THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST [B]: (Ex 24:3-8, Heb 9:11-15, Mk 14:12-16, 22-26)

Today, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, popularly known as Corpus Christi. It was introduced in the late 13th century to encourage the faithful to give special adoration to the Holy Eucharist. Why was it necessary to institute a new feast? Doesn't the Church recall the institution of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday? Doesn't she celebrate it every Sunday and, more than that, every day of the year? In fact, Corpus Christi is the first feast whose object is not an event of the life of Christ, but a truth of faith: His real presence in the Eucharist.

Both our first and second readings talk about covenant, sacrifice, and blood. According to the first reading, the old covenant was sealed with the blood of animal sacrifice which Moses sprinkled on the people. On the contrary, the second reading reminds us that the new covenant was sealed with the blood of Christ. While in the first covenant blood was poured on the covenant parties, in the second covenant the sacrificial blood was consumed by the covenant parties. When we receive communion we reaffirm our acceptance of the New Covenant with God. This is more than just saying, “I agree.” Communion is an intimate sharing of the presence of Christ conquering evil on the Cross. We are not just stained with blood. We take the blood of the Lamb within us. We don’t just offer young bulls for sacrifice. We take the sacrifice within us. The sacrifice is the Body of Christ.

 

While the first covenant never guaranteed eternal life, the new one does because it was sealed with costly blood through a perfect sacrifice offered once and for all. In the gospel, Christ instituted the Holy Eucharist. Here he was both the priest and the victim.

There is a danger that believers face at present regarding the Eucharist which is to trivialize it. There was a time when it was not received so frequently, and fasting and confession had to precede it. Today, virtually everyone approaches it. It is normal that participation in Mass also implies Communion; that is why it exists. But all this entails a mortal risk. St. Paul says: Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily, will be guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord. Let each one examine himself and then eat the bread and drink the cup because he who eats and drinks without discerning eats and drinks judgment unto himself. We cannot receive God except as "God," that is, respecting all His holiness and majesty. Therefore, worthy reception is demanded from the recipients.  A worthy reception will enable us to communicate with Jesus on a deeper level. Every petition we make is heard by the Lord, particularly when he is within us.

Today’s gospel reading describes the moment when Jesus gave the gift of the Eucharist to his first disciples. It was Jesus’ last meal with them, on the evening before he was crucified. At this last supper, Jesus gave himself to his disciples in a way that was distinctive and memorable. The last supper may have been the last in a whole series of meals, but Jesus also intended it to be a beginning, the beginning of what we have come to call the Eucharist. This is why in the earliest account of the Last Supper in one of Paul’s letters, and also in Luke’s gospel, Jesus goes on to say, ‘Do this in memory of me’. In other words, ‘Repeat what I have just said and done’.

The Lord’s giving of himself in love to his disciples at the last supper looked ahead to the gift he would make of himself to them and to all humanity the following day. On the cross, he gave his body and his blood, his entire self, out of love for us all. The love that shone through Jesus on the cross was shining through him at the last supper and continues to shine through him at every Eucharist. That is why Saint Paul could write to the church in Corinth about twenty five years after the last supper, ‘As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’. At every Eucharist, we are proclaiming the Lord’s death, the Lord’s self-giving love on the cross, and that love becomes present to us in a powerful way. The Lord who gave himself on Calvary gives himself to us at every Eucharist. As at the last supper he called on his disciples to take his gift of himself, the gift of his love, so at every Eucharist he calls on us to take his gift of himself, to receive his love into our lives. The Lord’s love that we are invited to receive at every Eucharist is a costly love, it is the love of one who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life for all. We are sent from the Eucharist to share this costly love that we have received, so that the Lord can continue to serve others through us. The Lord comes to us in the Eucharist to catch us up into the rhythm of his own self-giving love. He comes to us so that he can live in and through us, so that his attitudes and values can take flesh in our daily lives. Because we receive the Eucharist so often, it is easy to overlook the huge commitment we are making to live and spread the Kingdom of God.

 Sharing in the Eucharist places several significant demands on us, calling us to live in ways that reflect the profound spiritual and communal significance of the sacrament.

Sharing in the Eucharist calls us to emulate Christ’s love and sacrifice by serving others. This includes acts of charity, justice, and compassion, particularly towards the poor, marginalized, and those in need. The sacrament strengthens and sends believers out to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world. As we are dismissed today at the end of the Mass, let’s recognize that we are going out with Christ’s hands and feet and heart and mind to reach out to other people as Christ would today.

 

 

 HOLY TRINITY: Dt 4:32-34, 39-40; Rom 8:14-17; Mt 28:16-20

There’s a story about a young boy who climbs up a mountain in India, and there he meets a guru who is half asleep; he wakes him up and says, “I want you to explain God to me.”

And the guru smiled and said, “A God that can be explained is not a God that you should worship.” And he smiled and went back to sleep.

A God that can be explained is not a God that you should worship because if you can explain Him, it means that you’ve reduced God, the Creator of the world, to be another one of us.

The mystery of the most Holy Trinity is a basic doctrine of Faith in Christianity, understandable not with our heads but with our hearts. It is not like the ideological monotheistic god of Islam, but a revelational and relational God.  The Trinity is not merely an abstract doctrine but a living reality that shapes our faith and practice. It teaches us that God is relational and communal, inviting us into a divine fellowship of love. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in a perfect relationship of love, and we are called to reflect that love in our relationships with others.

The oldest doctrinal formulation of the Church’s belief in the Trinity is found in the Apostles’ Creed which has served both as the basis of instruction for catechumens and as the Baptismal confession of Faith since the second century.  Later, the Nicene Creed, originating at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), stated the doctrine more explicitly.  

The Christian life develops completely in the sign and presence of the Trinity. At the dawn of life, we were baptized "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," and at the end, at the bedside, the words recited by the priest when giving the last sacrament are: "Go forth from this world, O Christian soul, in the name of God, the Almighty Father who created you, in the name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you, and in the name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you."

Christians believe that God is one and triune because they believe that God is love! The revelation of God as love, revealed by Jesus, has "obliged" one to admit the Trinity. It is not a human invention. If God is love, He has to love someone. There is no love "in the void," without an object. But, whom does God love to be defined as love? Men? But men have existed only for thousands of years, no more. The cosmos? The universe? The universe has existed only for billions of years. Before that, whom did God love, to be able to define himself as love? We cannot say that he loved himself, because this would not be love but egoism and narcissism.

This is the answer to Christian revelation: God is love because from eternity he has "in his bosom" a son, the Word, the one he loves with an infinite love, that is, with the Holy Spirit. In every love, there are always three realities or subjects: one who loves, one who is loved, and the love that unites them. The Christian God is one and triune because he is the communion of love. In love, unity and plurality are reconciled; love creates unity in diversity: unity of intentions, of thought, of will; diversity of subjects, of characteristics and, in the human realm, of sex. In this connection, the family is the least imperfect image of the Trinity. A husband and wife become one in their intimate expression of love, as the bible says, they shall become one flesh, and in that intimate expression of love, a child is born. A family is not just a father and mother but also includes a child/children. It was no accident that when creating the first human couple God said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26-27).

When the Church describes something as a mystery, she is making the point that this truth cannot be known to us independently of such revelation from God. Our natural faculties including our intellect would not be able to arrive at this conclusion without God Himself having revealed or shown it to us. The Apostles, the monotheistic Jews, would never have come to know of God as a trinity had it not been revealed to them and they personally experienced it in their lives.

God is so far above us that we can never fully understand Him. We, mortals, would be incapable of knowing that God exists as One but in three distinct persons if this has not been revealed to us through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

Speaking about mystery, isn’t a human person itself a mystery? Which wife or husband knows the other perfectly well? Doesn’t your wife or husband reveal to you as a mystery each day? Which parent knows his/her children well? Every day each one of us is revealed as a mystery. Who among us knows oneself fully well? I am a mystery to myself.

Although the word “mystery” implies a certain distance, it involves an intimate encounter. A relationship would remain shallow if the parties are not willing to open themselves to the other. All would agree that there should be no secrets between lovers. The reason why God would unlock and reveal a mystery to us is because He loves us and wishes to engage us and wants us to enter into a relationship with Him. Through this relationship, we come to know Him and by knowing Him more and more, we get to deepen our relationship with Him. This knowledge, admittedly, is not exhaustive but engaging. It draws us closer to the One who can never be fully known. It is a relationship of love. Just like the more you get to know someone you love, the more the person is revealed to be a mystery.

Now that we know His motivation is love, why would God bother to reveal Himself to us? That we might have Eternal Life. And what is eternal life? It is actually sharing in the supernatural life of the Blessed Trinity. How can we share in a life which we have no knowledge of? Impossible. That is why, the more we come to know God, the more we wish to enter into a deeper communion with Him.

Because God is love, we are able to truly love. Because God is unity, we are able to be united to Him. Because God is three Persons, we are able to have communion with Him. This is the reason why this dogma is the central mystery of faith.

May the Holy Trinity help us to know him better each day so that “we may love Him, serve Him, and be with Him in paradise forever.”

 

 

 

 

 

 Pentecost [B] Acts 2:1-11; I Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13; or Gal 5:16-25, Jn 20:19-23

When we look around our little church here, we will find that there is no shortage of images, mostly in the form of statues and paintings of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. There is a long tradition of images within the church, beginning with the paintings in the Catacombs in Rome. The Holy Spirit, whose feast we celebrate today, does not lend itself all that easily to imagery. The traditional image of the Holy Spirit is the dove. That is drawn from the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus. There are two other images of the Holy Spirit in this morning’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Luke says that all who gathered in one room heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven; he goes on to say that something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire. Just as the evangelists do not say that there was an actual dove at the baptism of Jesus, Luke does not say that there was an actual wind and fire at Pentecost. There is something about the Holy Spirit that does not lend itself to any kind of concrete representation because the Holy Spirit cannot be seen as such. Yet, the Holy Spirit is profoundly real.

 

There is a great deal in our universe that is real but is not visible to the naked eye. We may need a microscope or a powerful telescope to see it. What we see with our eyes is only a fraction of our physical world. The Holy Spirit is part of the spiritual world, and so it is not surprising that we cannot see the Spirit with our physical eyes.

 

In today’s second reading, for example, Saint Paul, uses an image drawn from nature; he speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. He is talking about the visible impact of the Spirit on someone’s life. We may not be able to see the Holy Spirit, but we can see the impact of the Spirit in someone’s life, just as we cannot see the wind, but we can see the impact of the wind on people and objects of various kinds. Paul is saying, ‘wherever you find love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control, the Spirit is there at work’. The Spirit becomes visible in and through these qualities, these virtues. The person who possessed those qualities in abundance was Jesus because he was full of the Holy Spirit, full of the life of God.

 

Paul gives a full list of works of the Spirit and their opposites, the works of the flesh, that is, the works of natural, unreformed, and selfish behaviour. Christ has sent His Spirit so that our behaviour may be completely changed, and we may live with His life. The works of the flesh are not merely the gross, ‘fleshly’ distortions of greed, avarice, and sexual license, but include also such failings as envy and quarrels. Paul’s list is a useful little checklist to apply to our own way of life. The desires of self-indulgence are always in opposition to the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are in opposition to self-indulgence: they are opposites, one against the other; that is how we are prevented from doing the things that we want to.

What is self-indulgence and why is it the greatest threat to a life in the Spirit? Self-indulgence, simply put, is the desire for pleasure. If we look carefully at people today and modern society in general, we see immediately that they are dominated by the passion of love of pleasure or self-indulgence. Human beings have a constant tendency towards this terrible passion, which destroys their whole life and deprives them of the possibility of communion with God. The passion of self-indulgence wrecks the work of salvation.

According to the Fathers of the Church, self-indulgence is one of the main causes of every abnormality in man’s spiritual and bodily organism. It is the source of all the vices and all the passions that assault both soul and body. St Theodore, Bishop of Edessa, teaches that there are three general passions that give rise to all the others: love of pleasure, love of money, and love of praise. Other evil originate from these three, and subsequently “from these arise a great swarm of passions and all manner of evil.”
The antidote and cure to this predilection to sin is living a vibrant life in the Spirit. St Paul assured us that “If you are guided by the Spirit you will be in no danger of yielding to self-indulgence, since self-indulgence is the opposite of the Spirit.” In the list of the fruits of the Spirit listed by Paul, self-control is listed last instead of first even though we may assume that self-control is the clearest antidote to self-indulgence. And yet, love is listed first. The reason is that love always seeks the well-being of the other rather than oneself, and if there is no love even in the ascetic practices of our faith, we are merely empty gongs, and everything we do, even if it has the appearance of a virtue, is self-serving.

It is precisely because we continue to struggle with self-indulgence that we have to constantly allow the Spirit to fortify us and strengthen our resolve to be holy and faithful to the Lord.

Today, we remember how the Risen Lord, breathed His Spirit on the apostles and on all of us, saying: “Receive the Holy Spirit!” The Spirit comes to each one of us as a gift but also as a challenge to the ongoing conversion of our hearts and minds. As the source and giver of all holiness, let’s implore the Holy Spirit to keep us in grace and remove those artificial obstacles, habits, and ways of thinking that prevent us from living fully in and for Christ. Let’s also listen to the exhortation of Paul:  “Walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.  If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit” (Gal 5:16, 25).

 

 THE FEAST OF ASCENSION [B]  (Acts 1:1-11; Eph 1:17-23 or 4:1-13; Mk 16:15-20)

Today, we are celebrating the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. The Ascension marks the completion of Jesus' earthly and bodily presence on earth.  Jesus had to return to his Father so that he could send the Holy Spirit to make his work continue in and through his disciples.

The feast of the Ascension is not about the departure of Jesus somewhere above us, but, rather, about the ways that the Lord is present among us, helping us to share in his work of proclaiming the gospel everywhere. How do we proclaim the gospel? We do so not so much by our words but by our lives.

 Rebecca Pippert, the author of Out of the Salt Shaker: Into the World, tells of a time she was sitting in her car at a traffic light with her window rolled down. As the light turned green a car drove by and its occupant threw something into her car hitting her on the cheek. It didn’t hurt but she was so startled that she pulled over immediately. When she unrolled the paper, she discovered it was a Gospel tract. She says she was the apparent victim of what she refers to as “torpedo evangelism.” —the torpedoer meant well. But he or she did the wrong thing for the right reason in the wrong way. We can engage people in conversation about their Faith and their relationship with God in a non-judgmental manner. We can encourage. We can invite. We can offer counsel. But we leave the hard work, the heart work, up to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

It is through the Holy Spirit that the risen Lord works among us and within us to enable us to become fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself. Today’s feast is very closely related to next Sunday’s feast, the feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. The period after the resurrection, when the risen Lord was present to his first disciples in visible, bodily form, had to come to an end before he could be present to disciples of every generation, to us today, in and through the Holy Spirit.

In the first reading, it is said that the risen Lord was lifted up while the disciples looked on, and after he was lifted up, they were ‘staring into the sky’. It is as if they did not want the visual connection between themselves and the Lord to end. They peered after him, anxious to see him and to know that he saw them. After the crucifixion they thought they would never see him again; then he appeared to them in bodily form, although in a transformed state. Now, that period of his visible risen presence to them was coming to an end, he took his leave of them again. According to that first reading, while they were staring into the sky, two men in white put the question to them, ‘Why are you men from Galilee standing here looking into the sky?

The question that the two men ask in our first reading today suggests that the disciples were looking in the wrong direction if they wanted to see the Lord. They won’t see him standing there, looking into the sky. They will have to look elsewhere to see the Lord. The Lord remains visibly present to his disciples, although in a different way from how he was visibly present immediately after his resurrection. The second reading suggests where the disciples need to look to continue seeing the Lord. That reading makes reference to the Body of Christ, the church. According to that reading, when the Lord ascended, he gave gifts to his followers. ‘Each of us’ - in the words of Paul - ‘has been given his or her own share of grace, given as Christ has allotted it’. Because of the Lord’s return to God, we have each been greatly graced and gifted through the sending of the Spirit. The sending of the Spirit and the gifts that accompanied the Spirit’s sending brought into being the Body of Christ, of which we are all members through faith and baptism. It is above all in and through his Body, the Church, that the risen Lord is present and visible in the world. Rather than looking up into the sky to see and meet the risen Lord, we are invited to look towards the members of Christ’s body. We, the baptized, are all called to be the sacrament of Christ, the place where Christ is powerfully present in the world.

Though, the Lord was taken up, was taken away, yet he was working with them. The Lord did not ascend to distance himself from the church, but to be closer to the church. Again, St. Paul understood this very clearly as a result of his meeting with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. After persecuting the church with great zeal, the risen Lord appeared to him and asked him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ In persecuting the church, Saul came to realize that he was persecuting the Lord because, as today’s gospel says, the Lord was working with those who were witnessing to him. Today’s feast then is more about presence than about absence. We celebrate the Lord’s presence in the church. His Spirit has been poured into our hearts and, together, we are his body.

We pray on this feast of the Ascension that we would be faithful to the task that the Lord has given us, and that we would come to recognise the ways the Lord is working with us as we seek to do that task.

 EASTER VI [B]: Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48; I Jn 4:7-10; Jn 15: 9-17

One of the greatest gifts in life is friendship. The Book of Sirach in the Old Testament declares, ‘A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter: whoever has found one has found a treasure. For many married people, their best friend is their spouse. All of us, hopefully, whether married or not, have a faithful friend, someone who loves us as we are, who listens to us when we need someone to share with, who stands by us in good times and in dark times. It is difficult to get through life without the love of a friend.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I call you friends.’ What Jesus says to them, he says to each one of us. He says that he reveals his friendship for us in two ways. Friends trust one another enough to share what is deepest in their hearts. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus says ‘I have made known to you, everything I have learned from my Father’. What was deepest in Jesus’ heart was his relationship with God, his Father, and he has shared that relationship with us. In the words of the second reading, he has revealed God to be Love. He hasn’t simply spoken to us about God’s love but has given expression to God’s unconditional love in his whole way of life and, especially, in his death. When we speak of God’s love as unconditional, we must understand that His love is not something that can be bought. It is not given to us as a quid pro quo, a reward for good behavior, or payment for some devotion or sacrifice which we have made to earn that love. St John asserts that God loved us while we were still sinners. His love for us is not dependent on us being righteous or worthy. No sacrifice or price we are willing to pay would be sufficient to purchase it. It is not fully true to say that God’s love makes no demands on us. In fact, a great deal is demanded of us. And here we have it in both the second reading and the gospel that God’s love challenges us to a new way of life that makes certain demands of us.

Firstly, we are required to obey and keep His commandments. His commandments are an expression of His will and our refusal to obey those commandments is rebellion against His will. To claim that we love God and yet oppose His will would be a lie.

Secondly, predominant among God’s commandments is the commandment to love others: “Love one another, as I have loved you.” This is the benchmark by which all love is to be measured. We do not just love those who have been good to us, who have treated us well, whom we are indebted to. Love extends even to those who have done nothing to deserve it, those outside our circle of friends and family, and even those whom we consider enemies. Of course, we are not commanded to “like”, as “liking” or “not liking” someone is purely subjective. True love is never subjective. To love, instead, is to intend the well-being of the other person. And this is something that can be accomplished and measured objectively. This is why St John can argue that “Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.”


Jesus also says that he has befriended us in a complete way, ‘so that his own joy may be in us and our joy be complete’. The gift of true friendship is a blessing that always brings us joy. A faithful friend is one of the great joys of life. Jesus himself knew the joy of God his Father’s friendship. By befriending us, he wants us to share in his joy. By loving us as God loves him, he wants us to know a joy that nothing in this world can give us, a joy that is complete. We can seek happiness in all kinds of places, but true joy, a joy that is deeply rooted and lasting, is found when we open ourselves up to the gift of the Lord’s faithful friendship. We will only fully experience the joy Jesus speaks about in eternal life when we will be fully opened up to God’s love, but here and now Jesus wants us to begin to experience this joy by receiving the gift of his friendship.

 

The primary way we remain in Jesus’ loving friendship is by allowing his faithful love to flow through us and embrace the lives of others. We are to love one another as he loves us, to find ways of befriending one another as he has befriended us. Jesus poured out on us the love he received from God his Father, and we are to pour out on others the love we receive from Jesus. When this happens, then our joy will be complete. May the risen Lord who commanded his disciples to love one another as he had loved them give us the grace to love others as he loves us without counting the cost.

 

 

 

 EASTER V [B]:  Acts 9:26-31; 1Jn 3:18-24; Jn 15:1-8

 

We live in an age that tends to put a high value on independence. We like to feel that we have our destiny in our own hands. One of the aspects of reaching old age that can trouble us is the prospect of losing our independence. We want to be as independent as possible for as long as possible. Yet, we are also aware that independence is a relative thing. We know that we depend on each other in all kinds of ways all through life. We are totally dependent on others at the beginning of life, and, probably, for many of us, at the end of life as well. In between the beginning and end of life, we never escape fully from that dependency on others.

The gospel strongly proclaims our ultimate dependence on God, and also our dependence on each other, because one of the primary ways that God is present to us is through each other. The first Christians had a stronger sense of this than we do of their dependence on one another, if they were to become all that God was calling them to be. In today’s first reading, Luke describes a moment in Paul’s early life as a Christian when he was very dependent on one person in particular, Barnabas. Paul had only recently changed from being one of the most zealous persecutors of the church to being one of its most enthusiastic missionaries. He very much wanted to join the community of disciples in Jerusalem but, given his former reputation, they were all afraid of him and kept him at a distance. It took Barnabas to convince everyone that Paul was a changed person. Paul would go on to be a much more significant person in the early church than Barnabas. Yet, he was completely dependent on Barnabas to create that initial opening for him.

When Jesus says, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches’, he is addressing all the baptized. He is speaking about the very deep communion that he wants to have with each one of us, in virtue of our baptism. When we look at a fully grown vine, it can be hard to know where the stem ends and where the branches begin. Jesus was very familiar with vines; there were plenty of them in Galilee. He saw in the intimate relationship between the stem of the vine and its branches an image of the relationship he wanted to have with each of us and wanted each of us to have with him. He doesn’t say, ‘I am the vine and now you must become the branches’, but rather, ‘I am the vine and you are the branches’. He has taken the initiative to enter into this relationship with us and he will never take back his initiative. Our calling is to remain in that relationship which he has initiated with us. In the gospel reading, he calls on us to remain in him, as branches need to remain on the vine. Another way Jesus expresses this call in the gospel reading is, ‘Make your home in me, as I make mine in you’. The Lord has chosen to make his home in us, through the Holy Spirit, and now he calls on us to make our home in him.

What Jesus is doing in today’s gospel reading is reminding us that what is essential in our faith is nurturing our relationship with him, so that we can live off the sap that flows from him, just as the branches of the vine live off the sap that flows from the roots of the vine up into the stem. We might be tempted to think that a close union with Jesus is only for saints and mystics. It is a privilege that is granted to us all. Jesus knew that only our close communion with him would make it possible for us to live his life, which is a life of loving service to others. This is the fruit that Jesus speaks about in the gospel reading. ‘Whoever remains in me, with me in them, bears fruit in plenty’. Only a branch united to the vine can produce grapes and only if we are united to the Lord through faith can our lives bear the fruit of the Lord’s love.

 

It is normal for a vine to be pruned. There is nothing exceptional about the work of pruning. It is part and parcel of the life of a healthy vine, because there is always some part of the vine that needs pruning. Similarly, with our own lives, there is always a sense in which something in us needs to be pruned if we are to become all that God is calling us to be. One day, Michelangelo walking through a garden in Florence saw a block of marble in a corner protruding from the earth, half covered by grass and mud. He stopped suddenly, as if he had seen someone, and turning to friends, who were with him, exclaimed: "An angel is imprisoned in that marble; I must get him out." And, armed with a chisel, he began to work on that block until the figure of a beautiful angel emerged. God also looks at us and sees us this way: as shapeless blocks of stone. He then says to himself: "Therein is hidden a new and beautiful creature that waits to come out to the light; more than that, the image of my own son Jesus Christ is hidden there, I want to bring it out!" We are predestined to "be conformed to the image of his son" (Romans 8:29).

For the branches to bear fruit, being attached to the vine is not the only essential prerequisite, pruning is just as essential as well. A gardener understands that he needs to prune in order to help the plant realize its full potential. Through pruning, growth that is dead or dying is removed, the size and quality of the fruit are improved, and new fruit is encouraged to develop. Recognizing that unless we allow ourselves to be pruned, we may end up being barren or stagnant, let’s pray for the grace to receive and accept pruning without grumbling and stay united with the vine producing the expected fruit.  

 EASTER IV [B] SUNDAY: Acts 4:8-12; I Jn 3:1-2; Jn 10:11-18 

The fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. It is also the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. Each year on this Sunday we reflect on the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, devotedly taking care of his flock.   In the past, we tended to restrict the term ‘vocation’ to the priesthood and the religious life. Yet, everyone in the church has a vocation, and, today, we are invited to reflect a little on the different ways in which we have each been given a vocation. Each of us is called by God. We all find ourselves standing before the call of God.

The particular way the Lord calls us and works through us will be unique to each one of us. I can do something for the Lord that only I can do. Each one of us has a unique contribution to make to the work of the Lord in the church and in the world, and that contribution is just as important as anyone else’s contribution. We each have a unique vocation and each vocation is equally significant. When we each respond to our own unique vocation, we are supporting others in their response to the unique call of the good shepherd to them.

The theme that the Pope has chosen for this Vocation Sunday is ‘vocation to service’. Each one of us, in different ways, has been given the vocation to service. In his message for this Vocations Sunday the Pope reminds us that Jesus is the perfect model of the ‘servant’. He is the one who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. In the words of today’s gospel reading, he is the good shepherd who lays down his life for his flock. All that he received from God he gave to others, he gave for others. This is at the heart of our own vocation to service too. All that we have and all that we are we have received from God, and we are called to place what we have received at the service of others.

The Pope in his message for this Vocations Sunday states that service is possible for everyone, through gestures that seem small, but, are, in reality, great, if they are animated by sincere love. The ways in which we live out our vocation to service can often be small and hidden. We give something of ourselves in service to someone. What we give may seem insignificant – a listening ear, a word of encouragement, a small gesture of some kind, what the gospel calls in one place a ‘cup of cold water’. We don’t have to think of service in terms only of the big commitment, the huge undertaking, or the absorbing task. It is in that relatively small space that most of our vocation to service is to be lived. The way we live out our vocation to service in that space will not make headlines, and may never become known beyond a small circle. Yet, as the Pope says in his message, when interpersonal relationships are inspired by mutual service a new world is created.  

In the gospel reading Jesus says that he is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. Perhaps one of the reasons why the image appealed to Christians from earliest times is because it conveyed something of the personal nature of the relationship between Jesus and his followers. The image of the good shepherd carrying the straying sheep on his shoulders conveys a sense of the close personal connection that the shepherd has with his individual sheep. He declares that he knows his own and his own know him, just as the Father knows him and he knows the Father. It is an extraordinary statement to make. Jesus is saying that the relationship that he has with each one of us is as intimate as the very personal relationship that he has with his heavenly Father. Jesus knows us as intimately as the Father knows him. When it comes to the Lord we are not just one of a crowd, lost in a sea of faces. In a way that we will never fully understand, the Lord knows each one of us by name. We only really know those we love. It is because the Lord loves each of us so completely that he knows each of us so fully. Saint Paul expresses this conviction in his letter to the Galatians saying, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’. We can each make our own those words of Saint Paul.

 

The first reading declares that the stone that was rejected by the builders proved to be the keystone. There is a clear reference there to Jesus himself. He was the rejected one who became the keystone of a new family, the church. There is a sense in which the Lord sees each of us as the keystone for some aspect of his mission. We are all key to the Lord’s work, and he calls each of us by name from the first moment of our conception to share in that work. On this Vocations Sunday let’s commit ourselves anew to hearing and responding to the call of the good shepherd. With trust and confidence, let’s join the psalmist in praying: The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.