The Foundation of Truth

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

If someone tells you that they have a simple way to explain the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity, don’t believe him for a second. It’s a scam! If it was so simple, our Lord Himself would have taken every effort to explain the concept exhaustively and leave nothing to chance or speculation. If it was so easy, then the volumes of tomes on the subject would have been unnecessary. Our Lord did not dismiss the complexity of the topic. In fact, He acknowledged at the beginning of today’s passage that He “still (has) many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now.” Our experience of God can resonate with this truth bomb. In all humility, how could the finite claim to fully comprehend the infinite? At the popular level, even among Christians, the Trinity is generally thought of as a hopelessly obscure piece of doctrine at best and a self-contradiction at worst.

Of course, one should not stop with the first line of our Lord’s words in today’s gospel passage. To do so would be to condemn ourselves to perpetual intellectual darkness when it comes to contemplating the mysteries of God, an impenetrable brick wall that prevents us from seeing beyond the “cloud of unknowing.” We will never be able to “know” God, and progress in our relationship with Him because to love Him and serve Him and be with Him in Paradise forever is premised on our knowledge of what He has revealed to us in the first place. We should, therefore, continue to the next line, a line which changes everything with the coming of the Holy Spirit: “But when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking as from himself but will say only what he has learnt; and he will tell you of the things to come.” It is interesting to note that the Spirit’s role in the complete revelation of God, the Most Holy Trinity, is reflected in our liturgical calendar. The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity falls no earlier than the Sunday following Pentecost Sunday.

What is this “complete truth” which our Lord is referring to? For one, it is objective and eternal. In other words, truth is not a matter of consensus. We don’t fashion truth to suit our opinions or desires. It is common today to speak of “your truth” and “my truth,” and that is instead of looking at objective facts, we often hear people speaking of their “lived experiences,” suggesting that every person’s truth is unique and irreplaceable and therefore, infallible and unchallengeable. The complete Truth of the Lord, however, cannot be something malleable, easily moulded according to our personal agenda, our likes and dislikes. Rather, it is we who must conform to the objective Truths revealed to us by God; and if we are humble and strive to be faithful, then the Holy Spirit will gently lead us and transform us with that Truth, into God’s own likeness.

But the most complete Truth is not like any other objective truth which we can speak of. The self-revelation of God is in fact that “complete truth,” for above the Truth of God, there can never be any other truth, and all truth found in the created world is only a shadow and a reflexion of His Truth. The inner Truth of God is this: that the most original and unconditional love of the Father is matched and answered by the equally absolute reciprocal love of the Son. We can understand and participate inwardly in this mystery of love, if the Spirit, who is both the mutuality and fruit of this eternal love, is made to penetrate us. The Spirit binds us to divine love itself. Indeed, this is what St Paul proclaims to the Romans in the second reading, that “the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.”

Far from being obscure, the doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity is the breath-taking Truth that makes sense of all other truths, the Luminous Mystery that illuminates all other mysteries, the dazzling sun that allows us to see all things except itself (and this is not because of darkness but its excess of light). All of human thought and experience point in one way or another to the summit of knowing and loving that we call the Trinity. It is the revelation that makes sense of everything in our experience, everything.

It is an undeniable reality that we who believe in the primacy of the Truth revealed to us by God, are now engaged in a direct confrontation with the greater culture which denies the existence of objective truth, what more the doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity that finds no equivalent correspondence in this life. Perhaps, the world continues to reject the revelation of the Trinity, precisely because we have been bad witnesses - our lack of love or care for others, our penchant to be selfish and individualistic, our tendency to pander to the maddening crowd, rather than stand up to defend the Truth. How wonderful it would be if we could just reflect the life of the Most Holy Trinity in our own lives? That would be our most convincing and effective way of evangelising - not just with eloquently profound theological explanations (which are undeniably necessary) but, simply through the way we live our lives.

And so, on this day we affirm once again the truth of the One True God in three persons, co-equal in dignity and substance, we recognise that it is less important to focus on the math of the Trinity and more important to focus on the why. Why would God go to all the trouble of creating the world, creating us, and then sending His Son to save us and His Holy Spirit to guide, inspire and sanctify the Church? We arrive at the same answer as the early disciples. God is love. God is not revealed to “be” love in any other religion in the world other than Christianity because in order for there to be love, there must be a beloved. It is impossible to love in the vacuum and to claim to love “no one.” We need an “Other” to love. From all eternity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have poured themselves out into each other in an infinite act of love, which we, as Christians, are called to experience through faith and the sacraments by which we are lifted up into that very love of God itself (Romans 5:1-5). “God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness: ‘Creatures came into existence when the key of love opened His hand’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 293).

Yes, “the key of Love has opened His hand.” It is the love of God - the love of God the Father, the love of God the Son, the love of God the Holy Spirit - that binds us, heals us, and makes us children of God. It is this love which compels us to know Him, not just partially but fully, in order that we may love Him fully, and not just partially, and then serve Him wholeheartedly so that we may share in the eternal life which He has promised us from the very beginning. That is the complete Truth, and nothing less than the complete Truth. That is the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. May His Holy Name be praised!

The New Adam

Feast of the Baptism of the Lord Year C

The story of the baptism of the Lord is found in all four gospels with tiny but significant differences. In the Fourth Gospel, the account is reported speech or a hear say account by St John the Baptist, whereas Matthew, Mark and Luke record this event directly as if they had witnessed it or received the testimony of other witnesses. But in all three Synoptic gospels, we see both similarities and differences in the basic order. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all follow the same basic order of events: the appearance of St John the Baptist and an introduction to his ministry followed by the Baptism of the Lord.

Although both Matthew and Mark record that the Lord is baptised by John, Luke remains silent on this. We can only assume as the reader and from comparing this text with the other parallel texts, that our Lord was baptised by John. But this omission may in fact be deliberate. In fact, Luke may have wanted to emphasise that Jesus baptised Himself since no one was worthy to do so: “Jesus after his own baptism.” Unlike us who are adopted children of God through baptism, that is being baptised by another person, Jesus who is already the Son of God by nature had no need of such elevation or coronation. In Matthew and Mark, immediately after hearing the voice of the Father, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.

But Luke uniquely breaks the flow by offering us Jesus’ genealogy between the baptism and the temptation. This is a curious placement for a genealogy, and at first pass, it might seem to interrupt the flow of Luke’s narrative. We might expect Luke to place the genealogy at the beginning of his Gospel (such as we find in Matthew), or perhaps at the end of Luke chapter 1, right before Jesus’ birth. Yet Luke strategically places it here, just after our Lord’s baptism and prior to the episode on how the Lord endured temptations in the wilderness.

The key to understanding the placement of the genealogy is found within the genealogy itself. Unlike Luke, Matthew’s gospel is written to the Jewish community. As such, Matthew’s genealogy (presumably following Joseph’s line) links Jesus to King David, the greatest of the Jewish Kings, and then to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. And there Matthew’s genealogy stops. But Luke’s gospel is written to a non-Jewish audience, and his genealogy does not focus on Jesus’ relation to Abraham. Instead, Luke (presumably following Mary’s line) traces Jesus all the way back to Adam, and then ultimately to God.

Matthew’s genealogy presents Jesus as the second David, a son of Abraham. Luke’s genealogy presents Jesus as the second Adam, a son of God. This should not come as a surprise to any reader of the Gospel of St Luke, as the angel had already announced to Mary at the Annunciation: “He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High.” But what is more surprising, unlike Matthew, Luke begins his genealogy with Jesus who is described as the Son of God and then traces it back to Adam, another son of God. In fact, the last name in the genealogy is not even Adam, it is God: “Adam, the son of God.” That this genealogy terminates with God Himself is a feature unparalleled in the ancient world, including the Old Testament. Having begun his genealogy with Jesus instead of Adam, Luke wishes to emphasise that Jesus’ identity had no need of validation by tracing his lineage back to Adam. On the contrary, it is Adam who is being validated and confirmed by his descendant, Jesus, the Son of Mary and the only begotten and Beloved Son of God.

And thus, Luke offers us the genealogy — linking Jesus to Adam, and ultimately to God — as a means of introducing Jesus’ temptation. With the placement and nature of his genealogy, Luke intends us to see Jesus’ wilderness temptation as a recapitulation of Adam’s garden temptation. It is Jesus — the descendent of Adam and the Son of God — who will overthrow the devil. Where Adam failed the test, Jesus will endure Satan’s temptations and remain faithful to the Father. Where the first Adam failed, the Second Adam would succeed.

So, what our Lord accomplished by nature, we enjoy through the grace, especially the grace of baptism. Most people often believe that baptism serves as a means of washing away our sins. It does. Others believe that it is a rite of passage which incorporates us into the “club,” the Church. That too happens. But most importantly, baptism incorporates us into the life of Christ. We follow Him into the waters of baptism to partake of His death and to die to our old selves but we also rise from the waters of baptism as a new creation, a Christian, in other words, a little Christ, as we now share in the graces of His resurrection. We cast aside our fallen nature which we inherited from the old Adam so that we may now be adorned with Christ, the new Adam, and because of this ontological or substantial change in us, we have now become sons and daughters of God. As the Catechism teaches: “Baptism not only purifies from all sins, but also makes the neophyte "a new creature," an adopted son of God, who has become a "partaker of the divine nature,” member of Christ and coheir with him, and a temple of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1265).

Herein lies the deepest mysteries of the Sacraments instituted by Christ for our salvation and growth in holiness. The Sacraments are not just “things” that we do, archaic ceremonies that are performed to appease God. Our Lord Jesus did not come into the world merely to do things for us, but rather He came to open up through His humanity a way to participate in His divinity, to graft ourselves into His very life. So, today as we celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, let us remember with ever greater certitude that the heavenly voice that spoke “my Beloved” that day was referring no less to us than to Christ, that it applies in equal measure and with equal intensity to all of you who have been incorporated into Him “through the bath of rebirth.”

The Woman who bore God

Solemnity of Mary Mother of God

The first set of visitors to the bedside of the Blessed Virgin Mary after the birth of our Lord would have been most unexpected. Rather than kings or prophets or the aristocratic priestly caste coming to pay homage to the new born King of Kings, the gospel tells us that it was a motley crew of poor shepherds who were the first visitors, a group of people whose profession would have even been looked down by others because of their lowly state and the frequent association of their kind with petty thieves and others who engage in unsavoury work. But this would not be surprising if we knew our Scripture. God Himself had promised to shepherd His people through the prophecies of the prophets of old. So, shouldn’t the first ones to recognise this ominous event be the ones who would be most like this Shepherd King in the flesh? Birds of a feather do indeed flock together!

The Blessed Virgin Mary would have had a sense of this. She did not feel insulted by the presence of these shepherds nor withdraw in fear. She welcomed them and the message of the angels which they brought: “Today in the town of David a saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord”. And St Luke tells us that “she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.” To ponder and to enter into deep reflexion is one thing, but to “treasure” is on an entirely different level of appreciation.

In that tight space of a hollowed-out cave with little room for anything else than the animals who were stabled there, the Holy Family took refuge and the Word spoken at Creation and who brought the universe into existence was born and laid in a manger, a humble feeding trough for the animals. The space was crowded enough before the arrival of the guests. And yet that space was large enough to house the animals, the Holy Family and the shepherds who had come to worship the Saviour born that day. Once the Virgin Mary contained the Uncontainable, and her womb became more spacious than the heavens, the small grotto of Bethlehem has expanded to such a degree that it now houses true worshippers like the most cavernous basilica! We do not feel cramped here! We may feel cramped at church during the midnight service, but not here.

The Son of God was born on earth, yet He was not separated from heaven. He is babbling like an infant in the arms of His Mother and giving commands to the archangels and angels concurrently. It is precisely for this reason, that we affirm the title of His mother as Mother of God, or in Greek, Theotokos which literally means “God-Bearer,” the one who gave birth to God. This title was solemnly defined by the Council of Ephesus in 431 (although it has been widely used for centuries earlier) to mean that in the person of Jesus Christ, His humanity and divinity are inseparable. Jesus cannot be split up into two parts, one divine and the other human. This means that Mary cannot be simply the mother of the human Jesus without being also, in a genuine sense, the Mother of God.

The first Christians called Mary the “Mother of God” without hesitation. There was scriptural precedent, and it seemed logical. If Jesus was God, and Mary was his mother, then that made her the Mother of God. That sort of logic depends on a principle called the “Communication of Idioms.” According to that principle, whatever one says about either of Christ’s natures, can be truly said of Christ Himself. That’s because His two natures, the divine nature and the human nature, were united in Him. He is one divine person.

In the fifth century, however, some people raised the same objections to the title that many non-Catholics raise today: They argued that the title “Mother of God” implied that Mary was the “originator of God.” Those objectors said that they could accept the title “Mother of Christ,” but not “Mother of God.” At the heart of those objections, however, was an objection to the unity of Christ’s two natures. Mary, they claimed, gave birth only to Christ’s human nature, not His divine nature. The Church, led by Pope Celestine I and St. Cyril of Alexandria, disagreed. As St. Cyril pointed out, a mother gives birth to a person, not a nature. And the bishops at the Council of Ephesus sided with them and rejected the duality of natures proposed by Nestorius and his camp who could not come around to call Mary Mother of God.

Accordingly, Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ, who was and is a divine person. Although Mary did not “originate” or “generate” God, she did bear Him in her womb and give birth to Him. Mary did not give Jesus His divine nature or His divine personhood—those He possessed from all eternity as the only begotten Son of the Father. But she also didn’t just give Him His flesh: She gave birth to the whole person. She gave birth to Jesus Christ, both God and man. For this reason, we should not hesitate to acknowledge that Mary was God’s mother.

So, as we continue to spend time in prayer and meditation at the Christmas creche to honour the Saviour of the World, let us not forget His mother who stands watchful by His side. Together, with her, let us treasure all these things and ponder them in our hearts.

In the Beginning

Christmas Mass During the Day

Catholics attending this Mass or a later mass today are often surprised by the Gospel reading. There doesn’t seem to be anything Christmasy about this Christmas Day gospel reading. There is no mention of a manger, a stable, shepherds, of Magi, of angels, of Bethlehem or, very surprisingly, of Mary and Joseph. If you came last night, you would not have been disappointed. But this morning’s Gospel starts in a manner which doesn’t seem to be in synch with the season: "In the beginning was the Word," and it continues to speak only of the Word of God. So why is this a Christmas Gospel reading?

Up until the liturgical reforms of the post-Vatican II era, the Prologue of St John’s Gospel, the text we just heard was and is still proclaimed at the very end of every Traditional Latin Mass, thereby earning for itself the misnomer ‘the Last Gospel.’ According to one source, the Last Gospel was inserted here to counter the heresy (prevalent among clergy at the time of its introduction) of denying the Incarnation, and therefore the divinity of Jesus Christ. It was to assure the congregation that the priest who had celebrated Mass was not a heretic and thus the Mass was valid. Phew! The priest by reading this passage publicly attests to the orthodoxy of his faith. Whatever may have been the original reason for its insertion, it is a beautiful paradox that the Last Gospel of the Mass takes us back to the beginning, for it opens with the words "In the beginning."

The tradition of reading the prologue on Christmas Day has survived the liturgical reform. Though the practice of reading the Last Gospel at the end of mass has been discontinued, it did serve the purpose of climaxing every celebration with the compelling and beautiful truth of the Incarnation, the dogma that speaks of the act and decision of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, becoming man – the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The prologue situates the Christmas story outside the confines of human history. In fact, it provides for the words and works of the Incarnate Word an eternal background or origin and proceeds to proclaim His divinity and eternity. He who "became flesh" in time, is the Word Himself from all eternity. He is the only begotten Son of God "who is in the bosom of the Father." He is the Son "consubstantial with the Father," He is "God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God." He is the Word "through whom everything was made”… “and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

This focus on the Incarnation and the Divinity of Christ reminds us that we are not celebrating the birthday of a celebrity, or a great hero, or a sagely guru, or an illustrious prophet. We are celebrating the birth into human history of the Divine and Eternal Word, the Son of God, the One from whom and in whom all things were made. "The Son of God became man", St Athanasius explains, "in order that the sons of men, the sons of Adam, might become sons of God.” With all the gift-giving, merry making, commercialisation of our feast, it is quite easy to forget this very central truth.

While our culture is very open to the likes of Superman, Thor, Spider-man and other “super-beings” who are fictional, it is ironic that man regards the Incarnation, the fact of an Omnipotent God choosing to become mortal, a strange and unbelievable idea. There has been increased hostility and opposition to the biblical doctrine of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the rejection of His divinity. In history there have been those who have sought to sacrifice either the deity of Christ (e.g. the Ebionites) or remove His humanity (e.g. the Docetists). In modern times, there has been a bold attack on the doctrine of the incarnation. The great quest of liberal theology has been to invent a Jesus who is stripped of all supernatural power, deity, and authority. They are not reinterpreting traditional Christology. They are simply abandoning it.

The doctrine of the Incarnation is central to a Christian celebration of Christmas, a truth that is currently under attack. The doctrine of the Incarnation is one which is vital to the Christian faith because other doctrines will stand or fall with it. We cease to be Christians the moment we deny that Jesus is God. Our believe that He is God sets us apart from other religions.

Perhaps the best way to underscore the importance of the doctrine of the Incarnation is to consider the price for putting it aside. Nowhere is it more beautifully and succinctly articulated than in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which lays down these various reasons for the Incarnation thus pointing to its central significance:

· The Word became flesh for us in order to save us (CCC 457).

· The Word became flesh so that thus we might know God’s love (CCC 458).

· The Word became flesh to be our model of holiness (CCC 459)

· Finally, the Word became flesh to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature.’ (2 Peter 1:4)

Can we truly celebrate Christmas and at the same time deny both the humanity and the divinity of Christ? The answer to that question must be a decisive ‘No’. Those who reject these truths empty our celebration of its essential content – Christmas is not just a celebration of the birthday of our founder, a sentimental reason for gathering as a family, an occasion for gift-giving and carolling, a cultic act to proclaim the legendary charity of Ole St Nicholas. For us Christians, Christmas must always be a celebration affirming our belief in both the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. He is fully God and fully Man. The Incarnation does not stand alone as a doctrine that can be severed from the rest. On the contrary, it is an irreducible part of the revelation about the person and work of Jesus Christ. With it, the Gospel stands or falls.

It is often the case that we are invited to admire the humility of our Lord Jesus Christ as He chose to be born in the spartan conditions of a cave or stable in Bethlehem. But this morning’s liturgy also invites us to humbly kneel in adoration before the One who chose to kneel before His disciples to wash their feet. It’s time to rescue this Feast of Christmas from all that sentimental sugar coating. It is the Feast by which we affirm once again our belief in His divinity. Together with Pope Benedict, we affirm that our “Faith is simple and rich: we believe that God exists, that God counts; but which God? A God with a face, a human face, a God who reconciles, who overcomes hatred and gives us the power of peace that no one else can give us.”

We will recognise Him by His wounds

Second Sunday of Easter Year A

There is a story told, a legend perhaps, about St. Teresa of Avila. One day the devil appeared to her, disguised as Christ. Theresa wasn’t fooled for even a second. She immediately dismissed him. Before leaving, however, the devil asked her: “How did you know? How could you be so sure I wasn’t Christ?” Her answer: “You didn’t have any wounds! Christ has wounds.”

Because of His Wounds, because His Sacred, Precious Blood was spilt, you have the opportunity to see the Face of God. As our Holy Father poignantly wrote at the start of his bull of indiction of the Jubilee of Mercy, “Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy.” That’s Christianity in a nutshell!  It is something that every Christian knows, but too few truly ponder enough. Today, a week after Easter Sunday, the Church invites us to gaze upon and meditate on the wounds the Lord bore for us. He returns to His disciples in His bodily form without having disguised the wounds of His passion. He returns a battle scarred hero, displaying His wounds to us for our scrutiny, inviting us to touch and even enter into these very wounds, so that our faith may be restored, our own personal wounds healed, and our sins forgiven.

I believe that you are all too familiar with the famous demand of Thomas in today’s gospel, “Unless I see the holes that the nails made in His hands and can put my finger into the holes they made, and unless I can put my hand into His side, I refuse to believe.” This condition laid down by Thomas is, of course, the reason he has come to be called “the doubter.” However, does this description deal fairly with Thomas? Did he say that he doubted the testimony of Mary Magdalene and the ten who saw the Lord in bodily form? Well, I believe that we are jumping to a conclusion that one necessarily means the other. Thomas is not insisting on seeing Jesus with his own eyes, to see what the others claimed to have seen. That is not what he requested. He asked for something quite different, something quite specific and odd. He says, “I want to see the wounds of Jesus. I want to touch those wounds.”

It is only in the Gospel of John, in this particular passage, that we come to realise that Jesus was affixed to the cross by nails and it is only in the Fourth Gospel, do we have the story of the piercing of His side with a lance. The other gospels have not one single word about piercing nails or thrusting spear or even physical and visible wounds on the body of the resurrected Lord.

But isn’t it odd that the resurrected body of the Lord should have wounds? Isn’t the resurrection by definition a glorification, a transfiguration, a perfection, a total healing? Shouldn’t the resurrection remove every trace of old weakness, every hint of prior vulnerability? Why would the Fourth Evangelist deliberately take note of this seemingly trivial and yet scandalous point?

To add further intrigue to the story, Our Lord offers Thomas precisely what he desires, without any rebuke. At that point, Thomas utters his confession, “My Lord and my God.” Pay special attention to this high point, perhaps the climax of the entire gospel; that it comes not immediately after the incident of the empty tomb, nor at Mary Magdalene’s discovery of the resurrected Christ, and not even on the lips of the ten who witnessed that very same resurrected body walk through closed doors. No, these words that mark the “High Christology” of St John, where he surpasses the other evangelists in the honours, titles and privileges heaped upon Jesus, is found on the lips of the one who demanded to see the wounds of Christ. The wounds of Christ would be the very reason for this confession of faith. Thomas sees the wounds and he sees God.

This is at the very heart of our Easter faith. A Jesus without wounds is a Jesus without a cross and a Jesus without a cross would never be adequate to meet the deepest needs of mankind. Too many modern Christians have clasped to their bosoms a powerful but cross-less Christ. That kind of Christology will always have at its corollary a cross-less discipleship. A cross-less Christ, a God insulated from pain and suffering, will produce followers who believe they should enjoy the benefits of a special relationship with this lite-version of Christ. They become touchy ‘Christians’, ‘Christians’ who get offended easily. Every small little demand made of them would seem impossibly heavy. These ‘Christians’ will look to their false image of Christ for “blessings” of success and privilege, and these become evidence, that they enjoy divine approval. But to worship such a Christ would be to worship a false Christ – an anti-Christ.

Through the Thomas story, however, St John the Evangelist wishes us to see a resurrected Christ who bears forever the marks of nails and spear. Those wounds will never go away. They can’t be window-dressed. The exalted Christ has not passed a sublime existence immune to suffering. Even after Good Friday and Easter, God continues to turn to the world through the wounded Christ. To believe in this Christ means to take Him, wounds and all, into our lives. To believe means to participate in Christ’s own suffering on behalf of the true life of the world. The living but wounded Jesus is the Revealer of God. Therefore when the Fourth Gospel declares the oneness of the Father and the Son, it is proclaiming that the wounds of Christ are integral to the identity of the mystery we call “God.” What the pages of the gospel proclaim is not so much that “Jesus is like God” but rather, “God is like this Jesus with His wounds.”

This is why the suffering and death of the Son of God is unique in the world’s religions because in it we see the ultimate answer to suffering. God does not give us a ten-point explanation on suffering. He does not set out a systematic answer to the pain of the world. God does not stand aloof, watching, as the world suffers. In the Lord Jesus Christ, God enters the world and experiences suffering with us and for us. The death of Christ was not a myth. It was a physical and an experienced reality. This was the God-man, Jesus Christ, being wounded, scarred and beaten; being maimed, marred and murdered for us.  God can look us in the eye and honestly say, ‘I know what you are going through because I have gone through it too.’

This is the incredible reality of the Christian faith. We do not worship a God who gives us life lessons on how to be happy or a God who sets out a strategy for how to avoid sorrow. We do not worship a God who remains aloof, untouched by our pains and sorrows. We worship a God who has chosen to, as the Malay expression goes, “turun padang,” go down to the grassroots of unwashed humanity. Yes, we worship a God who has experienced the most profound sorrow of suffering. He suffered for us and He suffers with us. And He has the scars to show for it.

When Thomas sees Jesus and believes, he sees the wounds. He looks at the wounds. He does not see the evidence of man’s depraved cruelty but rather, he sees beauty, the beauty of the self-sacrificial love of the One who willingly chose to die for us. He sees the face of God’s mercy. We too need to see them to believe. We must let it sink in and remember that Christ did this for us. The wounds that mar Christ are the wounds that mar us all, transferred from us to him. In His death, every needless death is absorbed. Every drop of blood ever shed is seen in His death. Every sorrow is seen in His sorrow. Every tear of mourning and loss is understood by Him. God attends every funeral and whispers, ‘I know how this feels’ to everyone who will listen to His quiet voice. Our wounded God has redeemed every wound. Our murdered God has redeemed death. Our broken God has redeemed brokenness. Our bereft God has redeemed mourning. And, we will recognise Him by his wounds.

尊敬母亲是兑现儿子

2016年天主之母节

今天庆节的名称——天主之母节，对非天主教徒来说，尤其是对基督教信徒及穆斯林，时常都会造成混淆。基督教信徒会指责我们崇拜偶像，而穆斯林则会说我们给没有父亲或母亲的全能造物主一位人性的母亲。可是，非天主教徒一点都不了解，当我们称圣母玛利亚为“天主之母”时，其实那是我们对耶稣至高无上的尊崇。

教会有关圣母玛利亚的教导可在圣母四端信理中找到，这些信理分别是“终身童贞”、“天主之母”、“始胎无染原罪”及“蒙召升天”。每一条信理都是以基督为中心，和耶稣基督息息相关。前面的两端信理提醒我们，耶稣基督不单只是一位人类母亲的儿子，祂也是天主子。后面两端则提醒我们人类的终向。换句话说，这四端信理都指向耶稣基督的救世工程。基督降生成人，为的就是要拯救我们脱离罪恶，并要领我们回到天乡去，而圣母就是这事件的证明。

我们称玛利亚为“天主之母”有几个原因。第一，这称号告诉我们有关耶稣的事迹；它指明了我们信仰的核心，那就是：耶稣是人，也是天主。

第二，“天主之母”这称号让我们对天主有更深一层的认识，它凸显了天主的谦卑；因为天主取了人性，并选择借着凡间女子降生，寄居人间被养育。

第三，这称号也讲述有关我们自己及人类。当圣言在圣母胎中成了血肉时，人类就变成了天主在世的住所。透过取了人性的恩宠，天主圣化了我们的生活。教会时常教导我们关于天主怎样成为人，为让世人也能像天主一样。

所以，正当全世界在庆祝新一年的开始，并为新一年列下展望时，让我们也在这慈悲年中，列下我们的展望，并以圣奥斯定的祷词作为祈祷：“就如同圣母胎中怀有耶稣，让我们在心中也怀有耶稣；正如童贞女孕育出基督的肉身，愿我们的心中也孕育出基督的信德；如同圣母带来救世主，愿我们的灵魂也有救赎和赞美。愿我们的灵魂在天主内不是贫瘠的，但却是富足的。”