20th SUNDAY(A) 17 August 2014

Fr. Gerard Kelly 

There are some things that are troubling in the Gospel story that we have just heard.  But there are also things that encourage us.  It can be good to recognise that the gospel can speak to us at a few different levels.

Perhaps the easiest level to appreciate the gospel is to note the attitude of the woman who approaches Jesus.  She is a woman who is determined to be heard and to make sure that Jesus understands her needs.  But she does this with the greatest respect for him.  She is persistent in calling out to him.  Perhaps another way we could express this is to say that she keeps knocking at his door, even when there is no answer.  She is convinced that he will respond to her.  In the end Jesus praises her for her faith.  What was her faith?  Faith can be hard to define.  In the case of this woman, the best way to know her faith is to look at how it was demonstrated.  She begins by falling at the feet of Jesus and addressing him as Lord.  Here she shows that she recognises him as someone who comes from God.  This gesture is basically one of worshipping him.  In worshipping him she acknowledges that he is God and that she is depends on him.  This is why her prayer – and that is what it is – is “help me”.  She knows that her life and her daughter’s life depend on Jesus.  This tells us something about faith, namely that faith is always saving faith.  This woman has an encounter with Jesus who saves – saves her and saves her daughter.

There is an important message here for us.  We learn something of how our relationship with God, in Jesus, works.  We learn a number of very profound things about prayer.  One is that before all else, our prayer is an act of worship.  We worship Jesus as Lord, as did this woman.  In worshipping him as Lord we acknowledge his power to transform our lives and our world.  We also acknowledge our own neediness and our dependence on him.  We also learn that prayer is an honest and direct encounter with Jesus.  The woman was not afraid to keep going back to Jesus while ever her need lasted.  Yes, she was respectful, but this did not stop her from speaking in a forthright manner to him.  We can learn from this that there is nothing that we can’t raise with Jesus in prayer.

This gospel can also speak to us at another level – one that is a little more difficult to comprehend.  We can be troubled by the way Jesus begins his response.  This woman is from foreign territory.  She does not belong to the People of God.  Jesus’ initial response is to say that his message is not meant for foreigners like this woman; it is for God’s chosen people, the Jewish people.  Jesus uses the phrase that he was sent to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.  It seems that he only reluctantly responds to this foreign woman.  Because she was a foreigner, she would have been considered to be an enemy.

These facts can tell us a few things.  One is that Jesus is in a line of prophets who proclaimed God’s message and called the people of God back to that original relationship God offered them.  God was never going to revoke that relationship.  In fact he wanted to offer a similar relationship to the whole world.  So, his message goes out from the Jewish people to the whole world.  That is how all of us have received it.  Of all the people who appear in the gospels, this woman is the person who is most like us.  So this gospel story today marks an important development in God’s plan.  We learn that his is message for the whole world.

We, then, become part of the new people of God who continue to take that message to the whole world.  The Christian faith is always spreading out.  The most important way that it spreads is by its attractiveness.  Recently, Pope Francis made the important point that effective Christian witness is not bombarding people with religious messages.  We can bombard Jesus with our prayer, but we become witnesses of his message by showing to the world that he is concerned with our doubts, our hopes, our sorrows, our joys, our pain and our needs.  To put it simply: he is interested in our salvation; he saves. 

Just as the story of this foreign woman remains in the Gospel as a witness to us of Jesus’ concern for everyone, so too our own stories of his saving action can show others that he also cares for them.

16th SUNDAY(A) 20 July 2014

Fr. Gerard Kelly

Anyone who has done any gardening probably knows the type of situation that Jesus is talking about in the parable of the wheat and the darnell.  However, they probably don’t act in the same way that the farmer did in the parable.  All the gardeners I know spend a lot of time weeding the garden, making it look good and making sure that there is plenty of room for the plants to grow.  In the parable, the weeds are allowed to keep growing among the good crop of wheat.  I am sure that those listening to Jesus back then were just as shocked as any gardener today would be if we told them to leave the weeds to grow among the plants.

But Jesus wants to make the point that sometimes it is hard to distinguish the weeds from the wheat, especially in the early period of growth.  To stay with the gardening analogy, the fear of any parent allowing their child to weed the garden is that the child might pull out some of the plants as well as weeds.  In Jesus’ time the situation was a little more complex because the roots of the wheat were often intertwined with the roots of the darnell.  Pulling out all the darnell would easily result in the wheat crop being destroyed.

Why does Jesus tell this parable?  It is like all the parables of Jesus: it tells us something about God and the kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is growing in the world.  The temptation for a lot of people is to see God’s kingdom as being outside the world and having nothing much to do with the world.  They see it as a type of utopia that might even help them escape from the things they don’t like in the world.  But this is not the kingdom that Jesus preaches.  If the wheat in the parable is a sign of the kingdom growing, then those who think of the kingdom as being outside the world are simply thinking of a perfect field of wheat with no weeds growing anywhere.  But that is not how God works.  The fact that the field contains both wheat and weeds is a sign that the kingdom is taking root and growing in the world – even in the midst of the messy aspects of the world and of life.  The kingdom doesn’t change the world into a utopia, but slowly transforms the world.  Once God’s work is complete then we will see a good field of wheat.  But right now God is patiently at work bringing the kingdom about.  While we live as people of the kingdom even now, we also live with the messy things of the world.

What is true of the world is also true of our own individual lives.  Part of being human is to have dreams and expectations about life.  We all want what is good; we want the best.  At certain moments in our lives that vision of what is good for us clarifies and we make a resolution to set our course for what will bring that vision to life.  But this does not always last, and we can be overcome by disappointment.  The reality of our own weakness can even lead to a certain paralysis, or we can feel that it is too hard to get up and keep going.  Sometimes this is an intense feeling, but at other times it just seems part of the normal everyday experience of living in our family or workplace or community.  We are confronted by an imperfect world.  We are confronted with the weeds that seem to be growing along with the wheat.

This does not mean that we should simply sit back and not worry about personal conversion or looking for ways to change our lives.  That is not the point of the parable.  The point rather seems to be that God is patient with us.  In the parable, the farmer knows that the crop will produce wheat.  For us, this means that the kingdom of God is definitely taking hold of our world and our lives.  It is this conviction that allows us to transcend weakness and frailty, and not be weighted down by it.  God does not abandon us because of our weakness, but rather uses the very things that are weakest in us and that perhaps trouble us most, to transform us.  This is the great paradox about God.  The religious leaders of Jesus’ time thought that God was only interested in those who were worthy of him – those who were ritually and socially pure.  But Jesus showed time and time again that God was more interested in stooping down to lift up those who were bent over in pain or sorrow or sin.  He loved them.

To appreciate what is going on here we need to take account of the other parables that Jesus tells immediately after he speaks of the wheat and the darnell.  He compares the kingdom to mustard seed.  This is a tiny seed, yet it contains all that is necessary to grow into a huge tree.  In other words, God has given all of us the gift to grow into a kingdom people.  We all have the potential to become the sort of person that God has called us to be.  We have the capacity to love the God who loves us.  Sometimes we may feel that we don’t know how to seek out this God.  St Paul reminds us that the Spirit of God dwelling in us helps us in our weakness.

The parables today invite us to be open to the Spirit of God and to see God’s Spirit at work in our lives and in our world, transforming them.  This is not a call to run away from the world, but to be part of a world that is slowly being transformed in the kingdom of God.  We too are slowly being transformed so that we reflect more clearly the image of God.

CORPUS CHRISTI (A) 22 Jun 2014

Fr Ruben

Jn. 6 L51-58

I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever.

Theme: THANKSGIVING, REMEMBRANCE, and FRATERNAL SHARING.

In the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, sometimes called the Feast of Corpus Christi, we note three words that summarize the event --- THANKSGIVING, REMEMBRANCE, and FRATERNAL SHARING.

THANKSGIVING.

Most reason for having big celebrations, and sumptuous meals is THANKSGIVING --- for memorable events like birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries. Precisely, the word Eucharistia in Greek means “thanksgiving”.   We thank the Lord for the gift of human life in Birthdays and the gift of spiritual life in Baptism, which includes us in the family of God, and sharing in his bountiful table called providence.  God gifted us with life and sustains it. Above all he does not want us to die and become fertilizers, but shares with us his divine life.  In fact, he says: I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever.  The Eucharist is a Sacrament that guarantees us eternal life, immortal life, life without end.

REMEMBRANCE.

We remember important moments of our life, and history.  And we love to retell these stories to the persons close to us --- especially the stories of our pains and successes, of our failures and triumphs, of our hardships and glory.  Stories intertwine us into a family, and a community.  For God, it is the Calvary Event that binds us most intimately into the body of Christ.  In fact, Jesus says: “No greater love than this that a man should lay down his life for his friends.  And more than just friends, we belong to the family of Jesus.  The redemptive blood of Jesus flows in our bodies for “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”  We become what we eat and drink.

FRATERNAL SHARING:

Like the little boy who was asked to donate rare blood to his sister suffering from leukemia; aft first, he hesitated to give, but he was finally persuaded that only his blood could save his sister. So, even though they quarrel at times, he loves his sister very much. After donating his own blood, he asked the doctor, “when will I die?”  The doctor said, you will not die, but you have just shared life.

In this Eucharistic banquet, we give thanks to the Lord our God for all the blessings we have received from him.  We remember his divine providence for our kettles never run out of rice and noodles, because it is in fraternal sharing, and in family giving where we do not count the costs, and because redemptive love means “no one is too heavy to carry, for anyone can be my brother or sister, father or mother.”

MOST HOLY TRINITY (A) 15 June 2014

Fr Gerard Kelly
Catholic Institute of Sydney

I once heard a story of a Year 2 class of school children who were asked by their teacher to draw a picture of God.  It seems a rather strange request because we would all say that God is invisible.  Anyway, one girl drew a picture of a swan floating peacefully along a river, weaving in and out of the rushes.  The teacher wasn’t happy.  But if we think about it for a minute the young girl may have had more wisdom and imagination than the teacher.  The girl obviously did not think that God was a swan, but the swan did seem to represent for her what God was like.  The image of a swan must have connected with her experience of God.  The image suggested a God who was beautiful and majestic; a God who communicated peace; and a God who was immersed in creation.  The teacher may have been upset, but I think it is a wonderful image of God.

Of course, all images are weak and only convey a small part of the real picture.  They presume some intellectual understanding, but what this child showed was that her understanding of God was connected to her experience of God.  I think this is always the case.  To truly know God we must have an experience of God.  People could study God as an academic exercise, but they might not know God.

In our readings today we encounter people who had a real experience of God.  Moses went up a mountain to meet God.  And even though he did not see God face-to-face, he encountered God and could come back to the people and tell them that God was inviting them into a special relationship.  In fact, much of the Old Testament in the Bible tells us about that relationship – its high points and its low points.  From all of their experience the people came to speak of God the way we heard in our first reading: a God who is tender and compassionate, rich in mercy and slow to anger, and always faithful.  If you use that sort of language to speak about God, then you have clearly had a profound experience of a loving God.  This wasn’t just a theory about God; it was how they experienced God.

This experience of God reaches its highpoint in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  The language of today’s Gospel speaks of God sending his Son.  I think there are a few things to note about this.  The first is that God sends the Son as a sign of love for the world.  There is a real sense in which this is the ultimate sign of love: that God will send his own Son into the world.  But we also need to recognise that the Son responds generously to the Father and loves the Father.  The gospel tells us even more: God’s love for the world has a specific purpose, namely that God wants what is best for everyone.  God promises eternal life to those who believe.  All of this points to how God loves, and what God is like.  Our God is a God of relationships.  The inner life of God is one of relationship as the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father.  More than this: God invites us into that relationship by giving us his Spirit.

So where do we experience God?  Where do we come to know God?  I think that the first place we come to know God is when we come to worship God, because in worshipping God, we engage in communication with God.  We encounter God’s love in Holy Communion, and we also join ourselves with Jesus in his love for his Father. We worship God through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

But there are also other places where we experience God every day as we go about our daily tasks, and engage with the people we meet and love.  I believe it is important to make some time each day to step aside and take note of where God has touched our lives during the day.  These don’t have to be great events; they can be things that seem very ordinary.  But unless we take time to identify our experience of God we will never truly know God.  Once we recognise our experience of God we will probably find that it is as varied as it was for the people we meet in the Bible.  We will also no doubt eventually recognise that our experience has much in common with theirs.  We will be in relationship with a God of tenderness and compassion, a God who is rich in mercy and slow to anger, and above all a God who is faithful to that special relationship with us.  We might also know and be in relationship with the God who was drawn as a swan by that Year 2 girl, a God who is beautiful and offers peace.

It is important to know this God.  The more we know and experience God the more we will be helping other people to experience the love and mercy of God.  We all have a special role because we are the people who show the image of God to the world.  We are the people who show others that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that everyone may have eternal life.  After all, we are made in the image of God.

2nd Sunday after Easter (A):Divine Mercy Sunday 27th April 2014

Fr. Noel Connolly

This is Divine Mercy Sunday. Mercy has long been a neglected theme in theology but is a key theme in Old and New Testaments. "Mercy is the name for our God, and without mercy we are lost." Rules alone can make us harsh judges and rules were certainly not Jesus’ major concern. Jesus loved according to our need and not according to the amount of effort we put into being virtuous. Witness the prodigal son and the elder brother.

We must remember Jesus’ context. He was born into a Galilee trapped in debt. Most of the people he lived with were poor peasant farmers living on extremely small blocks of land that were barely able to support them and their families. Farming was always risky and then they were cruelly exploited by the landowners who demanded an excessive amount of the crop and by the Romans and the local ruler, Herod Antipas who taxed them to build the cities of Tiberias and Sephoris. They were extremely poor and tried to survive with some dignity and honour as many poor people still do today. A drought or sickness could easily cause these farmers to lose their land and then they were forced to become day-labourers and if that didn’t work beggars or prostitutes. These were Jesus’ friends and acquaintances and that is why they figure so frequently in the Gospels.

Much of their Jewish religion did not help because it concerned the Temple which they would not have had the money to visit or purity laws which they were too poor to keep. They often “sinned” and were strictly speaking untouchable. Yet Jesus often dined with “sinners”, touched and was touched by them. He doesn’t demand formal rites of repentance before they can join him. He understands that those who lack everything are also being condemned to live in shame and without even some honour and dignity. This does not mean that commandments are unimportant, but Jesus understands that spiritual progress takes time and right now they need acceptance, love and confidence. Grace and mercy come before judgement in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ experience of God was a God of life, mercy and healing not of worship and law. “I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.” [Jn. 10:10] Impelled by the God of life, Jesus went to those whom religion had forgotten, illness had marginalised and poverty dehumanised. Jesus’ God was a God of Life, so a God not of the righteous but of the suffering. Jesus loved according to need not according to effort, virtue or achievement. He didn’t try to reform their religious life but to help them live a healthier life, free from the power of evil and all that dehumanised them.

Sickness was common in Galilee in Jesus’ time. His neighbours and friends suffered many of the diseases of the poor. They were blind, paralysed, had skin diseases or were mentally ill. And as everyone was living on the edge of survival, the sick were often abandoned by neighbours, society and their religion and with no means to earn a living, reduced to begging. Jesus saw them by the roadside and loved them. Abandoned by God and humanity, stigmatised and excluded from community life, they were probably the most marginalised sector of Galilee society. That is why Jesus loved them. His highest concern was for the suffering and most unfortunate. He wanted to show them that God was especially with those who were suffering and abandoned.

Jesus’ healings were the practical demonstration of everything he preached. He not only healed the sick but restored them to relationships, to their families and their community. Jesus was contagious with health and life. The sick and abandoned no longer felt alone and he awakened previously unrecognised energy in people. He revolutionised their understanding of God and of themselves.

That is why Pope Francis insists that, “mercy is the greatest of the virtues, since all the others revolve around it and, more than this, it makes up for their deficiencies. This is particular to the superior virtue, and as such it is proper to God to have mercy, through which his omnipotence is manifested to the greatest degree”. Pope Francis uses the word “mercy” 32 times in his exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel and insists that what “the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”

He wants us Christians to have warm, joyful, merciful hearts capable of going out into the world, getting dirty and dialoguing with all people especially those who are sick, poor and marginalised. His challenge to us all is, “are we a church capable of warming and healing hearts”. Do we have the compassion that Jesus was famous for? Are we individually and as a community contagious with life?

Easter Sunday 20 April 2014

Fr. Gerard Kelly

We have arrived at Easter after six weeks of Lent.  Finally, over the last three days we have celebrated the Last Supper on Holy Thursday and the Passion and Death of Jesus on Good Friday.  So we should be very ready to celebrate Easter and the resurrection of Jesus.

If that is what we have been through, imagine what the followers of Jesus had experienced as they watched him carry his cross, saw him nailed to a tree and then stood back as he was taken down from the cross and buried in a new tomb.  Their world was shattered; his message seemed to have been defeated.  They weren’t expecting anything else to happen.  So when Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb early in the morning, she is probably going to anoint the body with spices as would have been the usual practice.  We are listening to St John’s gospel, and he sets the scene by telling us that it was dark.  The darkness probably captured Mary’s mood.  Then when she arrived she saw that the stone had already been rolled back.  Her first thought is that someone has broken into the tomb and stolen the body.  She runs back to tell the Peter and the other disciple, who both run out to the tomb to see what is going on.

What happens next is also surprising.  When Peter arrives he goes into the tomb and sees that the cloths in which the body of Jesus had been wrapped are lying there.  He must have been puzzled, because this would hardly have seemed the way a person stealing the body would act – why would they unwrap the body?  The mystery only deepened.  Then St John tells us that the other disciple goes into the tomb and that seeing things the way they are, he believed.  This is really the first indication we have that what had happened to Jesus was something quite extraordinary.  The beloved disciple believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

After this experience the disciples have to work out what this means.  I think we all have to work it out.  We need to ask what it means for us.  This was such an unexpected experience that those first disciples struggled to make sense of it.  Their early experience told them that what happened to Jesus was something very different to what had happened to Lazarus.  A couple of weeks ago we heard the gospel where Jesus called the dead Lazarus to come out of the tomb.  He came out still bound in the burial cloths and Jesus had to tell some people to unbind him.  There were plots to kill Lazarus, and of course, he would die again.  Jesus is different.  He hasn’t simply been resuscitated.

In the gospel scene there are other hints as to the meaning of resurrection.  The emphasis on darkness at the beginning of the story would have reminded the hearers of the darkness and chaos that set the scene for the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis.  Even the reference to the first day of the week, which of course is the day after the seventh day – in other words an eighth day – would have reminded the people of the days of creation.  It is as though this is the first day of the new creation.  The new creation is the completion of God’s creative action.  The new creation represents God’s victory over darkness, chaos and sin.  The new creation represents the beginning of a new way for all of creation to live in relationship with God.  It means the beginning of a new type of relationship between human beings – where the peace and justice, which are fundamental gifts of God, will permeate the whole created order.

Just as the disciples of Jesus had to learn the meaning of this, so too do we.  It is still unfolding!  The resurrection is still taking effect in our world, even when we might see very few signs of it.  The question for us is: how might we live as the Easter people.  How might we live in this time of the first day of the new creation, even while creation is still waiting to be perfected?

The beloved disciple may offer us a clue.  He saw an empty tomb and some linen cloths, and he believed.  These became signs for him that God had raised Jesus from the dead.  The signs that we have are the sacraments, particularly baptism and the Eucharist.  St Paul reminds us that in our baptism we died with Christ so that we might live with him.  Our life is now hidden with Christ in God.  Through our baptism the resurrection takes effect in our lives; we are part of the new creation.  Likewise, when we celebrate the Eucharist we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus.  In receiving communion we are drawn into his new life.  Very shortly we will renew the promises of our baptism and we will be sprinkled with the Easter water.  We will then receive communion.

Like the first disciples of Jesus we are called to live in such a way that the new life we have received in these sacraments becomes a reality in our day-to-day lives.  We live in a world that is still being created anew in the resurrection.  Even in the midst of the world’s imperfections, we are witnesses to the effect of the resurrection.

7th SUNDAY(A) 23 Feb 2014

Fr. Noel Connolly

Personally I find the readings today extremely challenging. In the first reading from Leviticus we are told not to bear hatred for our brother in our heart, to be open to forgive and not to be vengeful. And in the Gospel we are told to turn the other cheek when someone hurts us.

I used to take these challenges in my stride. By personality I prefer to avoid trouble so forgiving people is easier than fighting with them. Then some years ago I was seriously betrayed by someone close to me. This time it wasn’t easy to forgive because I was hurt in a way that could never be undone.

For a long while I fumed inwardly thinking about what I would do and say to get even. Besides the pain of betrayal I felt that if I forgave the person involved I would be a fool, albeit a Christian fool. He would take advantage of me again and that somehow that would be weak when I wanted to teach him a lesson. I worried for some time about the need to get even, not to let him get away with this injustice. I felt exceptionally righteous.

But after some months of feeling righteous and bitter I slowly came to realise that the bitterness was hurting me more than anyone else. It certainly wasn’t hurting the person I wanted to hurt. He was blithely ignorant of my rage. Then I read in the Book of Sirach. Only the sinner holds on to anger and wrath, and the Lord heals us only when we stop nourishing anger towards another.

Later I read a parable about a Native American grandfather who told his grandson how he felt about a tragedy that had befallen him. He said, I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one. The grandson asked him, Which wolf will win the fight in your heart, Grandad? The grandfather answered, The one I feed.

It is true there is often a fight going on inside our hearts between our righteous but vengeful, angry side and our loving, forgiving side. And if we keep running over the hurt or injustice in our minds and keep planning how we can get even then we will feed the vengeful side of ourselves and we will live bitter, unhappy, self-preoccupied lives.

It is this preoccupation with ourselves and what has happened to us which keeps us from seeing life from other peoples’ point of view, which prevents us from forgiving and which isolates us in our misery.

Many years ago in Ireland I was challenged to always look at issues that angered me from the other person’s point of view, to try to put myself in their boots or rather mind. I lost a lot of my anger when I tried to see the situation from their point of view even if I still didn’t agree with it. Another elderly Jesuit who had held many important and responsible roels told me that when he felt anger he always prayed for the people he always angry with. Not for God to correct them but for whatever they wanted and needed, for their growth.

But I think the Native American’s words about not feeding our anger apply not only personally but socially. It applies in our families and in our communities. Strangely our families and our church a local communities are where we find our greatest support and our major hurts. We think we know one another and we remember too much.

But it also happens on a political level.  Unfortunately our politics her in Australia are becoming increasingly angry. There is real venom in our national debates about all the major issues, the need for a carbon price, refugees, and the economy. Too many of us are feeding the vengeful, righteous, angry, violent wolf. So that constructive debate, openness and respect for the other’s point of view is near impossible. This kind of anger will only polarise us more, make everyone miserable and prevent the constructive dialogue we need to solve our problems.

We must try to contain our anger no matter how justified it seems. We must not feed the vengeful side of ourselves but encourage the compassionate, reasonable, respectful and open side. This is the way to happiness. There is only bitterness and a narrow world in front of the person who cannot forgive and cannot respect others. So while politics must necessarily be competitive and our debates rigorous there is something dangerous and destructive about the present level of anger in our public life. We have to stop feeding it.

Presentation of the Lord (A) 2 Feb 2014

Fr. Lito

In this episode, the temple becomes the meeting point of promise and fulfilment. The Old Testament, represented by Simeon, welcome the New Testament, represented by Jesus, who is also destined to be the new temple, where God can be worshipped in spirit and truth. It is a gracious meeting in which the Old recognizes the New as the embodiment of God’s faithfulness to promises made in the past. The evangelist Luke shows the continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament through Simeon’s peaceful exit to give way to god’s new offer of salvation in the person of Jesus.

I personally make out the following reflection points from the Gospel:

•   Jesus, the word-incarnate, is forever the Father’s firstborn. The Mystery of the Incarnation is a self-emptying. Jesus poured himself out to humanity and he left the glory of the father in order to save us. But during his earthly ministry, he remains connected to the Father. He is eternally the Father’s.
•  Jesus, the word-incarnate, is icon of primordial obedience. Jesus came as one who is greater than Moses – greater than the laws and the traditions of Israel. However, in a gesture of humility and obedience, he lived under the conditions of the law. He is truly an Incarnate, inculturated God.
•  “When the parents brought in the child Jesus… he took him into his arms and blessed God…”

I am particularly touched by these words of the Gospel. I believe that this is also what God wants us to do in this life. Let us take the story of the birth of Jesus as truly the father’s personal gift for each of us. Let us take Jesus into our arms and ask: What does this gift of Jesus mean for me/us?

Jesus is bringer of peace  /  Jesus is God’s faithfulness – one who fulfils God’s promise  /  Jesus is salvation  /  Jesus is revealing light  /  Jesus is the glory of God  /  Jesus is a sign of contradiction  /  Jesus is one who reveals the thoughts of many hearts.

Which of these words of Simeon speaks in your heart and life when you speak about taking Jesus into your arms?

Lord, in you, God has shown his faithfulness to us. Now in you, we are empowered to be faithful to God. Amen.