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Good Friday
Today is the day we remember how our Lord, innocent though He was, was put to death by His enemies. Today is the day our Saviour is nailed to the cross because those whom He had come to save rejected Him. Today is the day when His thousands of followers and even His most intimate friends abandoned Him and leaving just four women and a man to accompany Him during this horrible ordeal. Today, the Word of God is silenced on the cross - no farewell speech to encourage or inspire His followers. And yet we Christians call this day “Good Friday” and our Eastern brethren have an even more audacious sounding name for it - the Great Friday.
Why on earth would Christians refer to this Friday as “good”?
It’s called Good Friday because even while powerful men were conspiring to kill the Son of God, God Himself was acting to save the world from itself, once and for all. Even while the world’s authorities were conspiring to perpetrate history’s greatest evil, God was working overtime to bring about history’s greatest good.
Yes, we Christians have not made a great blunder in naming today as Good Friday. It isn’t a misnomer. Far from a mistake, our Lord’s death and sacrifice on the cross is God’s greatest achievement, His most prized trophy.
Today is good because on the cross, our Lord suffered so that we would not have to suffer eternally. Yes, we are not saying that Christians are insulated from suffering because of what Christ did. Christians are no strangers to suffering. It’s part of our DNA. In fact, to be a Christian means to deny ourselves and take up our crosses in imitation of our Lord. But all suffering in this life, no matter how unbearable it may seem, is only temporary. Suffering has a shelf life because of what our Lord did today.
What Christ did is that He “traded places” with us. He lived the sinless life that we should live and died the death that we deserve to die. He took our guilty record, died for it, and offers us His perfect record in return. That is why Saint Paul declared that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1).
Today is also not just a good day but a great day because by His death on the cross, our Lord Jesus reconciled us to the Father. Long before social distancing became the norm, man had already socially distanced himself from God by our sins. It is not God who had distanced Himself from us; it is not God who had abandoned us. It is we who have abandoned Him through sin. Because of our sins, we have alienated ourselves from God and others, but Jesus saves us from our sins in order to mend those relationships. The reconciling powers of Christ will cause all relational barriers to be torn down, including the barriers of ethnicity and nationality (Rev 5:9-10).
Finally, because of the cross and the resurrection we have hope for the future. As you all know, Good Friday is not a stand-alone feast. The story doesn’t just climax and end with Jesus dying on the cross on Good Friday. The real ending is found on Easter when Jesus will burst forth from the tomb, break the shackles and prison of death and rise again so that now we may have new life. With every darkening which seems to come with Good Friday, there is the new dawn of Easter.
Though Christ’s death has defeated the powers of death, suffering and evil, we must still wait for the day when He will return to put all these enemies under His feet. Until then, we must hope and believe that the victory is already His, that death is not the end, that suffering will not have the final say. Mission accomplished. A pandemic or any other calamity, natural or otherwise will have no hold over us. The work of Christ is complete. From the cross, He assures us, “It is accomplished.”
It does seem odd to refer to anybody’s death as “good.” Yet, God’s good plan is often counterintuitive: As Jesus says, “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it”; “the first shall be the last and the last shall be first” (Mark 10:31). And yes, through the “good” death of God’s Son, humanity can receive new life, abundant life. He has given us eternal life that will never be defeated by any infection, calamity or even death.
So, my dear brothers and sisters, have a “good day”! In fact, have a “great day!” You deserve it because Christ has earned it for you!
Third Sunday of Lent Year A
As humans, we are naturally wired to blame other people or external circumstances when things don't quite go according to plan. Malaysians are particularly adept at this. In fact, the blame culture can be best summarised by using the mnemonic ABC - that is, A for accusing, B for blaming and C for complaining. But where do they spring from? All three find their genesis in a feeling that we suffer from - a deficit of love. An old priest mentor once told me, “Michael, there are no troublemakers, only people wanting to be loved!” When we do not feel sufficiently loved, affirmed or receive constant approval from others, a gaping hole opens up within us, a hole that sucks in all the light and then regurgitates the darkness by accusing, blaming and complaining about others whom we believe have left us in this state.
Today, the first reading provides us with an example of what happens when our lives are not marked by gratitude, it is immediately replaced with complaining and grumbling. Following their exodus from Egypt, the Israelites frequently grumbled against God and Moses due to lack of water and food, often blaming Moses for bringing them out of Egypt to die. That’s quite rich because they were crying out to God for assistance and liberation while they were languishing in slavery. And now that God had liberated them, they continued to turn their fury and discontent at Moses and indirectly at God. Ultimately, they were questioning God’s Providence and promise that He will lead them safely to the Promised Land.
We read this and are appalled and shocked at their sudden amnesia and lack of gratitude. But how often do we act the same way? As long as things are going well, we are grateful. But the second our situation changes (for the worse), we doubt, we fret, we grow anxious, we complain, we blame God for our predicament and then we accuse Him of not being caring enough for us. Sure, He has helped in the past, we think (if we even remember). But where is He now? “Is the Lord with us, or not?” the Israelites asked, as they quarreled among themselves.
Should we have any doubt that God loves us, St Paul reassures us of God’s undying love for us even though we had not merited it: “what proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners.” So, in truth, we do not really suffer from a deficit of love. We cannot complain that no one loves us. Even if the whole world turns their back on us, which is a little over dramatic if I must say, God has never abandoned us. There is no doubt – God loves us and He has proven that love by sending us His Son who died on the cross for us!
Yes, deep down inside of us is this yearning to be loved, understood and accepted by someone. We try our best to please the people around us in order to gain their love and acceptance. We try to fill that emptiness that constantly gnaws at our soul. Over the years we will come to realise that no amount of possessions, friends or power will be able to satisfy this thirst and hunger of ours. There is only one thing that can satisfy that thirst – it is God’s love. In the timeless words of St Augustine, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” Therefore this thirst, this yearning, this desire, this longing is not a mere human reality. It is put there by God as a reminder of His desire to share His own life with us and to symbolise the Christian’s longing to be with God forever.
If in the Old Testament God showed His care for His people by giving them water in the arid desert, our Lord in today’s Gospel promises a far greater source of water – living water that surges up from the depths of our being, water that can be accessed without the use of a bucket, i.e. human ingenuity and machination.
The story tells of two thirsty persons who meet at a well. Jesus, sweaty, weary, thirsty, comes to the well with a parched throat. The Samaritan woman, on the other hand, came to the well with a parched soul. Unlike the woman, Jesus has no bucket and the well is deep. The reason for this was not just an oversight on His part, a passing traveller. The reason for this was that He had not come to quench His thirst, but hers. He is the fountain of living water that has come to quench the thirst of the world; our thirst for God. The Samaritan woman’s thirst for love and for salvation was more profound than His physical thirst for water. That is why she had been married five times and now lives with someone who is not her husband. She sought fulfillment and meaning in the arms of a mate. She drank from the well of relationships – a well that continued to run dry because void of Christ and self-worth, these relationships could not meet her inner longing. She came at noon to draw water because she would have wanted to avoid the gossip of the other women in town. She was both the subject and object of accusations, blame and complaints.
Christ offered her the living water of the Holy Spirit—the only thing that would quench her spiritual and emotional thirst. Only God can satisfy our every hunger and thirst. Only God’s love can reassure us that we are precious and worthy of love. In the eyes of her fellow townspeople, she was a sinner beyond redemption. But not so in God’s eyes. Our Lord promises her, a sinner and an outcast, the water of life – God’s love and forgiveness.
Many of us continue to live like the Samaritan woman, gazing into the dark depths of the well of our hearts, wondering if we could find happiness therein or just emptiness. Many believe that it is just a dry well which serves only as an echo chamber of our ABCs, our accusations, our blames and our complaints - it’s always someone else’s fault, there is always someone else to be blamed, there is always something unsatisfactory which justifies our complaint. Or we could look up from our navel for once and look at the One who looks back at us with love and compassion. If we can recognise His love for us, then our accusations would be transformed into praise, our blaming would be turned into repentance and our complaints would be replaced with gratitude.
Just like the Elect who are gathered here today, you have been thirsting for the life giving water that can blunt the blade of every accusation, deflect the blows of every blame hurled at you and satisfy every complaint that you may ever had in your life. Jesus promises each and every one of you the water of life. If you drink of this water, you will never be thirsty again. If you have experienced the unconditional love of God, you will no longer crave for other lesser substitutes. Cease your search for other wells; they will all run dry. You have found the source of Living Water, where you will thirst no more.
Christmas Mass during the Day
Some of you may be familiar with that poem known as “A Visit from St Nicholas” more popularly known as “the Night before Christmas,” because it begins with this famous opening line: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse ….” The imagery of silence is heightened by another idiomatic expression: “as quiet as a mouse.” In this case, you can’t even hear the squeak or the scurrying of a mouse. Yes, that Christmas night is indeed a Silent Night, a Holy Night!
But the silence of that first Christmas night would have been broken by a new born baby’s crying and that cry did not just pierce the night air but resounded throughout the world and throughout history - past, present and future. As much as we appreciate some quiet alone time after all the partying and carolling last night and the preceding weeks, we must open our ears and hearts to hear the noise of this child, who is no ordinary Child. This morning’s gospel declares Him to be the pre-existing Word. The Word was made flesh, born to break the chaos of silence, to bring order out of nothing. There had to be a birth of the Word at the beginning of time, there had to be a birth at Christmas time, there had to be a birth on Pentecost.
Some would naively argue that the concept of the “Logos,” translated as “the Word” in St John’s lyrical prologue, was something radically new, an appropriation of a Greek philosophical concept. But in the Book of Wisdom in the Old Testament, we find not just a subtle and distant hint but a blaring proclamation of the movement of the Eternal Word:
“For while all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, Thy almighty Word leapt down from Heaven from Thy royal throne, as a fierce conqueror into the midst of the land of destruction” (Wisdom 18:15).
As with most holidays, Christmas generally tends to be a noisy feast filled with strong, joyful carols proclaiming: “For Unto Us A Child Is Born,” “Joy to the World,” “Angels We Have Heard On High,” “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” etc. And this is all true, and very good, and very beautiful. But there is also a silence to be contemplated, a silence that is often missed and dismissed. The great things that God works within His creatures naturally happen in silence, in a divine movement that suppressed all speech. For what could we say? When God speaks, all voices must remain silent. Thus, God’s heavenly secret is kept under the seal of silence unless He Himself opens the lips and makes the words come forth. And this is what happened as the Book of Wisdom said it would happen: “For while all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, Thy almighty Word leapt down from Heaven from Thy royal throne.”
The Word Himself, God, the desire of all nations, “leapt down from heaven” in “quiet silence,” physically took on silence, becoming a new born human, an infant. And in the wonderful silence in the stable, Mary and Joseph looked at Jesus for the first time and contemplated the mystery of His birth in silence. Today, in the midst of our revelry and celebration, we are called to adopt an atmosphere of silence if we wish to grasp the mystery of His Incarnation and hear His gentle whispering.
Although the Incarnation took place in silence and the divine movement often takes place in silence, there is also silence which is imposed by force and violence – a silence which seeks to silence God’s Word. St John tells us that “He (the Word made flesh) came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Christmas, a reminder of the birth of the Son of God, must be removed from the public square and its message silenced because the message of Christmas, one of life, threatens the prevalent culture of death.
The human race has always known violence to the innocent, evidenced by the actions of Pharaoh and Herod and in the last century, Hitler and Stalin. Today, we have the new enemies of truth, the globalists governments and media that seek to police speech and silence persons who dare to challenge the official version of the truth, their truth. While adults can make their voices heard in protest, the unborn, the sick and the elderly, are easy targets because of their natural silence, if no one speaks for them and on behalf of them. Today, that struggle manifests itself in new and frightening ways - with the proliferation of abortion mills and passing of legislation which legalises the murder of innocents, the sick and the elderly and which seeks to silence dissenting voices. The violence has become customary, normalised, more imaginative and terrifying.
But our Lord shows us that life is ultimately victorious. Life conquers through its ability to empty itself out. The power of the Christian faith manifests itself most especially in being what the world is not. To arrogance it counters with humility. To cynicism it reacts with innocence. To deception it responds with truth. To glamour it demonstrates with simplicity. To death it responds with life. To a cacophony of noise, it offers silence. Christian faith is simply the opposite of everything that the world would expect and want. It offers “mud,” when the world would want “gold and silver.” This is what Christmas is all about. Christmas bears a dangerous message which threatens our world and yet, it carries with it the only message which can save the world.
But there is great irony in the liturgy of the Church. In celebrating a humble birth, we offer our best - we offer our “gold and silver”. To the silent entry of the Word into our world, we offer our voices in songs of praise and wonderment. We enrich the liturgy with the best that we have to offer because the accoutrements of the rituals manifest the beauty of a world that is not ours and thrusts us forward and upward into an unimaginable beauty, a sign of a world to come.
Today, we come to the manger offering our best only because we have acknowledged the worst in us: the noise we make in competition with God’s sublime Word; the “mud” we have covered ourselves in - our sins, our weaknesses and shortcomings. Instead of plugging our ears, we should gladly open them to welcome the Word. We take courage also in knowing that the Word broke His silence and entered into the noisy madness of our world as He stepped into the “mud” of our fallen existence. Yes, the Eternal Word which leapt down from heaven from His royal throne, has stepped into the filthy “mud” in which we are mired. We were once formed from dust, but now our Lord gives us new life by remoulding the “mud” of our being into a new creation. There is every reason for us to break our silence today, to make a joyful noise and announce: “Indeed, from His fullness we have, all of us, received – yes, grace in return for grace.”
Christmas Vigil Mass
The story of the birth of Jesus Christ has been told for centuries. The most familiar accounts can be found in Christmas cantatas and children’s Christmas plays, and they usually involve the story of the annunciation to Mary, the birth of the Christ-Child in Bethlehem or the appearance of the angel to the shepherds, yet the liturgy of the vigil Mass begins the story where Matthew begins his Nativity story, that is with the genealogy of Jesus.
I enjoy reading this long list of weird sounding names and love the sound of each rolling off my tongue. I’m quite sure that I would have mispronounced some and butchered most of them. For many the list seems pointless to our Christmas narrative, and many would choose to just skim over or even skip this portion completely, which the liturgy anticipates by offering us the shorter version which includes the last few lines of the text whilst excluding the rest. But I am convinced that our understanding of this vigil liturgy will be impoverished when the genealogical list is missing. And it’s not because I’m a liturgical masochist.
The inclusion of this list in Matthew’s gospel is not accidental. Matthew appears to be teaching us a powerful message about the Messiah by recording His lineage. Matthew divides the genealogy into three main sections of fourteen names each. The first section lists the patriarchs, the second lists kings, and the third lists names of people mostly unknown to us.
The genealogy begins with Matthew stating, "A genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” Does Matthew wish to present his entire gospel of Jesus Christ as a genealogy? One would imagine that this short line would be an adequately succinct summary of our Lord’s human origins. But then Matthew continues with the list by going into the details starting with the great patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These were men of great faith who left us heroic examples of righteousness. Right from the start, Matthew appears to be giving us a key to understanding his message. Each of these men were promised that through their seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed, a blessing that would be fully realised only through the birth and coming of the Messiah.
In the second section of the genealogy, we have a list which includes Judah’s kings from David to the Babylonian captivity, emphasising the importance of the dynasty of King David. David was seen by the Jews as their greatest king. Through him the nation of Israel was united. Under his command, the temple was built by his son Solomon. Through his seed the nation was ruled by the line of the kings. One would imagine that his successors would meet up to his legacy. But none of them did, save for two. Only two of the fourteen kings mentioned were considered righteous. Most of them failed to guide their people to the Lord. In fact, they led the people astray with their idolatry and burdened them with social injustices. The true King of Kings in David’s royal line would only be fulfilled through Christ, the Anointed One.
Finally, the last section lists names of those that are otherwise mostly unknown in the Bible. Matthew shows us the critical role these unknown persons played in the story. We can easily view ourselves as nothing special when compared to great spiritual and political leaders like the patriarchs and kings in the previous two sections. But many of us would find good company among those mentioned in this third section, namely the unknowns and insignificant.
From these divisions, we can see that God is able to work through both the spiritually and politically powerful, as well as common ordinary folks that appear to be powerless, unknown and insignificant. And that last part is good news for us because it teaches us that each of us can play a critical role in helping to build the kingdom of God, even if we can boast of no outstanding pedigree or significant influence.
What more, rather than an evolution which leads to the production of a perfect man due to centuries of selection of the fittest over the weakest, the genealogy seems to indicate a regression. What seems more scandalous is that after listing out the genealogy of Joseph which can be traced back to Abraham and David, Matthew makes a simple cursory note that the Saviour is to be born of Mary, but He will not be scion of Joseph. The Saviour is ultimately unconnected to this genealogy of both notables and unknowns. Which leads us to this truth - that though the Messiah is prophesied to be “a son of David, a son of Abraham,” He will not be the product of good genes and an impeccable lineage. The Saviour of the world would come to us as God’s decisive intervention in human history. God will be the cause of this messianic evolutionary leap, not genetics. Through this Saviour, God will inject His genes into the DNA of humankind.
There are four names which stand out in this list, they are that of women. Of all the women ancestors of our Lord, why would these four be named. It was certainly not because they were womanly paragons of virtue since one was guilty of incest, another of prostitution, another was an opportunist and finally, the last mentioned seemed to have willingly committed adultery and tacitly participated in the murder of her husband. Once again, we are shown the subversive side of God and the paradox of God bringing something exceedingly good out of something apparently bad. It is a reminder that, not only do bad things sometimes have good effects, but that in some cases the badness of the cause is essential to the realisation of the good effect. If not for Adam’s sin, our Saviour would not have come. If not for Christ’s death, we will not be saved. If not for these women to continue the line of Abraham and David, our Lord would not possess the messianic title of being called “Son of David” or “Emmanuel.”
After these four female ancestors of questionable reputation, the last woman mentioned stands out. She is Mary. She does not have any illustrious genealogy to boast of. Her origins are unknown. But we do know her as a Virgin who was hailed by the angel as being “full of grace.” Unlike the other women, we finally have a woman untouched by sin, which the Church teaches is not through her own merits but through the merits of her Son. Her place in the story highlights the truth that the Messiah’s true origin is God. Jesus, our Saviour, comes from God and is indeed God because God alone can save us from our sins.
As we read the genealogy of Jesus Christ and consider the people mentioned in His lineage, we learn how God chooses all sorts and weaves them into His story of salvation. Whether a righteous prophet, an imperfect leader, an unknown helper, or someone with a questionable background or reputation, all are known to the Lord. No matter our status, background, gender or station in life, we too can have our name added to the long, beautiful list of those who play a critical role in God’s plan of salvation. During this Christmas and every Christmas, let us not forget that our Lord Jesus chose to be born into our human story, our history, to be “a man like us in all things but sin" (Eucharistic Prayer IV, cf Hebrews 4:15). O Come O Come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel!
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C
Whenever an anecdotal story is shared, it begs the question: “what’s the moral of the story?” Most homilies on the parable of the Good Samaritan would most likely attempt to provide the answer to this question and it would often sound like this: “do good to others, even those who are not your friends.” If it was only that simple, this would be the end of my homily. But the truth is that there is more than meets the eye in this most familiar parable of our Lord.
The context of our Lord telling this parable is that it serves as an answer given to a question posed by a lawyer, not to be confused with modern advocates and solicitors. The lawyer here is also known as a scribe, an academician or scholar, who has devoted his life to studying the Mosaic Law in order to provide a correct interpretation and application of the Law to the daily lives of fellow Jews. The question he poses is not just a valid question but one of utmost importance because it has to do with our ultimate purpose in life: “Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” That is the question that every religion and every philosophy has ever attempted to answer. Though a valid question and one which all of us should want to know the answer, the evangelist tells us that his motives are less than pure. It is said that he asked this question “to disconcert” the Lord. It was a trap. In fact, the lawyer already knows the answer to his question. But knowledge of the answer does not necessarily mean that one is living the answer, which is what the Lord wishes to expose here. He speaks eloquently of love but has no love for our Lord or even his audience. And so our Lord tells him that even though he has answered right by citing the two-fold commandments of love, there is still something missing in his answer: “do this and life is yours.”
Having been found out by the Lord and therefore, humiliated, he continues to try to “justify” himself by nit-picking: “And who is my neighbour?” In other words, the lawyer seeks to corner Jesus by forcing Him to tell who is deserving of our love. The surprising thing about the parable of the Good Samaritan is that it does not really provide a direct answer to the lawyer’s second question of defining one’s neighbour. If Jesus had been asked, “How should we treat our neighbours?” and had responded with this story, perhaps “Be like the Good Samaritan” would be an acceptable interpretation. Such a moralistic interpretation would mean that the “neighbour” in question is not the one who is deserving of our love but the one who demonstrates love. It turns the question completely around. But, the intention of the parable is more than a mere call to display altruistic behaviour to one’s neighbour. It addressed a more vital question: how have we come to salvation?
According to the Fathers of the Church, this parable is as an impressive allegory of the fall and redemption of all mankind – how we came to be saved! This is clearly depicted in a beautiful stained-glass window in the famous 12th-century cathedral in Chartres, France. This window is divided into two parts. At the upper section of the window, we see the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, at the bottom section of the window, the parable of the Good Samaritan; therefore, the narrative of the creation and fall of man is juxtaposed with that of the Good Samaritan. What does the parable of the Good Samaritan have to do with the Fall of Adam and Eve? Where did this association originate?
The roots of this allegorical interpretation reach deeply into the earliest Christian Tradition. Various Fathers of the Church saw Jesus Himself in the Good Samaritan; and in the man who fell among thieves they saw Adam, a representative of mankind, our very humanity wounded and disoriented on account of its sins. For example, Origen employed the following allegory: Jerusalem represents heaven; Jericho, the world; the robbers, the devil and his minions; the Priest represents the Law, and the Levite the Prophets; the Good Samaritan, Christ; the ass, Christ’s body carrying fallen man to the inn which becomes the Church. Even the Samaritan’s promise to return translates into Christ’s triumphant return at the Parousia.
Understanding this parable allegorically adds an eternal perspective and value to its message. It certainly takes it beyond the cliché ‘moral of the story’: ‘Be a Good Samaritan.’ Before we can become Good Samaritans to help others, we need to remember that we have been saved by the Good Samaritan – the story helps us become aware of where we have come from, how we have fallen into our present state through sin, and how Christ has come to save us, the Sacraments of grace continue to sanctify us and the Church continues to nurture and heal us. In other words, this Christological interpretation shifts the focus from man to God: from ‘justification’, how do we work out our salvation, to sanctification, how does Christ save us and continue to sanctify us. As the old patristic adage affirms: “God became Man so that men may become gods.” It moves us away from the humanistic mode of being saviours of the world to a more humble recognition that we are indeed in need of salvation ourselves - we are that fallen man by the wayside waiting for a Saviour and we have found Him in Christ!
In a rich irony, we move from being identified with the priest and the Levite who were solely concerned over their personal salvation but never perfectly love others “as ourselves,” much less our enemies, to being identified with the traveller in desperate need of salvation. The Lord intends the parable itself to leave us beaten and bloodied, lying in a ditch, like the man in the story. We are the needy, unable to do anything to help ourselves. We are the broken people, beaten up by life, robbed of hope. But then Jesus comes. Unlike the Priest and Levite, He doesn’t avoid us. He crosses the street—from heaven to earth—comes into our mess, gets His hands dirty. At great cost to Himself on the cross, He heals our wounds, covers our nakedness, and loves us with a no-strings-attached love. He carries us personally to the shelter of the Church where we find rest, where our wounds are tended and healed. He brings us to the Father and promises that His “help” is not simply a ‘one-time’ gift—rather, it’s a gift that will forever cover “the charges” we incur and will sustain us until He returns in glory.
So the parable is not just a moralistic tale of what we must do as Christians but the history of salvation in a nutshell - it tells us what Christ has done for us and continues to do for us?
The context puts the Lord’s final exhortation to “go and do the same yourself” in perspective. It puts every work of charity, gesture of kindness, expression of hospitality on our part within the greater picture of the wonderful story of salvation. The great commandment of love isn’t about some altruistic humanistic project – us saving the world. Reaching out to others, especially to those who labour under the heavy load of toil and suffering, is not just an act of goodness. It is a participation in the economy of God’s salvation – God saving the world through us and in spite of us. We can love only because we have been loved. We can only heal because we have been healed and continue to be healed by the Good Samaritan Himself, Jesus Christ. To understand what it means to love, does not mean attempting to be a ‘Good Samaritan.’ To understand what it means to love, we need to gaze upon Jesus Christ, He is the ‘Good Samaritan’ who has laid down His life and atoned for our sins. This is eternal life!
Second Sunday of Easter
Divine Mercy Sunday
It can be a real challenge to wrap your head around the fact that this Sunday goes by many names. Some would argue – way too many. Today is the Second Sunday of Easter but it is also known as the Sunday within the Octave of Easter. In the extraordinary form and in the pre-1969 calendar, it was also called Low Sunday (in relation to last Sunday, Easter). And since the pontificate of St John Paul II, it has received this eponymous title - Divine Mercy Sunday. As we continue to pray for Pope Francis of happy memory, we too remember how mercy had been one of the major lietmotifs of his pontificate.
But my favourite name for this Sunday is derived from the incipit of the entrance antiphon for this Sunday. Quasimodo Sunday. It is taken from 1 Peter 2:2 and in Latin, it begins with these words: “quasi modo geniti infantes” or in English, “like newborn infants.” This is the full text of the antiphon: “As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile, that thereby you may grow unto salvation: If so, be you have tasted that the Lord is sweet.”
The name Quasimodo Sunday may not be familiar to many of you, but the name is not unfamiliar. Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Well, if you recall Victor Hugo’s novel, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” (or the Disney animated version) you will remember that the main protagonist’s name is Quasimodo, the eponymous Hunchback of the story. For those not familiar with the storyline, this tale of love, chivalry and strange beauty is about this unlikely hero, the severely deformed hunchback, with a pristinely beautiful and innocent heart and soul, who lived in the rafters of Paris’ famous Cathedral of Notre Dame.
In Hugo’s novel, Quasimodo, rejected by his parents for his deformities, is abandoned inside Notre Dame Cathedral, at a place where orphans and unwanted children were dropped off. Monseigneur Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon, finds the child on “Quasimodo Sunday” and “called him Quasimodo; whether it was that he chose thereby to commemorate the day when he had found him, or that he meant to mark by that name how incomplete and imperfectly moulded the poor little creature was,” Hugo wrote.
In a strange way, the character Quasimodo, who risked his own life to save another whom he loves, is a type of Christ. And like Quasimodo, Christ also appears before His disciples today, arrayed not in gold and resplendent garments, but carrying the trophies of His victory on the cross - His wounds, His deformities. But unlike Quasimodo, our Lord was not born with these deformities, for He is the unblemished Paschal Lamb. These are the scars of the torture He endured for our sake. Instead of an unscarred and unblemished appearance, He chooses to retain His ugly wounds as a sign, not of His failure, but of His victory over sin and death. His wounds are supremely beautiful because they are visible marks of His love for us, the receipt for the price He had paid for us, the booty of a cosmic battle which He had fought and won for us.
Yes, in a way, all of us are incomplete and imperfectly moulded. We desire and hunger for the sacramental milk which only our Mother, the Church, can give. We have been deformed by sin, poor orphans abandoned and languishing in this Valley of Tears, waiting to be picked up by our Heavenly Father and to be adopted by Him. In His mercy, He has given us His only begotten Son, the Divine Mercy, not only to be our companion but to exchange places with us. Our Lord Jesus, the sinless and perfect Son of God, Beauty ever ancient ever new, chose to take our ugliness upon Himself in order to confer upon us the beauty of sanctifying grace. He took our sentence of death, in order to grant us the repeal of life. He has done this through the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, symbolised by the water and blood which flowed out through His wounded side, the source being His Most Sacred Heart beating in love for us.
But St Faustina also saw in that gushing spring of water and blood something else - grace and mercy. This is what she wrote: “All grace flows from mercy, and the last hour abounds with mercy for us. Let no one doubt concerning the goodness of God; even if a person’s sins were as dark as night, God’s mercy is stronger than our misery.” (Diary of St. Faustina, number 1507) Even the ugliest Quasimodos in this world can be potentially the most beautiful beings seen through the lenses of grace and mercy because “God’s mercy is stronger than misery!”
In Victor Hugo’s novel, as a group of old women hunkered over to examine the little monstrosity that had been left near the vestibule of the Cathedral, one of them remarked, “I'm not learned in the matter of children ...but it must be a sin to look at this one." Could this remark be referring to us too? This is who we were, inheritors of Original Sin, prisoners and victims of our own sinful misdeeds, deformed by our iniquities, that it would be a sin for anyone to look at us. But then, God looked upon us, not with vile disgust or hatred but with love and mercy, and His “mercy is stronger than misery.” God offered us atonement and pardon for our sins. God offered us His incalculable mercy by offering us His son to take our place on the cross. As Saint Paul assures us, “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). We have seen this God, we have tasted Him, we have been redeemed and saved through His grace and mercy, and we can proudly acclaim that we have tasted the Lord and can testify that He is sweet!
