process, which is contained in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The very commencement of the Eucharistic celebration, with the invocation of the Trinity and the sign of the cross, offers a summary of what will happen through the celebration. The Gospel is the initiative of the Triune God, who willed to redeem us from our sin, death, and evil by restoring us to ...

THURSDAY, TWENTY FOURTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 15:1-11; Ps 118:1-2,15-17; Lk 7:36-50 Our Knowledge of God’s Love We cannot love God without God first coming to our help in love. The fact that we are sinners means that we are bereft of God’s life. Living in sin, we lack the knowledge of God and are unable to love him. God willed to bring us to spiritual life again by sending his Only Begotten Son to reveal his loving will to us. This is the content of the Gospel we have received. We cannot love God without getting acquainted with the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The preaching of the Gospel is therefore the revelation of God’s love for us, for all peoples and nations. God invites everyone to his divine life through the proclamation of the Gospel. Hence, our ignorance of the Gospel causes our lack of repentance from our sins and sinful lifestyle. Our ignorance of the Gospel is ignorance of Jesus Christ; and the ignorance of Jesus Christ is ignorance of God and his loving pr...

SAINTS CORNELIUS, POPE, AND CYPRIAN, BISHOP, MARTYRS 1 Cor 12:31-13:13; Ps 33:2-5,12,22; Lk 7:31-35 A Good and Worthy Ambition God is infinite in every perfection. But the central perfection that best defines God's goodness is love. The first letter of Saint John 4:8 tells us that God is love, and anyone who loves is close to God. So, our growth in virtue of love is certain evidence that we are becoming like God. Recall that the purpose of our creation is to become like God. So, love advances us on the way of perfection more than any other virtue. Saint Paul understood this and encouraged us to be ambitious for the gift of love. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit, for he is specifically called Love. “Be ambitious for the higher gifts. And I am going to show you a way that is better than any of them.” The gift of love is more than any other spiritual gift, for loving leads us to immediate sharing in divine life. Love hits the mark, the bull’s eye. The other spiritual gifts only h...

OUR LADY OF SORROWS 1 Cor 12:12-14,27-31; Ps 100; Jn 19:25-27 Woman, behold Your Son The Blessed Virgin Mary features prominently in the life of the Church because she played a key role in the life and mission of her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. The Scriptures reveal the Church as the body of Jesus Christ, with Jesus Christ as her sacred and divine Head. The Holy Cross of Jesus Christ, which we understand as encompassing all that the Son of God endured in his Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection for the salvation of man, spills into the life of all his disciples. In a very prominent way, it spills into the life of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. For this reason, the Church celebrates her sorrows immediately after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The Seven Sorrows of our Lady are events of her participation in the Cross of our Lord. The Seven Sorrows are: (1) The Prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:34–35), (2) The Flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:13–14), (3) The Loss of...

FEAST OF THE EXALTATION OF THE HOLY CROSS Phil 2:6-11; Ps 78:1-2,34-38; Jn 3:13-17 The Son of Man must be lifted Up The core of the mystery of Jesus Christ as the Son of Man is his cross. The cross of Jesus Christ signifies his passion and death on Calvary. The passion and death of the Son of Man constitute the centre of the mystery of Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world. Therein lies the mystery of human salvation. The divine aspect of the mystery is our faith that the One who died on the cross is God and man. How would God allow his Son to become man, to suffer, and to die a cruel death for the salvation of us, men? There is no other reasonable answer to the question than Saint John’s statement in 1 Jn 4:8 that God is love. Often, love appears irrational. The Father's love for us led him to give up his Son to ransom slaves. This is the core of the mystery for us, for it poses an impasse to our poor human understanding. But God really willed that; and his Only Begotten ...

SUNDAY, TWENTY FOURTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Eccles 27:33-28:9; Ps 103:1-4,9-12; Rom 14:7-9; Mt 18:21-35 Our Mutual Forgiveness of Sin Forgiveness is so central to our Christian life and spirituality that it can be seen as another name for Christianity. Every Christian is born of forgiveness, for that is what our baptismal ritual implies. No one becomes a Christian without experiencing forgiveness of sins. This is because our journey to Jesus Christ originates from our recognition of our sinfulness. This humble beginning makes our Christian journey introspective. Our Lord stated this truth when he said that only the sick need a physician in Mt 9:12. Anyone who considers himself righteous will not need repentance; only the self-aware sinner seeks the Son of Man for forgiveness and spiritual healing. Since our nature was wounded from origin, we inherited a sinful nature and sin regularly. No one, therefore, is found without sin, except the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Son, Jesus Chri...

THE MOST HOLY NAME OF MARY 1 Cor 10:14-22; Ps 116:12-13,17-18; Lk 6:43-49 Our Common Inheritance God offers himself to us in the Incarnation of his Eternal Word, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, as our common inheritance and our salvation from sin and evil. The same God, who is goodness and rich in mercy, prepared a common foundation or receptacle in our human nature for his Word. We have always referred to the fall in Gen 3:15 as the moment when God promised to rebuild the corrupted human nature through the woman and her offspring. Since what God promised to accomplish through the woman and her Son is the common salvation of all peoples, the woman and her Son constitute our common inheritance or wealth. The name which the woman of promise received, therefore, points to this common inheritance. The name of Mary has been understood variously; but the most suitable and nearest to what the Blessed Virgin Mary stands for is ‘from the ocean or sea of grace’, or ‘ocean of grac...

FRIDAY, TWENTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 9:16-19,22-27; Ps 84:3-6,12; Lk 6:39-42 Knowledge of our Eternal Communion The Psalmist introduces today's theme. He speaks of the loveliness and attraction of God’s court. Of course, David’s immediate reference is the beautiful place he prepared for the Ark of the Covenant, even before Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem; he also makes a mediated reference to the heavenly Temple of God. David was a mystic and always related to God. His mind and heart were rarely removed from contemplation of God and his Law. Thus, going to the house of God was a moment of exultation and joy, because he felt God’s presence more deeply with the physical things that relate him to God. More fundamentally, his joy in going to the court of God was from the spiritual encounter he would have with God there; for God dwells spiritually in his Temple. We must form the habit of going to the house of God to worship, for it is a great act of worship and a...

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 Give, and there will be Gifts for You The humanly impossible religious demands our Lord Jesus Christ makes of us set Christianity apart from other human- or earth-originated religions. The divine precept to give without reservation is another way of demanding that we be perfect like our heavenly Father. The Son of Man did not just make the demand on us by mere words; he lived out the demand of love. The precept of charity is impossible with human strength or natural resources; thus, the Lord states that salvation is impossible from a human point of view and strength. But it is possible from God’s point of view. Hence, the demand to love all, friends and enemies, is another way to demand that we focus on God and not on creatures. To love as the Lord demands, we must never focus on the persons, but on God and his love for us. Our interior focus on God, as revealed to us by Jesus Chris...