Reflection on Matthew 10: 7-15

Why would we want to rock the boat when we can just enjoy the ride?

As Christians, we are called to become God's prophets - witnesses to and bearers of His Good News. However, being a prophet is no walk in the park since one is bound to disturb comfort zones in order to present better possibilities and broader horizons, or as Fr. Jerry Orbos puts it, "to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."

Moreover, there are problems more intractable than the challenges of changing hearts like say, the formidable task of dealing with frozen hearts.

So what are we to do?

In such circumstance, Jesus tells us, in today's Gospel, never to give up on people despite the fact that there will always be moments that people may not be willing or not yet ready to move forward with us. We are not to badger, or get angry or to condemn them but just to move on - to hold these people in prayer, to hope for the future, to commend them into God's hands and let go.

Reflection on John 10:31-42

In today’s gospel we would hear Jesus make a bold assertion on his divinity – of the unity of his holy human nature with the one Person of the Word, equal to the Father, and one entity with Him. The religious Jews to whom this assertion was addressed understood it as a blasphemy that, driven in their anger, they wanted to stone Jesus to death.

Same is true with the fathers of our faith who were accused and persecuted because they chose to uphold Jesus’ assertion. Among them was Saint Basil who said, “For two charges at the same time are made in the accusation against me. One, that I separate the Persons, and the other, that I never employ in the plural any of the names appropriate to God but speak in the singular, of one Goodness, one Power, one Godhead, and all the others similarly.”

Oftentimes, we are driven with maddening frustration and anger whenever we could not provide rational explanations or contain feelings, events or phenomena into the limited confines of letters or words, more so, of our intellect. However, Jesus implied, in the preceding lines before this assertion, a different kind of “knowing” in order for us to embrace his divinity. A kind of knowing that stems from deep love of and for God, an unwavering faithfulness to His promise and a generous self-surrender to Him. Just like in the case of Abraham, who according to Pope Paul VI, “rejoiced at the thought of seeing the Day of Christ, the Day of Salvation: he ‘saw it and was glad.’

Reflection on Mark 6:7-13

This week’s gospel readings have been showing different manifestations of faith: faith in the promise of salvation; faith that heals and even conquers death; the lack of faith from among the people in Jesus’ hometown; and today, on faith journey.

The global financial crisis has thrown some of us into the widening morass of anxiety and helplessness. The sense of losing our grip amidst the deluge of issues on unemployment, corruption, bankruptcy, hunger and homelessness has left some of us bereft of hope for a better future. What we cannot calculate, what we cannot fathom, what we cannot control easily unnerve us.

Perhaps the readings for this week have been designed as such so as to that we will be reminded the quintessential elements of faith trust and dependence, of letting go and letting God while urging us to continue His saving mission just like when He summoned the twelve apostles. His missionary work of anointing the sick and driving out demons which he bequeathed to the disciples and to us comes with a promise that by not taking additional provisions for our journey we are to expect that He would constantly watch over us and would provide for all our needs. He also reminded us to travel in pairs so as to avoid isolation that breeds spiritual pride and that a shared faith journey is far more enriching because of the reciprocity of talents and gifts between two persons.

In short, our faith journey requires more of unpacking than packing … “of emptying our self of everything that distracts us from God” as Henri Nouwen puts it, since in anything and everything that we are faced with, God alone is and will always suffice.