Love is sacrificial

Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Today’s gospel proclaims three eternal truths which do not sit well with modern sensibilities. In fact, they may even seem archaic, regressive and inhumane. But the fact that it is our Lord Jesus Christ Himself who speaks it, assures us of their revelatory and eternally relevant character. So rather than suppress or sanitise these truths for fear that they may offend someone or another, it is good to remember this saying which has been commonly but falsely, attributed to St Augustine: “truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.”

These three simple truths are as follows:

God made humanity male and female.

God intended marriage to be a permanent commitment for life.

God is the author of life and He is unapologetically pro-life.

Having explained that Moses’ permission for couples to divorce was a mere concession due to the unteachability of the people, our Lord then declares that “from the beginning of creation God made them male and female.” This statement should be so obvious, that it shouldn’t require restating or explaining, and yet, in today’s modern gender-bending society, making such a statement could get you “cancelled” for being intolerant and disrespectful to an entire spectrum of make-believe sexual identities.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church boldly teaches: “Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity. Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the sexes are lived out.” (No. 2333) God is the only One who has the power and authority to define us, and He did so at creation by making us into His “image and likeness”, and it would be arrogance to think that we can redefine ourselves by changing our pronouns or performing mutilating surgery on ourselves so that we can make ourselves into our own skewed image and likeness.

The second truth which our Lord pronounces speaks of the permanence and indissolubility of marriage: “what God has united, man must not divide.” Many modern people believe that such a demand is both harsh and inhumane. Why force two persons, who no longer have feelings for each other, to remain bonded for life? Isn’t this cruel? Would this be condemning them to a life-sentence of misery? The permanence of marriage would seem cruel if we merely view marriage through the lenses of a human contract. With the recognition of human frailty and the unpredictability of future events, all contracts contain exit clauses allowing the parties to part ways. But not marriage!

The bond of marriage is a divinely instituted reality (“what God has united”), not a matter of human convention, and when that bond is created in the life of two Christians, it simply cannot be broken. This bond, is intended by God to symbolise the love of Christ for His Church. Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote: “Marriage is not simply about the relationship of two people to God, it is also a reality of the Church, a sacrament, and it is not for the individuals concerned to decide on its validity, but rather for the Church, into which the individuals are incorporated by faith and baptism.” If we understand anything about the relationship between Christ and His Church, we would understand that it cannot be broken by any power in the universe…A spouse can no more become an ex-spouse than a father can become an ex-father.

The third truth naturally flows from the first two truths: if marriage is a union between a man and a woman and their bond is marked by indissoluble permanence, having children and starting a family would not just be a theological but a logical conclusion. And so, our Lord declares, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” When God gave man and woman the ability to have sexual intercourse, He tied it with the ability to procreate. This is the reason why same-sex “marriages” cannot be real marriages and why the Church teaches against the use of contraception. Contraception not only breaks the ties between the sexual act and procreation, but also impedes our share in God’s creative love.  Cut off from God, man can never experience true lasting joy.

Love, real love, is sacrificial. If love entails sacrifice, then children would always be regarded as a blessing, the fruit of that love. But this is not what the world tells us. Our culture often teaches us that children are more of a burden than a gift—that families impede our freedom and diminish our finances.  We live in a world where large families are the objects of spectacle and derision, instead of the ordinary consequence of a loving marriage entrusted to God’s providence. Although it may seem, to selfish immature parents, that children bring to an end the romantic phase of their marriage and their personal autonomy, children are actually the gift needed to allow the couple’s love to grow and flourish, to embrace others beyond the two.

Today, the world has no qualms celebrating marriages, civil unions and what they claim to be same-sex marriages. Couples, families spend a life-time’s savings, even prepared to take up loans to fund extravagant celebrations. But the openness to children is rarely celebrated, rarely understood, and rarely supported.  To many, the Church’s teachings on life seem oppressive or old-fashioned.  Many believe that the Church asks too great a sacrifice. But sacrifice is at the heart of love. Love which is not willing to make sacrifices is counterfeit.

Many Catholics today complain and demand that the Catholic Church should change in order that they may feel “more welcomed,” and it is unfortunate, that many well-intentioned pastors also believe that the only way they can be compassionate and pastoral is by affirming their delusions. But Pope Francis warned of those he called “alternativists,” those who, in the Pope’s words, say to themselves, “I’ll enter the Church, but with this idea, with this ideology.” They propose conditions “and their membership in the Church is thereby partial.” They too “have one foot outside the Church; they’re renting the Church” but don’t really experience it… They seek an alternative, because they don’t share the common experience of the Church.”

So, what is needed is not for the Church to change her teachings. She cannot change them. She has no authority to do so because it is our Lord’s teachings. Rather, it is we, who need to change, to die to ourselves, our selfish, self-centred and self-absorbed ways, so that we may conform ourselves more and more to Christ, who shows us the true meaning of love by dying on the cross for us. We are called to continue to proclaim the truth, beauty and goodness of the complementarity of sexes, fidelity of marriage and sanctity of life in a culture which eagerly confuses genders, promotes divorce and engenders a culture of death by promoting abortion.

To all married couples and those who are planning to get married or start a family, do not let fear, anxiety or worry get in the way of you loving each other sacrificially and being open to the children you may receive from God. Do not put a cap on what He wishes to give you. Let Him be the judge of that. Entrust yourselves to the Lord who will provide for all your needs.

Preserving the fire of Tradition

Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Gustav Mahler, one of the leading composers at the turn of the 20th century, who recognised the tension between tradition and innovation and who attempted to bridge the gap between classical and modern genres of music, once wrote: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” What he meant by this quote is that, tradition is not remembering the glory of the obsolete good old days in a sentimental way but the passing of our culture, heritage and values, as living and organic things, to the next generation.

Today, our Lord confronts the scribes and Pharisees on the issue of the “traditions of the elders” which our Lord describes in a derogatory way as “human regulations” and “human traditions”. Critics of Catholic Tradition and promoters of theological innovation have often cited the above text to show that our Lord Himself had also condemned traditions as man-made. They accuse promoters and defenders of Catholic Tradition as being sentimentally attached to the past and practising an illogical “worship of the ashes.” But this crass and condescendingly shallow judgment is based on a simplistic reading of the text and their own prejudices. In fact, it is those who promote progressive innovation who are most often enamoured by an unthinking sentimentalism (sola affectibus - “feelings alone matters”) and who are actually the ones guilty of creating human regulations and human tradition through their innovation.

Let’s first consider the context of our Lord’s teaching in today’s passage. What were these so-called “traditions of the elders”? Like any law, the Law of Moses requires interpretation: how, when, for whom and in what circumstances are these regulations to be applied. Over the centuries, an oral tradition of legal interpretations had developed and handed down by generations of leading rabbis.

Originally, the interpretations were just meant to be interpretations of the Law but soon they took on the weight of the Law as well. For the Pharisees, the oral tradition was just as binding as the written Torah. It prescribed numerous and detailed rules of conduct for daily life, so much so, that you needed the special class of scribes who were living depositories of such rules to provide guidance and consultation. This is why the carrying out of these rules had become a burden that sometimes obscured the purpose of the Law. If our modern day ever-evolving SOPs can be a constant cause of befuddlement and fatigue in modern times, can you imagine the pressure and stress it would have given the people of our Lord’s time who had no access to search engines or social media platforms to ensure that they were not in breach of any rules?

The specific point of contention in this passage were the rules regarding ablutions to be performed before eating one’s meal. The scribes and Pharisees complained to the Lord that His disciples were eating with unclean and unwashed hands. In the chapter prior to this (Mark 6:35-44), we had the miracle of the feeding of the multitudes. Perhaps it was our Lord’s miraculous provision of bread in the wilderness (where there was no source of water for people to at least wash their hands) that occasioned this supposed controversy. The pettiness of the Pharisees can be seen in them missing the forest for the trees! The requirement of ritual purity in the Torah, was originally only applicable to the priestly class serving at the altar of the Temple, but the oral tradition developed by the Pharisees had extended this rule to govern the behaviour of all Jews at meals - making every meal a religious act, on par with the Temple sacrifice. Those who failed to observe these additional meticulous rules would be despised by the Pharisees and labelled as accursed and ignorant.

Rather than falling into the trap of validating their terms of reference, our Lord levels a counter charge, challenging the entire shaky edifice of Pharisaic legalism. He accuses them of being hypocrites (literally “stage actors”), people who only pay lip service to their devotion to God - their outward conduct does not correspond with the true state of their hearts. Obsessed with external ritual purity, their hearts and intentions were anything but pure.

Having quoted from the Septuagint version of Isaiah 29:13, our Lord delivers the punchline, which He repeats in two other verses to show emphasis: “You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions.” It is a scathing indictment of His accusers’ whole approach to religion, in which the key contrast is between “God’s” and “man’s.” The will of God is supplanted by the agenda of man.

And this is what Sacred Tradition seeks to guard against – to prevent God’s revelation from being twisted by human machinations seeking to make it more palatable. And this is what innovation actually does – it puts aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions.  At the end of the day, theological innovation seeks to undo the deposit of faith handed down by our Lord Jesus to the Apostles, to us. To reject Sacred Tradition is to reject Christ’s teaching. Innovation shows up man’s arrogance. When we innovate and attempt to alter the teachings of Christ in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, we are actually claiming to be smarter than the wisdom of God; that God’s revelation and guidance is inadequate for our salvation, and needs to be augmented and completed by our addition, subtraction or amendment.

Although heresies over the centuries can occupy any part of a spectrum of ideas and they may often disagree with each other, there is a consistent theme or action found in each and every one of them. Tertullian puts it this way, “In the Church, the rule of Faith is unalterable, and never to be reformed.” This is because Sacred Tradition is not just something the Church “makes up.” It comes from Christ. It is the full, living gift of Christ to the Apostles, faithfully handed down through each generation. To attempt to change Sacred Tradition would be as ridiculous as attempting to alter Christ. This is what the letter to the Hebrews wishes to caution us: “Remember your leaders, who preached the word of God to you, and as you reflect on the outcome of their lives, imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same today as he was yesterday and as he will be for ever. Do not let yourselves be led astray by all sorts of strange doctrines” (Hebrews 13: 7-9). Heretics, according to Tertullian, “vary in their rules; namely, in their confessions of faith. Every one of them thinks he has a right to change and model what he has received according to his own fancy, as the author of the sect composed it according to his own fancy.”

As Christians, what is required of us is fidelity, not novelty. It is ultimately God who makes all things new, we can be assured of this. He does this not by making new things but by making all things new through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is why Sacred Tradition is not just obsolete customs or fossilised teachings, but living and dynamic. Pope Emeritus Benedict reminds us precisely of this, “Tradition is the living river that unites us to the origins, the living river in which the origins are always present, the great river that leads us to the port of eternity. In this living river, the word of the Lord…: “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age”, is fulfilled again (Matthew 28:20).” It is the fire of this living river of Tradition that must be preserved.

Do not be afraid of being "cancelled"

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

One of my greatest fears is waking up to find that the comments section of my social media posting has been inundated with people calling me out for something problematic that I posted. There was a time when social media was a relatively innocent, peaceful and harmless virtual platform where you could post just about anything and get away with it. This is no longer true especially if you are a high profiled personality. Every word or thought or opinion which you express would be thoroughly scrutinised by keyboard warriors. The fear of being “cancelled” can cripple us to the point that nowadays, we find it hard to share our opinions honestly in public.

This phenomenon is what we call “cancel culture” which involves public denouncement of those who dare to express an opinion that is different from the position of a particular group. What makes them such a fearful force to contend with is that, they often act in a pack - like a pack of wolves or a school of piranhas. For actually expressing your opinion, you will be labelled with all sorts of names, depending on which end of the spectrum your critics belong to. One begins to see how the majority can be held ransom by a small but loud militant minority and eventually be forced to placate the latter by giving in to their demands. It is no longer Truth which motivates us but fear.

But today, our Lord repeatedly tells us, “do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid of speaking the Truth; do not be afraid of intimidation from those who wish to silence you: do not be afraid of opposition, persecution and even martyrdom at the hands of your enemies; do not be afraid because we are of great worth in the eyes of God. At the end of the day, do not be afraid of proclaiming the gospel.

There is no denying that it is tempting to stop preaching the gospel or to soften the message in order to make things easier and protect ourselves from suffering and opposition. It may seem for now that whatever is the Truth may be passed off by society as a lie, but we are assured by the Lord that those who bravely proclaim and defend the Truth will experience vindication one day. Even if the Truth seems obfuscated in our lifetime, one day, “everything that is now covered will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear.”

Therefore, despite all the opposition and vilification which we will receive, Christians must continue to speak “in the daylight” and proclaim the gospel “from the housetops.” Such bold proclamations may lead to martyrdom, there is no denying that. But our Lord reminds us that the goal of a Christian witness is not just survival and personal safety but salvation. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell.” Therefore we should fear God more than our persecutors. Tell the truth and risk the wrath of the mob. But tell a lie and risk the wrath of God. We should prefer the former to the latter.

At the end of the day, the real motivation for our decisions, our actions and our speech should not be the fear of public reaction but rather, the judgment from God. Our Lord tells us that He will acknowledge us before His Heavenly Father, if we stand resolutely to acknowledge Him before His enemies. His enemies may harm our bodies, but God will save our souls. We may be “cancelled” by the angry mob, but we will be affirmed by our loving God. But be warned, less we take God’s patience and mercy for granted. God will not hesitate to “cancel” us, if we choose to placate the mob for our political survival, rather than stand for what is true and good and morally right, and be saved from eternal damnation.

Where God is honoured, not man

Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Recently, I’ve been following a Taiwanese miniseries playing on the HBO Channel – The Teenage Psychic. I know – the name sounds “cheesy” and the plotline, perhaps, even ‘cheesier’. The protagonist is a teenage school girl, who also happens to work as a temple medium, a psychic who communicates with the spirit world. In its second season, we are witnessing a growing rivalry between our heroine’s guardian and care-giver, and his techno-savvy brother, both of them owners and operators of temples based on entirely different philosophies – the former runs a conventional traditional temple dedicated to a pantheon of Taoist deities and his techno-savvy younger brother operates a digital age New Age Spirituality centre – no stuffy incense smoke nor scary effigies – a modern religion for the modern man.

The rivalry between the two brothers escalates when one of the disciples of the former, the brother with the traditional temple, chooses to defect to his brother’s camp. When questioned by the younger brother on the reason for his defection, the disciple says that he wishes to move on with the times. The techno-savvy brother makes this poignant point by explaining the fundamental difference between his centre and his brother’s temple. He writes the Chinese character for ‘god’ or ‘deity’ and explains that in his brother’s more traditional temple, it is the gods who are honoured, the gods who are placated and it is the gods who matter. But in his popular and modern set-up, after writing the character for ‘man,’ he explains that the success of his enterprise is due to the fact that people are at the centre – “We cater to people’s needs, to their wants. The gods have nothing to do with it.”

This astute observation is why we are celebrating today’s feast. The Feast of Christ the King, originally celebrated on the last day of October, was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as an antidote to secularism; a way of life where man believes himself to be at the centre, which leaves God out of his thinking and living and organises his life as if God did not exist. In Quas Primas, the encyclical of Pope Pius XI that established this feast, the venerable pope noted that “the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics.” In the aftermath of what was called the Great War, society found itself on the brink of disaster. Most predominantly Catholic countries had fallen under anti-Catholic secularist regimes. Christian Europe could no longer claim to be Christian as a consequence of the widespread destruction engineered and inspired by the French Revolution and later by the Enlightenment. Orthodox Christian Russia had fallen under the Bolsheviks and their communist ideology. What united all these states and their governments was their common belief and conviction that the political and economic solutions they offered actually catered to the needs and wants of the people. God or Christ have nothing to do with it.

This, of course, is contrary to what the Church teaches. Pope Pius XI writes that “as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Saviour, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations. Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ.” There can be no real peace or salvation, if God is not part of the equation.

Unfortunately, there are so many who reject the kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ because it seems outdated and alien. We live in a democratic age, and democracy, for all of its strengths, can also make people deaf to the language of faith. Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French political historian, described the difference between democratic man, and all of human history before the democratic age, as the difference between “two distinct humanities.” Democratic man instinctively distrusts any form of inequality, privilege or hierarchy. All legitimacy in a democracy flows from the sovereign individual and the state he helps create. But the Church makes a very different claim. The Church humbly recognises that her authority, indeed her very existence, flows not from human machinations and projects but mystically from the very side of our Crucified and Risen Lord, who reigns supreme from the throne of His cross. 

For centuries, men have deluded themselves by thinking that they could determine their destinies apart from God. Power over the natural world, seemingly granted by science and new technology, fed human vanity and man’s illusions of security. We think that we can call the shots. This is the extent of our delusion: we want to be gods but we’re not.  We want to create ourselves and our world, but we can’t. We see God and religion as threats to our power and sovereignty and Man will not tolerate any rivals. What we forget is that one little virus, one drunk driver, one “freak” accident, is all it takes to end our plans.

Unfortunately, the idea of man dethroning God is not just exclusive to a secular unbelieving world. Many within the Church today, in their quest to make the Church more relevant and trendy, have chosen to dethrone Him by placing man at the centre of religion. Just like the point made by the techno-savvy guru in the miniseries, God is no longer honoured, God is no longer placated, God is no longer pleased. It is easy to give in to a style of religion which is popular, a religion which claims to cater to the needs and wants of its constituents, a religion that follows and imitates the latest fad, a religion where man is at the centre. But such a religion is a false religion. A false religion is a scheme of making God available to man for man’s glory, and plans where God is dethroned and robbed of His glory. Such religion cannot save.

Such is the description given of the Antichrist in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” (CCC 695) The thing that makes the Antichrist the Antichrist is not that he openly hates Jesus Christ — that’s a given — but that he offers a brilliant fake version of the Christian gospel. It would appear that the Church is indeed presently wrapped and blinded by this “mystery of iniquity” as she struggles with a myriad of troubles: sexual abuse, financial corruption, doctrinal relativism, homosexuality, threats of schisms and heresies and the doubts of the faithful who see the Church’s enemies even in their midst.

Man-made and man-centred religions always seek to reach salvation through human effort. In his hubris, man believes that he can save the world without any assistance from God. But true Christianity preaches, “May it never be that I should boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). Here at the cross, we see both a wondrous and scandalously mind-boggling coronation. The cross strips us of our pride and puts all our hope in the merits of the Saviour. In Him alone, the One who reigns from the throne of the cross, will we find our hope and salvation. And so, despite the violence of the attacks that the Church must continue to weather, she will not die. That is the promise of the Lord, and His words are infallible. If we wish to weather the storm, we must “bend the knee” to the King of Kings. We must renew our devotion. We must never cease to pray and cry out to God in supplication for the Church, her shepherds and the world. We must attest once again through our prayers, our deeds, our very being, that our sole purpose is to honour God and please Him, not man. Long Live Christ the King!