First Sunday of Lent Year A
The first reading and the gospel provides us with two paradigms of dealing with temptation - we can either surrender or resist at all cost. In the first reading, Eve surrendered to the serpent’s temptation of rationalising disobedience to God’s will. But in case one is tempted to blame her for man’s fall, we need to commend her for at least putting up a fight in initially resisting the serpent’s temptation by quoting God’s commandments. We can’t say the same for Adam. He gave in to his wife’s offer without any argument. No resistance, no fight, no struggle.
The serpent’s temptation is insidiously cunning. It provides an end that seems most desirable - becoming “like gods” who would autonomously know what is right and wrong. This ambition to be god-like has been man’s perennial temptation - hoping to achieve it through knowledge, through technological advancement, through medical discoveries which seek to prolong one’s life and perhaps one day, guarantee immortality. The irony in the story of the Fall, is that in desiring to be immortal gods, both Adam and Eve surrendered their natural gift of immortality (symbolised by the tree of life and its fruits which were available to them) and exchanged it for mortality - death, which was not part of God’s original plan for them, but because they chose to disobey God’s warning, death became their lot and that of their descendants.
In today’s gospel, the devil tempts Jesus three times. He tempts Jesus to prove that He is the Son of God by turning stones into bread. He tempts Jesus to test God and see if God will really save Him, and he deceitfully promises Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth if He will worship him. Unlike the first human beings, Jesus does not succumb to the devil’s temptations. Unlike Adam and Eve, Jesus chooses to resist the devil, reject his lies and took a stand for God. Rather than challenge and disobey God, He obeys God and trusts in God’s power to save Him. Jesus is the New Human Being, the pattern for what we must become.
Let’s look at the nature of both sets of temptations, the one we find in the first reading and the second set in the gospel. Although, both the tempted, Adam-Eve and Jesus, responded differently, there seems to be a discernible pattern that threads through the temptations offered by both the primordial serpent and Satan. Both sets of temptations were in principle good suggestions in themselves. Can it be bad to want to be holy like gods, feed the hungry, or have the power to make significant changes in the world or even convert your enemies and make them your friends or fans? And the answer would be ‘no.’ What Satan is suggesting here is apparently good and the result would be guaranteed success for humanity’s future and our Lord’s mission, with much ease and little cost and pain on His or our part. It is “salvation” or what passes as “salvation” without sacrifice, without the cross. Wouldn’t that be great? The devil’s logic is simple, “It doesn’t matter how you get what you want as long as you get it.” But then again, the end doesn’t justify the means!
And this is how “evil” often looks like – it does not wear the face of a monster, but a benign one. It’s not like you have to wake up one morning, and decide to plot some monstrous plan to commit evil. You don’t. Evil often takes the path of a slippery slope, each decision, often innocent looking, taken one after another, until you’re swimming eyeball deep in the moral mud. As St Ignatius used to remind his retreatants, the devil tempts bad people with bad things but good people with seemingly good things. He doesn’t waste subtlety on the wicked but for the good, he will always try to sugar coat the bad by making it look good. The subtlety of the devil is to make us believe that we don’t really need God if we can find a solution of our own. Ultimately, in wanting to do it “our way,” it overlooks “God’s way.”
Returning to the story of the temptations of Christ, what is apparently missing from the “good” suggestions of Satan is God and His plans for us. We just need to take a quick look at each of the temptations to expose the cunning casuistry of the tempter.
In the first temptation, the devil tells our Lord, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to turn into a loaf.” Of course, the Church recognises that there is a fundamental option for the poor and should work towards the alleviation and even where possible, the eradication of destitution. This is where we see the devil ingeniously subverting this good and then reducing the entire gospel to a socio-economic solution. Resolving social problems becomes the primary yardstick of redemption. Make sure the world has bread, other things, including God, comes later. But then the Lord reminds us, “man does not live on bread alone.” Rather, it is Christ, who is the Life-giving Bread from Heaven, who is the real answer to our hunger.
In the second temptation, the devil transports the Lord to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, and challenges Him to perform a spectacular miracle. Imagine the instant influence and adulation Jesus could have acquired, if the crowds had witnessed Jesus literally being carried down by the angels or levitating in mid-air. But our Lord wisely responds that we “must not put the Lord your God to the test.” Authentic faith does not grow in the midst of a “circus” performance but often in low-key seemingly ordinary situations, in the silence of the heart.
In the third and final temptation, the devil shows the Lord the kingdoms of the world and promises power over them if only Jesus should worship him. The tempter is not so crude as to suggest directly that we should worship him. He merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to our machinations and thoroughly organised world, where God is exiled to the private sphere. Faith and religion are now directed toward political goals. The Lord challenges this falsehood by reiterating the fundamental commandment, “You must worship the Lord your God, and serve Him alone.”
This is what we face in many temptations: We want victory with limited commitment. We want heaven without sacrifice. We want a crown without the cross. As we begin this penitential season of grace, let us not just merely rely on our meagre strength and resources. In our eagerness to perform Lenten practices of self-denial, let us not forget that the end of all these acts is to expand the space in our hearts for God. They are not performed as if they are goals or achievements in themselves. Conversion is impossible without the grace of God. As we contend with our usual list of habitual sins, we often fail to recognise that one of our greatest temptations is to begin to rely on ourselves rather than on the power of God. To be a Christian is to be dependent upon God for everything, in battling temptations and growing in virtue. So does the end justify the means? Not if that end does not end in God and the means lead us nowhere closer to Him, for as St Thomas Aquinas reminds us, “the ultimate end of each thing (including man) is God.”
Ash Wednesday
“Let your hearts be broken not your garments torn, turn to the Lord your God again.” These are the beautiful words of the Prophet Joel in the first reading, and indeed they are the inaugural words of Scripture for this Mass, the first words the church offers us this Lent. As such, they are the foundation for the message God wishes to communicate to us this Lent and in fact, at every Lent. Here and throughout this prophetic book, the Prophet Joel is doing what prophets do best. He is calling the people to conversion by making them aware of their sins and pointing them to ideal action, “let your hearts be broken, not your garments torn!”
Traditionally, the people of Israel would rip or rend their clothing to signify mourning. The Scriptures mention this expression of grief several times, including Jacob mourning his youngest son Joseph, when he thought he was dead, or King David rending his garments at hearing that Saul had died. Even today, some Jews specifically rip their clothes over their hearts (which is known as “keriah”) if the deceased is one of their parents. But Joel is calling the people to not just ritually acknowledge their sins, but to mourn their sins—to grieve for their broken relationship with God—in not simply through outward ways, but inwardly as well. To encourage the people’s conversion, the prophet Joel is not calling them to strengthen their resolve through rituals of penance, he’s telling them to take these penitential rituals straight to their hearts, to the very core of their beings. They are not told to demonstrate repentance on the outside, but in their hearts and souls.
In the New Testament, the rending of garment seems to be an outward expression of indignation at sacrilege and blasphemy. For example, in Acts of the Apostles, Saints Paul and Barnabas rent their garments when the people of Lystra began to worship them. But in the gospels, the High Priest, Caiaphas, rent his garments when Jesus affirmed that He was the Christ, the Son of the Living God. There is profound irony here as in the rest of the gospel; instead of Jesus committing blasphemy, it is the High Priest who expresses blasphemy against Him. Furthermore, Caiaphas had violated the Levitical prohibition against a high priest rending his garments. This is in sharp contrast to the seamless simple garment of our Lord that was left intact at the moment of His crucifixion. St Bede the Venerable would recognise the symbolism in this action. In the Old Testament priesthood was to be rent on account of the wickedness of the priests themselves. But the solid strength of the Church, which is often called the garment of her Redeemer, can never be torn asunder.
There was one more “rending” that occurred during the Passion. This was the rending of the veil in the temple that separated the holy place from the holy of holies when our Lord died on the Cross. That curtain which veiled God’s presence in the temple might be called His garment. God Himself rent His own garment, as if weeping the death of His Son. Yet that most holy death was also the sacrifice pleasing to the Father. In union with the Crucified One, we too should rend our own hearts in preparation to receive the gift of Eternal Life.
Keeping in mind the command to break our hearts instead of merely tearing our garments, let us now turn to the gospel. Our Lord here gives us pointers as to how to conduct ourselves when we do acts of piety or righteousness, namely, giving alms, fasting and praying. When we do these acts, our Lord is asking us to do them without fanfare. He places the emphasis on our motivation: “Be careful not to parade your good deeds before men to attract their notice; by doing this you will lose all reward from your Father in heaven.” Rather, our actions must be done in “secret, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.” He reminds us that the intended audience is not men, but God. Our actions are meant to please God, not seek favour in the eyes of men. Such outward actions without interior conversion would be pointless. Therefore, these acts must spring from the heart and go hand in hand with our interior motivation. Pope Francis tells us in one of his homilies on this day “that conversion is not a matter reducible to outward forms or vague intentions, but engages and transforms one’s entire existence from the centre of the person, from the conscience.”
These practices are never goals in and of themselves, but instead are tools, working like ice picks to crack open our frozen icy hearts, levers to pry them open, so that we can look inside ourselves and see our deepest longings and fears for what they really are. Each Lenten ascetic practice—denying oneself meat, or luxury, or treats—helps us to put our lifestyles and desires into perspective and creates a space for God to enter. Having created a space, we must allow God to come into our lives and into our hearts: here is where Lenten practices of daily prayer and reading scripture are important. Take some time each day to pray, deny yourself of a favourite dish or a full meal; put aside your saved funds for the poor or some worthy cause; and by doing so, break open the monotony of the everyday to let God in to your life.
Finally, let this also be a season of loving. Very often, making sacrifices and performing penances can put us in a bad mood. Rather, than purifying us and helping us to grow in virtue, we end up becoming grouchy, irritable and even judgmental of others whom we believe are not as holy as we are. The way of loving requires an openness and vulnerability, a letting in of the stranger and the unknown, and a giving away parts of ourselves that we may rather keep. In short, to love as Christ loves, we must be willing to love to the extent of allowing our hearts to be broken. And becoming like Christ is not a one-time event, it is being constantly remade in Christ in our daily lives and in all aspects of our lives. The penitential season of Lent is not about slow progress to a singular moment of conversion; rather, it is a process of constant conversion, constant rending, and constant breaking. The rituals of Lent, such as giving something up or marking our foreheads with ashes, do not in and of themselves, mark our conversion moment. Instead, they are habits of ongoing conversion: allowing us to break open our hearts and give them over to God. When shall we begin? The answer is now! As St Paul reminds us in the second reading, “Now is the favourable time; this is the day of salvation!” “Let your hearts be broken not your garments torn, turn to the Lord your God again.”
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A
Today, many well intentioned Catholics and even leaders would opined that the traditional path to sanctity, to become a saint, is too demanding and may even be toxic by today’s standards. We often hear this complaint that the Church and her teachings are demanding the humanly impossible from her flock; that she shouldn’t “push so hard” or people will break and leave. And so instead of demanding excellence, we settle for mediocrity. Instead of pushing up the standards with the sky (or heaven) being the limit, we demand that the Church lowers the bar to accommodate all and sundry, even those who do not make the most basic and fundamental mark - for example observing the five precepts of the Church. When communion is guaranteed despite whether one is properly disposed or not or living in sin, when sacraments are dispensed like freebies at the supermarket, thrown in as consumer’s bait, when moral and liturgical laws are flagrantly violated in the name of pastoral inclusivity, you know you’ve hit rock bottom, or perhaps worst - we’ve bottomed out.
Today, we see the rise of mediocrity in every sphere. In fact, many celebrate their mediocrity by announcing, “this is who I am, take it or leave it!” When mediocrity has become the norm, when our imperfections and limitations are applauded or even hung up like trophies, when the status quo is accepted without question, there is no longer any impetus to improve ourselves, to grow or advance in sanctity. Mediocrity today poses as democratisation, inclusiveness, populism, condescension, tolerance, broad-mindedness, optimism and even charity. Mediocrity provides the anaesthesia our society needs to shield it from the sting of suffering and sacrifice.
In other words, mediocrity presents the promise of salvation without a cross, charity without needing to sacrifice. We try to make religion easier and more accessible in order to stem the steady decline in followers. But mediocrity is settling for cheap; it is selling a lie, and eventually most people will catch on to a lie, which explains why we continue to haemorrhage numbers. Easy come easy go!
The call to holiness, ultimately, is a call to perfection. Being average or just good when it comes to holiness just doesn’t make it! As Christians, we hear Christ’s rallying cry to walk the extra mile, to go out into the deep end, to make the greater sacrifice for faith. We are all called to be saints! You will hear Jesus constantly prodding you, “Why do less when you can do more?” He came to raise the bar, not lower it. “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”
The truth that we must embrace is that religion is supposed to be hard, like anything else worth doing particularly since it concerns eternal life. The way forward is up, not downwards. We should reach for the stars instead of being contented with mere pebbles of star dust. To a secular mind, saints are shockingly unreasonable. But can one love God too much? Can one be too humble or too charitable or too holy? Scriptures tells us that this can never be. Even our Lord Himself would demand nothing less than perfection: “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And no good Christian can ever accuse our Lord of being too extreme or unreasonable.
What our Lord is proposing to us today is that we Christians should never just settle for being good or be contented with just being average. The call to perfection is the challenge that Christ throws to everyone who would follow Him, that is to reach the unreachable; to leap beyond the practical, the ordinary and the routine; to fulfil the basic and minimum requirements and then to look eagerly for more ways to give, care, and love. That is why devotion to the saints is such a necessary antidote to the poison of mediocrity in modern times. The saints remind us that perfection in terms of holiness is possible and attainable, even though it may take a lifetime of surrendering to God’s grace as we progress in discipleship. We are made to be saints, being “half-baked” just doesn’t cut it. To quote one of Pope Francis’ favourite theologians, León Bloy, when all is said and done, “the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, you are meant to live a heroic faith, not a mediocre forgettable one. You are meant to shine like stars in the heavens, not just appear to be a shiny bling on some counterfeit Versace outfit. If you feel that this is overwhelming and you don’t have what it takes to be a saint, know this: It doesn’t take your strength but your surrender. It will cost you everything but gain you so much more. There is a life you’re meant to live, and Christ can help you get there. Make it your aim to live higher in your faith each day, instead of dragging your feet in the mud of mediocrity. In whatever you’re going through, it is meant to take you higher. The Apostle James assured us that “when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing” (James 1:2-4)
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A
Recently, I was just reflecting over two broad categories which we priests are often lumped into. Some priests are labelled as “strict”, while others are known as “humble.” You may find this dichotomy strange because the opposite of strictness is not humility, they are not antonyms by any measure, but it would appear that these are the only two categories we priests are associated with - it’s either one or the other. As I tried to wrap my head around these concepts, it occurred to me that both strictness and humility have been redefined beyond their traditional and conventional meanings. A strict priest is one who follows the rules and is slavishly consistent with regards to his policies, whereas the humble priest is radically flexible, and is ever willing to bend or break the rules when it is convenient to do so.
More than 1700 years ago St. Anthony the Great, whose feast we celebrated last month, envisioned a day “when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’” That day has arrived. There has been a tectonic shift that has upended how we view reality. It may have started with tiny indiscernible tremors but with hardly any resistance, this has morphed into full blown inversion of values. First you are made to tolerate the abnormal or the immoral, then you are asked to celebrate, and finally, you are forced to participate. Refusal to do so would result in the modern equivalent of excommunication - “cancellation.” In this almost alternate multi-verse-like reality, those who break the laws are canonised while those who keep the laws are vilified.
The Catholic Church, unfortunately, has not been spared. In The First Apology, Justin Martyr taught, “Let those who are not found living as He taught, be understood to be no Christians, even though they profess with the lip the precepts of Christ.” This has been the consistent teaching of the Church for centuries. Yet, today, the “view” of St Justin Martyr would be considered “strict,” “rigid”, overly restrictive and even un-Christian, where cohabitation, sodomy and abortion have become normalised. All of this suggests that the Church has been influenced more by the culture than has the culture by the Church.
If this is how modern folks, including many Catholics, view “reality” then we can begin to understand how our Lord’s teachings today will not sit well with many. A most frequent complaint against the Church these days is that we seem to be more a Church of Laws rather than a Church of Love. The statement suggests that there is an opposition between laws and love. But the reality is that the nominal rejection of legalism often reveals a new form of legalism – when you break a law, you end up making another. Man cannot live in a vacuum devoid of rules and norms. We either have to live under a law which applies to everyone without exception or favour, the Rule of Law, or we make up laws as and when it is convenient to do so, often favouring ourselves or our friends, which is called Rule by Law.
Today, we have a passage from the gospel that puts things in their proper perspective. St Matthew the Evangelist records Jesus as saying this, “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish them but to complete them. I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved.” But Jesus does not stop here. He proceeds to issue this warning, “Therefore, the man who infringes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven; but the man who keeps them and teaches them will be considered great in the kingdom of heaven.” Doesn’t this make Jesus sound overly “strict,” legalistically rigid?
Most critics of the Church’s penchant for laws and rubrics would rather portray Jesus as an exemplary and “humble” rebel, an anti-establishment instigator, a prophetic witness of libertinism, who came to undo the law, condemn the legalism of the Pharisees and set up a new relationship with God that was solely based on grace and freedom. For them, Jesus must always be a Jesus of Love, the fount of mercy, the anti-thesis of the strict laws. It’s not hard to see how this ideological framework fits into today’s society with its suspicion of law and authority. Yes, it is an attractive image but a false one as our gospel demonstrates today.
What these critics fail to realise is that there is no inconsistency between the Jesus of Love and the Jesus of the Law. Our Lord is both the Incarnation of Love and the perfection of the Law. He came to show us what it means to love and this comes with not just keeping the bare minimum of the Law but perfecting it through Love. With love, keeping the Law is no longer done grudgingly as if it were a burden but willingly and wholeheartedly as an expression of true freedom. Breaking the law doesn’t make you more loving, nor does keeping the Law make you any less. The Church’s law merely follows the theological reality of things. For example, it isn’t canon law that forbids divorce, Jesus does. Canon law merely translates what the Lord has revealed to us into juridical language. So, what happens when you take away the law or choose to ignore it? You would most likely find anarchy rather than love!
If the modern Church is to effectively deal with the social and moral issues of the day, it must do so NOT by lowering the moral bar nor by making things easier and lighter. The problem with Christians today is not rigidity but laxity. For unless the Church, by its living witness, takes seriously the teachings of Jesus, the world won’t either. G.K. Chesterton was right when he said, “I don’t need a church to tell me I’m wrong where I already know that I’m wrong; I need a Church to tell me I’m wrong where I think I’m right.” For whenever the Church fails to address how Church teaching applies to a moral issue in the culture or ignores the conduct of a member unbecoming of a follower of Christ, it is a signal that the church: is uncertain about her teachings, doesn’t take her own teachings seriously, or is satisfied with the “good enough” Christians, and whose moral failings remain, for the most part, private.
The mission of the Church is not to make things easier, but to form solid and committed disciples of the Lord who can meet the challenge of the day. This requires strict discipline done out of love. It is the lack of love which seeks to make things easier, because the desire for popular appeal is not the product of love but of cowardly self-preservation. To those who complain that the teachings of the Lord are too demanding, the Church must meet these demands with steadfastness and clarity of her teachings. She must remember that it is never a loving thing when she bends to the pressures of culture by allowing false teaching, weak teaching, and the lack of church discipline to endanger the spiritual health of her flock.
