O.T.XXXI-B:Deut 6:2-6; Heb 7:22-28; Mk 12:28-34.

The central message of today's readings is the most fundamental principle of all religions, may be, except Islam. It is to love God in loving others and to love others in loving God.

The scribe asked Jesus to mention one law, but he mentioned two. This was the clearest way of saying that they cannot be separated. Between these two there is a bridge: there is no real love of God without love of neighbor, and no deep or lasting love of neighbor without love of God. (But many love God unawares.) If these two cannot be separated, they are really only one in practice – like two hands. When a person loses one hand he is said to be “half-handed.”

The Church’s one of the most famous examples of this link between loving God and loving neighbor comes from France way back in the 300s, when Christianity had recently emerged from a long period of persecution.

At the time, a young army officer named Martin lived near the city of Amiens. He lived the rough and tumble life of the military, but he had begun receiving instruction in the Christian faith. He was what we call a "catechumen" - someone who was being taught the Catholic faith in preparation to receive the sacrament of baptism. So he knew about Jesus and about the inseparability of the two great commandments to love God and neighbor.

One cold winter's day, as he returned to the city gates on his huge war horse and in his full military regalia, a poor beggar shuffled up to him to ask for money. The man was dressed in rags, almost naked, and violently shivering with cold. Martin reined in his mighty charger when he saw the beggar, and felt his heart moved with sincere compassion.

But he didn't have any money with him. He stared for a moment at the beggar, and then dismounted. He took off his long, thick military cloak and held it in one hand while he drew his sword in his other hand. Then he slashed the cloak in half, and gave one half to the freezing beggar with a smile and kind word. He slung the other half onto his own shoulders, remounted, and continued back on to the barracks, where his fellow soldiers gave him a hard time about his torn cloak.

That night, as he was sleeping, Jesus appeared to him in a vision, surrounded by angels, and - wonder of wonders – the Lord himself was wearing the cloak that Martin had given to the beggar!

Jesus looked with love and gratitude at Martin and said, "It was Martin, still only a catechumen, who gave me this cloak."

The future St. Martin was soon baptized, and afterwards followed his call to serve the King of Heaven instead of the Emperor of Rome, first as a monk, then as a priest, a missionary, and the holy Bishop of Tours.

Truly, our love for God and our love for neighbor are two sides of the very same coin – we can't have one without the other.

True love for our neighbor can't be based on how much we like our neighbor or on how much we can get from our neighbor. Those motivations won't last, and they won't lead us to the true self-giving that Christ-like love involves. True love for our neighbor can only come from a true love for God, in whose image our neighbor is created.

Strict orthodox Jews wore little leather sachets (phylacteries) around their wrists, containing two verses from Scripture. (They still do, when they are at prayer.) One of these verses was, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut 11:13), and the other was, “You must love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18).

Loving God with our whole heart is the key to everything in life; because our relationship with God affects everything and everyone in our life.  St. Augustine wrote: "Love God – and do what you like."

 

There is an old philosophical dictum that says you cannot love what you do not know. And that's true.  To love something, we have to know it. And so, if we want to grow in our love for God, which is the surest way to grow in our love for neighbor, the best thing to do is to get to know God better.

Here are two things we can do to know God better.

First, spend fifteen minutes a day this week reading the Bible. The Bible is God's Word - he reveals himself there. Read through the Letters of St. Paul, or one of the Gospels, or even one of the books from the Old Testament (though these are not always easy to interpret).

Second, do a holy hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. When we spend time with him, near the Tabernacle, in silence, in prayerful reflection or even in prayerful reading, he speaks to our hearts. He reveals himself to us. We have our Fall adoration on 12^th and 13^th. It will help us to get into the habit of it and continue it. Besides these two, doing spiritual reading and scripture meditation will help deepening our knowledge of God, leading to love him with all our heart. Taking no effort doing any of these would manifest disinterest, or I don’t care attitude, in knowing God. Let’s make a resolution today to try to increase our efforts to seek to know God and love Him with our whole being.

 

 

 

 

 

 

OT XXX [B] Jer 31:7-9; Heb 5:1-6; Mk 10:46-52 (L/21)

Today’s Gospel explains how Jesus showed the mercy and compassion of his Heavenly Father by healing Bartimaeus, a blind man. Just as the blind and the lame were God’s concern in the first reading, Jesus was concerned with the blind beggar, Bartimaeus of Jericho. Opening the eyes of the blind was prophesied as one of the works of the Messiah: “The eyes of the blind will see” (Is 29:18; see also 32:3). In fact, in the very next scene he is being proclaimed by the crowds as Messiah.

Jesus and his team are approaching Jerusalem where the story will reach its climax with his death and resurrection. In Jerusalem all eyes will be fixed on him, with malevolent intent. In the meantime, Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, having received his sight, followed him to Jerusalem. One of the great ironies of this Gospel passage is that the one man who couldn't see with his eyes was the only man able to see with his heart. This gospel passage is a meditation on the different kinds of blindness.

 

A blind beggar’s misery is compounded: worse than the sum of the misery of a blind person and a beggar. He is totally at our mercy, stretching out his hand into the darkness, unable to gauge our mood, not knowing if we even see him.

Every believer is that man, most of the time. Faith is dark knowledge. Often we lift up our hands in prayer, and we feel no presence of the Other (God); we hear neither a promise nor a refusal. That is the time to remember Bartimaeus. He is placed here in the gospel story as an encouragement for us.

When he heard that Jesus was passing by he began to shout, “Have pity on me!” People told him to shut up, he was making too much noise. But he shouted all the more. “Call him,” Jesus said.... “Cheer up! On your feet, they told him, he’s calling you.” Then, the account continues, “throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus.” He came, of course, still in the dark.

Notice that he threw aside his cloak! It was a strange thing for a blind person to do: would he find it again? Blind people have great trouble finding things, they need the world to stay put. See how carefully they place things, caressing them almost. But sighted people are forever throwing things around. In throwing his cloak aside Bartimaeus acted like a sighted man. While all the sighted people held their cloaks and their possession around them with careful fingers, he alone leaped up, threw aside his cloak and ran to meet the Lord.

We say seeing is believing. We put great stress on seeing. “Sight is our principal source of knowledge,” said Aristotle, twenty-five centuries ago. And western culture has followed him particularly in this; it has a marked preference for sight over the other senses. Seeing is believing, we say. The meaning of today’s gospel reading is best expressed by turning that phrase around. Believing is seeing. There is a kind of seeing that is even more basic than the sight of our eyes. That is the kind of sight that Jesus restores.

Let’s again briefly go back to Mark’s emphasis on the seemingly insignificant detail: “he threw aside his cloak. To get at it, we need first of all to understand the role of the cloak in ancient Palestine. It was heavy and thick, and it was also the most versatile item of Palestinian clothing at the time.

It was protection against the rapid and frequent temperature changes, insulation against the harsh Judean winds, and at night it doubled as a blanket, especially for the poorer residents of the Holy Land, like Bartimaeus.

For these reasons, and because St Mark highlights it so clearly, the Fathers of the Church have seen in this cloak a symbol of self- sufficiency, a symbol of our deep-seated tendency to think that we are capable of solving all of our problems on our own. The cloak symbolizes all those things that we wrongly depend on for happiness, that we tend to idolize: good looks, intelligence, athletic ability, money, good education, success, popularity...

Following Christ, obeying his commandments and teachings, means putting these other things – good and valuable though they may be – into second place and trusting that friendship with God alone is the real source of the fulfillment we most yearn for.

 

Matthew (Mt 10:59), says in his gospel: “Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.”  Bartimaeus was willing to “lose his life,” to leave behind his comfort and sense of self-sufficiency, in order to put himself entirely under Christ’s care.

Insofar as we trust him completely and follow him unconditionally, leaving all cloaks behind, we will be able to experience the full power of his transforming grace, as the blind beggar did.

And we, like the blind man, want to see him more clearly; we want to know him, and to know how to follow him more closely – that's why we came today. But to make that happen, we need to leave behind our cloak of self-sufficiency.

Let’s pray the prayer of St. Ignatius today: Lord, grant that I may see you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly, day by day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O.T. 29 SUNDAY:Is 53:10-11; Hb 4:14-16; Mk 10:35-45

In today’s Gospel James and John want glory, and Our Lord wants to show them the path to it: suffering for the sake of others. Our true glory comes from the degree to which we give ourselves to others, just like Our Lord.

Today’s First Reading speaks of the Suffering Servant and the fruits of his suffering for himself and others. The Suffering Servant is a prophecy of Our Lord, and the “cup” to which he refers in today’s Gospel is the suffering he knows he must endure for us. [I have seen videos of testimonies of several Jews who embraced Christianity because they read the Suffering Servant prophecy in the Book of Isaiah and its fulfillment in Christ after they came across the New Testament. Jewish Rabbis forbid the Jews to read the New Testament, branding Jesus as a heretic Jew. But when someone reads it they can easily connect the link].

The reading says, the suffering servant gives his life as an offering for sin. And through his suffering, he shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear. Suffering has a purpose in this case: through Christ’s suffering, his followers will receive a long life, the Father’s will is accomplished, and many are justified. No one likes needless suffering. We seek to alleviate it, but it is not needless if it has a purpose. The suffering servant of Isaiah suffers for the sinners.

In today’s Second Reading we see the glory that Our Lord received for drinking the cup of suffering: he became our High Priest by sacrificing himself.

In the Gospel James and John are seeking glory, but they don’t entirely understand the path to it or the kind of glory to be won. Our Lord works with them; he doesn’t simply tell them they’re being ambitious and should focus on other things. Followers of Christ will be glorified if they persevere in the faith, but it’s the Lord who sets the terms as to what that glory consists of and how to get there.

In the kingdom of Jesus the standard was that of service. Greatness consisted, not in reducing other men to one’s service, but in reducing oneself to their service.

 Hannibal Barca was a military commander of the Carthage army in 247 BC. He led a famous campaign in the second Punic War against the Roman army, remaining undefeated until the very gates of Rome. His most famous military accomplishment was the battle of Cannae, where he defeated a Roman army double the size of his. What was the secret of his success?  He was a man who led by example. He would sleep among his soldiers and would not wear anything that made him distinct above his soldiers. He would lead the armies into battle and be the last to leave the battlefield. Even today he stands as a model for leadership.  Real leaders put the needs of the people they lead ahead of their own. So they became great.

 Jesus summarized his mission in one sentence: "The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." According to Jesus, greatness consists not in what we have, nor in what we can get from others but in what we give to others. Jesus thus overturned all our values, teaching us that true greatness consists in loving, humble, and sacrificial service. For Jesus, true service means putting our gifts at the disposal of others. For our contemporaries Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa, greatness lay in the giving of their whole self to the very lowest, treating them as brothers and sisters and living close to them.

 This is the lesson that the church places before us today. This is the lesson that the Saints have put into practice, and achieved greatness. This is the lesson that the world expects from the followers of Jesus.

Every baptized Christian has been called to enter the servant leadership of Jesus. The best place to begin this servant leadership is in our own homes and in the workplace.  We have to look upon our education, training, and experience as preparation for service to others.  Whatever may be our place in society — whether important or unimportant — we can serve.  We should learn to serve with a smile.  This is possible whether we are in military service, social service, law, medical service, government, or business. We get chances to serve others every day.  Nurses serve their patients, teachers serve their students, parents serve the needs of their children, and spouses serve each another and their children as well as their own parents in old age. “Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.” —Albert Schweitzer.

Today, as Jesus puts us first by giving himself to us in this Mass, let's ask him to help us follow his example, by being available to others this coming week.

 

Cycle (B) OT:XXVII:  Gen 2:18-24; Heb 2:9-11; Mk 10:2-16

The Book of Genesis contains two accounts of creation. Today's First Reading is taken from this second account of creation. The familiar phrase here is: "God created man in his own image and likeness; male and female he created them."

 ‘Adam’ is not a name like James or John; it means ‘the creature made of dust (the word for which is ‘adamah’ in Hebrew). In the first three chapters of Genesis, ‘Adam’ means man and woman equally. Obviously, then, man and woman are on an equal footing and both are equally images of God.

All this, of course, is before the Fall! After the Fall, all is changed. Humans are seen as being under a curse, and they suffer differently for it. To the man, God said, "'Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return'" (Gen 3:17-19). To the woman he said, 'I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you'" (Genesis 3:16).

Scholars regard this Genesis story as a reflection of actual conditions in the ancient Near East at the time that Genesis was written. In particular, it reflects the position of women in society at that time. A woman was subject first to her father, and then on her marriage she became subject to her husband. She was subject to them because she was their property.

Divorce was very easily obtained in the time of Jesus. As it is in Islam now, Some Rabbis taught at that time that if a woman ruined a meal or spoke badly about her in-laws, her husband could divorce her; some even said that if a man spotted a woman who was more beautiful than his wife he could divorce his wife. In Islam a woman can be divorced even without a witness. A husband can just say the word “divorce” three times, it is done, then, that becomes irreversible. And if he regrets and want to take it back, he can have her back only if another man marries her and consummate that marriage. There are agencies in Islamic circles facilitating this for money. [In any other religion it would be adultery]. When in rage, a man can say “divorce” even a hundred times. Because, anger can drive people to sudden decisions which they may regret later once the anger calms down.

All this was the background to the Pharisees' question to Jesus, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" Instead of going into a legal haggle with them about the law of Moses, Jesus harked back to the original state of innocence (before the Genesis story of the expulsion from Eden). He affirmed the original state over the corrupted one; he stated God's idea of man, woman, and marriage. The original state was the companionship of equals, not ownership by the man; it was love, not domination and subjection.

Today, wherever husbands and wives respect and love each other, refusing to regard each other as property – disposable or otherwise – the mind of Christ is made visible and human beings are living in a state of original innocence instead of original sin.

 

The Church’s teaching on divorce and remarriage has always been unpopular. In ancient Rome, divorce and remarriage was common and accepted. In early medieval Europe, even Catholic rulers habitually resisted this Gospel command which Jesus so clearly stated: “What God has joined together, no human being must separate.” [Separation of the Church of England and martyrdom of Thomas More are all the after effects of refusal of divorce to King Henry VIII, by the Pope.]

A sacramental marriage once celebrated and consummated, the Church has no power to dissolve. That is why the Church never uses the term divorcing a marriage. What the Church does is declare a marriage annulled, declare null and void, meaning that a sacramental marriage did not exist in the first place. It means that the essential properties of marriage were not present at the time the marriage first was celebrated. Essential elements are true, mature consent devoid of force or based on wrong knowledge about the person. That is why the Church does not recognize under-age marriages. If the person was under drugs or alcohol and could not give real informed consent, then that would make it invalid. If the person had some mental illness, he or she could not give proper consent. Then, it is invalid. Openness to having  children is also essential element of marriage. Therefore, if the couple decided not to have any children in their marriage, then that marriage is invalid.  If only you are able to prove that one of these essential elements was absent, only then you can obtain annulment. Obtaining an annulment does not mean that the children born from this marriage are illegal. No. That was a marriage recognized by society but not a sacramental marriage. Therefore, children of this bond are legal children. Sacramental marriage, once celebrated and consummated is indissoluble.

Now, the sacramental marriage is only between two baptized Christians. It is in the pattern of Christ’s love for His Church. It is an indissoluble relationship. A Catholic can only marry in the Church and if one chooses to marry outside the church it is an invalid marriage in the eyes of the church. Such people break their relationship with the Church.

It is like a young man marrying without telling his mom who gave him birth and raised him up. And the next day he shows up at the family meal pretending nothing has happened the day before. The Church gave this person birth in baptism and fed him with Christ’s body, the spiritual food and then he cannot keep the church away from his life at this very important part of his life. Now, such people should apologize to Church and rectify their marriage before they can receive the communion. They can come to church if repented and receive spiritual communion but not sacramental communion.

When a Catholic desires to marry non Catholic or non Christian it has to be approved by the mother Church. Therefore, one has to get permission prior to the marriage from the local bishop. A Christian’s life is totally in Christ and his marriage also gets the graces only when one is in communion with Christ. One cannot say I want Christ but I don’t care about the Church which is Christ’s body here on earth.

 

As we continue with this Mass, let’s thank God for patiently showing us the true meaning of marriage, and pray for all Catholics who for convenience sake left the church and blocked the divine grace in their life by marrying the way they wanted.