Be a little Christ

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

The lofty demands by the Lord in today’s gospel reading would often elicit this immediate response: “I’m only human.” This is not a humble admission of one’s fallibility or inability to live up to the ideals of Christian living, but often used as an excuse that such demands are only meant for angels and the saints, and beyond the reach of mere mortals like us. When we hide behind the label of being “human”, our nature is not seen as a gift but rather as a deficit. We forgot that we are made in the image and likeness of a loving God who only wants what’s best for us and to be our best, not our worst.

We find in the course of salvation history and the pages of the Bible, individuals, families and nations called, chosen and sent by God on His mission not because of their good genes, immaculate backgrounds, exceptional talents or heroic prowess. In fact, most of these figures appear to be failures and losers, or as my bishop is fond of saying, they are members of “the least, the little, the lost and the last.” The reason for such seemingly defective candidates directs the spotlight away from them and points it glaringly at the One who is the real hero and protagonist of the story - God. Scripture is not the revelation that exposes the gradual evolution of man into some sort of Ubermensch (Superman), but rather the revelation of a God who qualifies, empowers and sanctifies the unqualified weak sinner.

In the first reading, we are given a beautiful portrayal of young David before his ascension to the throne. In his loyalty to God, he spares the life of his king who had hunted him and who had threatened to kill him out of envy. As magnanimous as David may be, epitomising the virtue of compassion and offering forgiveness to his enemy as the Lord exhorts in the gospel, David proves to be a weak man and a great sinner later in life. As much as he is seen as a national hero and in fact, the gold standard of kings, David remains a weak and imperfect man. He would later be found guilty of the most egregious crimes of adultery and murder. The Messiah is prophesied to be of his lineage and it is this lineage and link to David which would serve to validate and legitimise the office of the Messiah. But the gospels would soon reveal that it is the Messiah, Jesus Himself, who would validate His ancestor.

St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians also draws a contrast between the first Adam and the second or last Adam, who is Jesus Christ. The contrast could not be starker. Christ is the founder of the new humanity, just as Adam is the founder of fallen humanity. The obedience of Christ, the Second Adam, undoes the disobedience of the first Adam. Just before this passage Paul has explained that in the resurrection, we will all be changed, and transformed into the heavenly sphere, in the image of the Risen Christ. What was weak will be strong with the strength of God, what was corruptible will be incorruptible with the incorruptibility of God, what was contemptible will be glorious with the glory of God. So, a Christian’s goal is not just to aspire to be the best and most perfect man (“Adam” means “man”) but rather our goal should be to imitate and be another Christ. That is why we are called “Christians.” “Christian” means “a little Christ.”

The gospel provides us with one of the most important aspects of Christ which we must imitate - His mercy and compassion. The problem is that one of the victims of our banal culture is compassion. Compassion is a precarious word, often used interchangeably with pity and sympathy. The word “pity” means a feeling of sadness or fear at the unavoidable lot of another, either deserved or undeserved. But the message we hear in today's gospel is entirely different. Being a bleeding heart, having pity and sympathy for others just doesn’t cut it. It must go much deeper: Our Lord says, "Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate."

So that compassion may not descend into shallow banality, we look to Jesus who provides us with a radically new benchmark. In fact, every example that He cites in today’s passage is something which the Lord Himself had done, especially during His Passion. He forgave His enemies who had delivered Him to His executors right at the moment of His death on the cross. He was mocked, slapped, humiliated and tortured but did not retaliate. He was stripped of His clothes and then made to walk a mile and beyond to the place of His execution. Our Lord demonstrates not only through His teaching, His miracles, His public ministry, the shape and content of compassion, but most certainly through His passion and death.

This is what compassion entails. From the Latin root, the word literally means to “suffer with” and this is what our Lord, our true Hero did for us. That means sharing our goals, our fears, our intentions, our pains and our suffering. One can't even begin to speak of compassion unless one is prepared to pay the price for it, an often expensive price that may even entail sacrificing our personal happiness and well-being, and finally our entire life. So, compassion is never of the saccharine kind. It bears within itself the precious cargo of patience, humility, and growth in the conforming of our will to God's will, to the will of Jesus Christ, our friend. To become more like Him is to become more, not less, human. Only in this way, as the whole of our being takes on the qualities of truth and righteousness, is love and compassion true. Its inner demand always includes suffering. At a deep level, the essence of love, the essence of genuine compassion, means self-abandonment, self-giving, it bears within itself the sign of the cross.

How do we grow in sacrificial love and compassion? We do this by uniting our own sufferings with His, dying to our selfish will, and rising to new life in Christ through humility and obedience to His will. So by declaring that “we are only human” is not a resignation to our weak fallen nature, an excuse to abandon what is difficult, but should be testimony that we wish to be “modelled after the heavenly man,” Jesus, whom St Paul so proudly declared. In embracing our humanity, we must also enter into solidarity with fellow humans. We are all united by our humanity and because of that we are also united by our fallen nature and need for salvation. The good news is that we are also united by grace, because the One who has come to save us chose to unite with us so deeply that "He became sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21).

Each of us can resolve to imitate Christ in our own lives, by reaching out in love and compassion to assist and comfort others who are suffering. At times this can be relatively easy, such as simply spending time with a friend who is suffering with a problem and may need someone to listen. At other times the witnessing of suffering may require much greater effort, such as when a loved one is dying from a painful illness. It would mean embracing the pain, the suffering, the frustration and the anger of the friend. And even in the face of the greatest offence which we had suffered at the hands of this person, we should also acknowledge - “he is only human” - and at least remember to treat others as how we wish to be treated in return. If we desire mercy, show mercy!

Made of Sturdier Stuff

Thirty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

“Snowflake,” according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, is a “derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.” A snowflake listening to today’s ominous warnings and prophecies in the gospel will have a royal meltdown. To a snowflake the slightest perceived offence would sound like a cataclysmic end of the world scenario, an Armageddon of disproportionate size.

But before you react to the words of our Lord, especially the part listing down the various sets of trials, tribulations and calamities, it is good to fast forward to the end of the passage to see the point of His message: “Your endurance will win you your lives.”

Catholics are not to waste time calculating when the end will come. They are not to allow themselves to be misled by false prophets and false messiahs. Nor are they expected to behave like headless chickens running around in circles panicking. Above all, they are to trust in the provident care of God, who will give them eloquence and wisdom to defend themselves and preach the truth. ‘Your endurance will win you your lives.’

As simple and as powerful as this message is, it doesn’t always feel that way. Our penchant for giving up and flying the white flag is so strong, especially when tragedy hits. As you all know, any exposure to the mildest sunlight, even for a few minutes, will cause snowflakes to dissolve into the ground with no resistance. It sometimes feels that every crisis is so catastrophic like it’s the End of the World. This is how the Jews would have felt when their beloved Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 AD in retaliation for their revolt.

Apparently, the great first century Temple in Jerusalem was a tremendous structure, a suitable tribute to God's greatness and glory, as well as the central symbol of the Jewish nation and their faith. The veil that separated the most sacred inner sanctum from the rest of the Temple complex was adorned with symbols of the cosmos, suggesting that the Temple was literally the centre of the universe. To say that it was worthy of admiration was an understatement. But when our Lord noticed His disciples admiring its grandeur, He had to speak this hard truth: “not a single stone will be left on another: everything will be destroyed.” Despite being sturdily built with reinforced foundations to last centuries if not for eternity, Our Lord knew it would one day fall and its fall would be a cataclysmic event, like the end of the world itself.

However, the Lord also knew that the Temple's destruction would not mean the end of God's creation nor the end of salvation history. So He urged His disciples to bear suffering with hope and patience. His lesson was that all of us suffer, and all of us go through destruction and tearing down. All of us even go through death, but that is not the end. He died Himself, but it was not the end. He was resurrected, and God's creative power began again and the first creation was surpassed by the greater act of redemption.

There may be some signs toward the end. Our Lord famously mentions some of them here and in the other gospels. Signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, wars and insurrections, earthquakes and the economy. At one level, He could have been speaking of the veil in the Temple with its embroidered cosmic and planetary symbols, the same veil torn into two at His death on the cross. But these signs could also point to something new emerging – the old creation has to be destroyed in order for the new to arise. These signs could indicate cycles of life. Stages of our life inevitably end before another begins. We think it is the end of the world, but it isn’t. Just the end of that particular stage of our world. With the ending of a phase, we enter into a new one. This too was true of the Temple. Its destruction did not mark the end of Judaism but initiated a new phase of belief rooted in faith.

The transition is often painful. Changes hurt. But they are signs that the kingdom of God is near, is very near. When you are encountering the anxiety of any change in your life, be assured that you are not far from God in that experience; He may feel distant and uninvolved in our crisis, but the truth is that He is closer to you than you can ever imagine.

The Church does not stand aloof and far removed from the changes which take place in our lives. The sacraments of Christ administered by the Church have always been associated with changes in our human lives-inevitable changes that most of us go through: birth, illness, marriage, death. In direct association with those changes, the Church provides baptism, anointing with oil, the sacrament of marriage, a funeral. The Church pronounces blessing and grace during those moments of change, painful as well as joyous. At its best, the Church teaches us how to change gracefully. Even the changes in the Church itself can be occasions for our learning grace.

“Everything will be destroyed,” the Lord ominously predicts. And sometimes we can see the signs of that tumult all too quickly. But that will not be the end. God will be in the change. A new beginning can emerge from destruction. And all things will be made new.

Finally, it is in all the changes of our lives, that our very character is formed. Thus, the way we endure change is the way we shape our character, our identity, our very soul. That's why the Lord said what He said about endurance. When we endure change, when we bear change, we gain our identity. In fact, we gain our souls. By your endurance, the Lord said, “will win you your lives”.

Trials "try" us, and tests "test" us. Most of the time, the purpose of trials is to show us who we really are, to reveal character in us. The measure of a man is not how he acts when things go smoothly, but how he acts when he is challenged. We can think all kinds of good thoughts about ourselves, but until we are put to the test, we don't know whether those things have become realities in us or not. We may consider ourselves generous, honest, or deeply committed to a particular truth or ideal, but the depth of these dynamics only reveals itself when we're under pressure. When we go through trials, we learn whether or not we really have the character and commitment we think we have. Test will prove to us whether we are snowflakes or made of sturdier material - hard solid rock that can withstand the heat of pressure and the cold of rejection. Remember, the hardest of diamonds are the product of the greatest pressures. That’s what you are meant to be. That’s who you are.

God subverts the Undesirable

Sixteenth Ordinary Sunday Year A

This week’s fare is a set of three parables offered for our consternation. Parables often complicate faith. They seem to be contrary to our present modern culture’s impatience with the mysterious and the cryptic. We want statements of faith that clear, concise, unambiguous and palatable. In fact, we want our lives and the world to be perfect, devoid of messiness and troubles. Thus, the perennial search for perfect understanding, for Shangri-La and the Final Solution to all our troubles. The parables of Christ, however, subvert this desire to make faith simple and understandable and life uncomplicated. Instead, they demand our eternal return to their words, our wrestling with them, and our puzzling over them. I would often like to think of the parables as part of the Divine Comedy. And just like any kind of a joke, they utterly fail if you have to explain them, you either “get it” or you don’t. Except that the parables are no joke, they’re a matter of life and death.

After listening to complaints from parishioners for over ten years, I’ve come to realise that the common request or suggestion is that I should summarily reprimand, remove or dismiss all the ‘troublemakers’ in the parish. My usual reply is that if I were to act on every complaint, including the complains I get about the complainers; I would end up sacking over 90% of the people in the parish! But I guess this tendency goes beyond the parish. We seem to have a natural human desire to root out and destroy all that troubles us. We want to look for the final solution to our problems. But in doing so, we end up devising greater suffering. Perhaps, the best example of this point is found in the Nazi’s Final Solution – millions of Jews and other nationalities and differently able persons had to die in this mad search for perfection.

The opening parable of today's gospel is loud and clear: If we want to be faithful servants of God that can produce a fruitful harvest, we must be ready to live alongside those we perceive as darnel or weeds. The counsel of Jesus is prudent, “Let them both grow till the harvest.” It is a reminder that life can be messy and we need not and should not play God. . Since this is God’s Kingdom, he sets the agenda, he lays out the path, and he determines the deadline. The problem is that the difference between the wheat and darnel is not always going to be obvious, and that there is potential danger of mistaking the good for the bad, the will of man for that of the will of God. Furthermore, one may find both wheat and darnel mixed up within every person. We may risk getting rid of the good in our zealous desire to root out the bad

Next we have two parables which are usually given a highly sedated interpretation of illustrating how the Kingdom of God can have humble beginnings. But let’s remember that the parables are not just simple allegorical stories.  And just like the paradox of Jesus’ life, they are intended to disturb and unsettle and throw everything off balance. And so we have the seemingly harmless parable of the Mustard Seed. What harm can we see in this? Most of us are familiar with mustard sauce, the White man’s substitute for our Asian chilly. Little do many realise that the mustard tree can grow like a weed and, like a weed, it’s virtually impossible to manage, and before you know it, it’s taken over the whole garden; hardly the kind of plant that you would wish to see in your vegetable and fruit garden. Furthermore, there is the matter of the birds - they may strike us as a charming touch, but as we Klangites can attest, they are probably crows, and therefore an ever-present threat to the crops. Thus, the parable provides the early listeners with a startling metaphor. Jesus uses a parasitic plant which has dangerous invasive take-over properties, which attracts undesirables, and which is allowed to grow to enormous proportions, to describe the Kingdom. 

And then there is the parable of the Yeast.  A woman takes some yeast, mixes it with flour, and the dough rises. Most of us like this parable. It makes us feel all warm and domestic and safe - just the way we like our religion. But this is not what it’s meant to be. This yeast is actually more accurately called leaven. Leaven isn’t your yeast that you can buy off the shelves of those sanitarily clean health food stores. In fact, it’s rotten dough. Leaven is unpleasant, disgusting, leaven stinks. Leaven in Jesus’ day was considered so foul that it was deemed to be ritually unclean, and it was banned from use in the Temple. On the eve of the Passover, the entire household will undertake a hunt of leaven within the house in order to remove this offending foodstuff ingredient. Indeed it had come to symbolise evil. And look how much flour the woman in parable uses to mix with her leaven- forty litres, half a hundredweight, enough to feed 150 people - a ridiculously enormous quantity! Something very odd, almost sinister, is going on here, as in the parable of the Mustard Seed. What is Jesus suggesting with this surrealistic image?

One thing we can be sure of is that Jesus is again setting out to shock his listeners on purpose. I mean, he says that the utterly holy - the kingdom of God - can only be understood if we compare it with the utterly unholy, loathsome leaven, and the undesirable, mustard. So put away any ideas that, in the world, proclaiming the kingdom of God will have about it the sweet smell of success. Indeed, don’t be surprised if it actually puts people off. Quietly, secretly, stealthily, subversively, the kingdom of Got rots away from within any expectations we may have of respectability, success, glory and the nice. The Kingdom will expand in ways that we can hardly anticipate and that will surely amaze and confound us.

So our three parables. Hardly, you’ll agree, bedtime stories for children. Not all about comfy-cosy rural or domestic scenes, nor about the squeakily clean and pristinely perfect. In fact, pretty disturbing images, upsetting our preconceived notions about God. Here we see that the growth of the Kingdom is always a messy affair. It’s made of the same stuff as the sharp pungent tasting mustard, and powerful, putrid leaven. Here we see that the kingdom is not only not in our control but has a way of getting completely out of control, and that it spreads not through mighty campaigns and crusades but, like a contagion, in hidden, seditious ways. God does not only tolerate the messiness but in fact subverts the messiness and uses it as the raw material of His Kingdom. Here we see that the kingdom belongs to people at the edge, poor people, disenfranchised people, invisible people, and that the kingdom comes to us precisely through the odd, the strange, the unexpected other; and, conversely, that it undermines and overturns the self-serving interests of self-righteous. And here we see that the kingdom can only be imagined - and re-imagined - not in spite of, but because of, small and trivial beginnings that will yet transform the world in unusual and unlikely but in fact quite natural and, if disruptive, certainly nonviolent ways.

The Kingdom of God has a tension. While we live here on earth, the Kingdom is messy and imperfect and in progress. We long for the time when the Kingdom will be complete, but for now we have to recognise that this is the way that God creates and works and brings good life. God allows the mess. He demonstrates the value of the mess through the death of His Son on the cross. In the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good…. If God can take the greatest of evils and turn them for the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, and turn them to his good purpose as well. The cross demonstrates the veracity of these parables – God can subvert the worst evil for the greatest good, He can bring an unexpected blessing out of the most inexplicable form of suffering.