The Spirit of Understanding and Forgiveness

Jn 20:19-23

Pentecost Sunday – Year B

The narration of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is found very vividly in the Acts of the Apostles. The tongues of fire, the thunder, and the wind create a dramatic background of Pentecost. These images have their symbolic roots in the Old Testament. Very often stumbling on the dramatic narrative the actual miracle fails to get sufficient attention. The central phenomenon is the newfound ability of the timid and scared apostles to confidently speak to a large crowd of varied languages in their Galilean accented Aramaic and the gift of the crowd to understand them in their own familiar languages. The message of their preaching is the Ascension mandate, repentance, and forgiveness through the risen Christ. With the outpouring of the Holy Spirit the apostles are infused with an understanding of the realities with clarity and their fear disappears, and the Ascension mandate gets a newer dimension and purpose.

The message transcends the chaos of many languages of the gathered crowd and everyone gets the message without confusion. It is important to recall here the Old Testament narrative of the tower of Babel (Gen 11: 1-9).  The project to defy God is represented by the tower of Babel. It was disrupted when God so confused their languages that they could not understand each other and the God-defying-project came to a halt. During the Pentecostal event, God gathers back his people scattered in the Babel project and begins the reconstruction of humanity by unifying them in a language of repentance and forgiveness under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The miracle is not about the ability of people to understand a language but the ability of people to understand one another. One of the foundational human tragedies is failing to understand others as one’s brothers, sisters, and neighbors. Its antidote is to develop a spirituality of understanding one another. It is this understanding that can bring all humans together.

There was an attempt to begin a language called Esperanto. After nearly a 100 years of promotion, only about two hundred thousand people speak the language now. The idea was that it would be easier for international communities to understand each other if they had one language. The language failed to capture the imagination of people because the disruption and chaos in the world are not about language but about a quality of the mind to understand others. It is this understanding that the Pentecost inaugurated.

The gospel passage we read today from John describes the outpouring of the Spirit immediately after the resurrection. After he breathes his Spirit into them, Jesus empowers them, “whose sins you forgive will be forgiven and whose sins you retain will be retained.” This passage is often misinterpreted as allowing a certain discretionary power to the disciples to cast people into the status of sin. The text has to be interpreted as the continuation of the topic of forgiveness that Jesus speaks. These are the disciples who have learned from Jesus to forgive without limits. He taught them that if you do not forgive others their sins, you will block your own forgiveness from God the Father. The invitation to the disciples is not to let any sin remain without being forgiven, rather to reach the whole world and forgive their sins. The hidden message there is if you cannot reach out to the last person in the world to forgive sins, this person lives in the pain of sinfulness. The forgiveness of sins is to be understood as an essential part of baptizing.

A forgiven sin loses its sting to hurt the one who is wronged and the one who does wrong. The key to annihilate sin is forgiveness.

The Ascent

Mk 16:15-20

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord – Year B

We are celebrating the ascension, remembering the ascent of Jesus Christ to heaven. The gospel however begins with the invitation to proclaim the gospel to every creature. The reference of preaching to every creature is an invitation to consider the whole creation and not only humans as beneficiaries of the gospel. Accordingly, we’d better have a review of the strategy of protecting only what is useful to humans and destroying what is not useful. That approach to creation will end up in exhausting what is useful and eliminating what is not useful, ending up in the loss of both. Let the gospel be good news to all creatures.

The signs of the kingdom accompanying the disciples are interestingly taken from nature. If a snake bites, it does not harm them. The tempting venom of the snake in the creation story is what brought death to Adam and Eve. In the new kingdom, the snakes will not hold a venom strong enough to kill the disciples, nor will any poison be strong enough to destroy them. This alludes to how the proclamation of the gospel is also the restoration of the harmony of the universe.

Mistaking the preaching of the gospel to an act of persuasive oratory exercise is a misconception. Jesus defines gospel as the good news of liberation to the poor, to those have become captive to sin, vision to the sightless (Lk 4:16-20). The gospels contain that liberative force and its preaching should be its liberating force in action. It includes a new vision of the whole creation based on the gospel values.

At the ascension scene, the evangelist Matthew notes that Jesus promises his accompaniment with the disciples until the end of times. It is contradictory to read that the one who leaves says that he is not leaving. So the purpose of the ascent is to be present always. Ascension, then, does not refer to a relocation but a new way of relationship of Jesus with the Father and a new way of presence in the world until the end. The limitations that the mortal body and a location imposed on Jesus were shed forever to live and accompany his disciples to the end of times.

I personally understood this presence when my dad died. It was sudden and no amount of consoling was sufficient to soothe my grieving heart. It was then that Fr. Mathew, the Superior General of our Congregation, visited me. He asked me to think of the death of my father not as a permanent absence. He said, “He has left you, but he is closer to you now than ever.” That is true. I never had to make a phone call since then to get his advice. He is closer to me even after 14 years of his death. I discuss with him in my imaginary space any difficult decisions I have to take.

The feast of the ascension also calls for our own ascent out of what limits our full living. The earth and its cares, the body and its desires are not bad by themselves. But the cares of the body and things that are near and close to us lock us into a certain prison of self-seeking behavior.

Sometimes we identify this small world of ours as the final horizon of our lives. The feast of the ascension invites us to breach the ceiling of our prejudices and belief systems that trap us into a small world. Once we break the ceiling, we are able to see the sky of divine possibilities and of living our life to the full.

Ascending to Divine Love

Jn 15:9-17

6th SUNDAY OF EASTER – Year B

Today’s gospel passage is the continuation of the exhortation of Jesus on love. Jesus makes a logical sequence to arrive at the foundational principle of his kingdom as love. The letter of Saint John we read today is a commentary to the gospel, in which he explains love is of God and makes a crescendo in that sequence to tell that God is love.

It is very difficult to define what love is. Saint Paul instead tries to explain what love does and does not do in 1 Corinthians 13. Because of the complexity of this emotion, many states of mind get passed as love. Someone who likes an object, a scenery, a poem, an animal uses the verb love for what they feel. Even an infatuated attraction to a person also is passed as love. A lion caring for its cub is also depicted as love, A man dying while saving a stranger is also called love. The spectrum swings from plain aesthetics to sacrificial death. All these are sparks of the love of God. However, growing into the maturity of divine love invites us to go through a process of apprenticing in the values of Christ. Love in its purest form is God.

Let us try to sequence the spectrum of love that Jesus speaks about.

Instinctual love
This is the love that a mother shows its offspring. Even animals are able to do this. Sometimes animals show this instinct more strongly than humans. This is more protective love towards those who are connected to the parent by blood relationships. Jesus expresses this connectedness with the concern of the hen for her chicks (Mt 23:37).

Social love: love those who love you
This is love by affinity. You have a special preference to people of the same place, members of the same family, between brothers and sisters, with spouses, and the like. We build communities based on this affinity. This is also common to many animals that live in groups. Listen to what Jesus speaks of this love, “What good is it if you love only those who love you….even sinners do this” (Lk 6:32).

Higher love: do not hate those who hate you
“If you know that someone has a grievance against you, leave your offering, get reconciled first” (Mt 5:23-24).

Still higher love: forgive those who hurt you
“Love your enemies. Forgive those who persecute you” (Mt 5: 43).

Highest human love: die for your friends
“The greatest human love: give your life to save your friends” (Jn 15: 13).

Divine love
“Sinners as we were, he gave his life” (Rom 5: 8). This becomes divine love not because only God can do it, but that our process of living in Christ begins when we are able to do it.

When the disciples are able to love like Jesus, he calls them his friends and not slaves. The usage of slave causes not a little discomfort to read it in this context. Did Jesus consider the disciples before this as slaves? No! that is an uncalled for interpretation. We understand that usage of slaves only when we read closely the words of the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son. The elder brother tells, “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders” (Lk. 15: 29). The feeling of the elder son, the representative of Pharisaism and the Old Covenant, for obeying his father’s commandments is that of a slave. Whereas those who obey the commandment of Jesus is that of a friend. The change that happens to the community of the followers of Jesus is that of a movement from slavery to the laws to the freedom of love.

The gospel passage is also the conclusion on the allegory of the vine and branches, and Jesus concludes it by saying to bear fruits that will last. Jesus is alluding to the possibility or experience of fruits that are temporary, or people who make conversions that are very emotional and fleeting, and later fail to sustain it. A conversion becomes permanent only if it is coincided with an ideological and spiritual ascent to the practice of divine love.

Pruning Until We Can Produce Fruits of Love

Jn 13:1-8

5th SUNDAY OF EASTER – Year B

The gospel today invites a reflection on the vine and the branches. Like the shepherd’s image we meditated on last Sunday, another metaphor that Israel identifies themselves with is that of the vine. They have in their memories Psalm 80 that says, “You brought a vine out of Egypt,” or the lamentation of Yahweh in Isaiah 5 as unforgettable to the listeners of Jesus. This metaphor has been ingrained in their consciousness that it is sometimes difficult for the Israelites to distinguish the metaphor from the real.

Israel was the prized vine of Yahweh. The metaphor indicates a unique and intimate relationship between Yahweh and Israel. In this image Jesus is establishing that he is the stem of that vine and his disciples are branches indicating that he desires to establish an even more intimate relationship with his disciples, the new Israel. Sharing the same trunk and sap of the vine is similar to what Jesus speaks about eating and drinking his flesh and blood. When we read this metaphor with the metaphors that he used about his body and blood in parallel, we understand the full import of what Jesus is explaining in a mystical way—the desire of God to live with us, or even more, to live in us.

Vine-and-branches is an elaborate metaphor, or more accurately, an allegory. If we do not decipher all the parts of this allegory, we might lose important messages. The components of these allegory are: vine, branches, fruits, abiding, pruning, burning, vine dresser, branches that do not give fruits, and branches that do bear fruit. Most of the components of the allegory, Jesus himself clarifies. The vine is Jesus. The disciples are the branches. The Father is the vine dresser. He prunes the branches in order to bear much fruit. The ones that he prunes and removes will be burned. One verb he uses throughout the allegory is “abide in.” So there are two components of this allegory that we need in order to understand deeper the rest of this allegory. What does it mean to abide in him and bear fruit?

We are used to living in houses or boarding houses. But how do we live in a person? In the passage that follows after today’s reading, Jesus explains that living in him is equal to living in his love. How do we exactly live in love? He continues to say, obeying his commandment is the way to live in his love. What is his commandment? Later he would say, “This commandment I give to you, love one another.” Loving others is the golden rule for me to live in Christ and Christ in me. This logical sequence of the elements makes the philosophical foundation of his kingdom.

The metaphor of “bearing much fruit” has then something do with loving, with acts of charity. Acts of love and mercy are the fruits of love. All the pruning the Father invites us to go through in us are for us to become fruitful with acts of love! It is in this context that we can clearly understand the pruning. The Father is not using clippers and cutters to prune us. It is the voice of the Father in the gospel that challenges our tendencies that go against the virtue of love, that prunes our plans that do not produce acts of charity and compassion. So pruning is a process of discernment and judgment of values and practices that we maintain against the gospel value of selfless love, and the painful process of cutting them away from our life. Whatever is there in us that is against love should be annihilated.

A Shepherd Who Smells Like the Sheep

Jn 10:11-18

4th SUNDAY OF EASTER – Year B

The Good Shepherd Sunday takes us to the gospel of the allegory of the good shepherd and the sheepfold. Israel has such an inalienable connection to this metaphor of the shepherd that sometimes it is difficult to extricate the real from the symbolic. With very few exceptions, the heroes of Israel were all shepherds. Abraham was a shepherd, Moses was one, so were Jacob, Saul and David. That socio-economic activity of their celebrated ancestors has left a linguistic and cultural imprint on Israel.

After he treacherously killed his soldier Uriah and committed adultery with his wife, the most accomplished king of Israel, David would be challenged with an allegory of shepherding by prophet Nathan (2 Sam. 12). David’s action was narrated in a parable as a shepherd who had killed the only lamb of the neighbor when he had his own large herd of sheep. David makes amends for his mistake but the parable of Nathan stays so embedded in Israel’s psyche that non-Jewish reader will meet with unfathomable cultural depths.

The Old Testament celebrates the metaphor of the shepherd many times. But none can match the pastoral song of the psalmist who sings, “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.” With Jesus pronouncing ‘I am the good shepherd’ this psalm gets new nuances. The Lord mentioned in the Psalm is ‘I AM’ = Yahweh. Remember, that this is one of the seven I AM statements of Jesus. Israel is also familiar with a prophesy from Jeremiah 3:15 which says, “I will give you shepherds after my own heart.” These all too familiar Old Testament writings are replayed in the mind of every Israelite when Jesus speaks about himself as the good shepherd.

The usage of the term ‘good’ in the phrase is heavily loaded evocative of the complaint of Yahweh about bad shepherds and the promise of the shepherds after His own heart in Jeremiah. When Jesus explains the nature of the bad shepherds in the subsequent verses and contrasts with that of the good shepherd, the connotations to the Old Testament become sharper.

The most touching sentence in this allegory is the phrase, “I am the door. No one goes in or out except through me.” It is difficult to make sense of a person becoming the door. We know that in those days, the shepherds used to take turns to guard the entrance of the make shift pen at night, by lying across it, becoming a door in effect. No animal can enter in without stamping on him nor can a sheep get out without walking over him. Jesus uses this practice of the shepherds to tell, how he will protect his sheep giving his life for them. Jesus narrates how intimate is the connection he has with the Church and the faithful, knowing each one personally, by name and traits. Oh! How many journeys I have undertaken walking over his heart, sometime breaking and bruising the shepherd! How many return journeys of repentance have I made to that welcoming heart, after I have wasted away all the blessings I received?

More recently, the image of the ‘the shepherd’ who smells like the sheep, resurfaced with new force in the Church with Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium. In that image is an invitation to all shepherds to become closer to the sheep. Getting closer to the sheep will require for the pastors to break down many intimidating infrastructures and even some structures.

The metaphor of the shepherd who smells like the sheep brought to my mind an Indian regional language film named ‘Goat Days.’ This biographical survival drama of a man who went to Saudi Arabia in search of a job depicts how he was forced to a pen to mend the sheep. His constant life with the sheep made him eat, drink and sleep like the sheep. He almost became a sheep, in his habits of life just as the title suggests. The Lord asks the shepherds to develop a close familiarity with all the sheep that they tend; to share their joys, sorrows and anxieties.

Finally, the gospel makes an invitation to everyone to become good shepherds as well. We are always living two roles simultaneously as sheep and shepherds. We are sons and fathers, daughters and mothers, child and a brother or sister at the same time. Whoever is given the responsibility to protect another is a shepherd. Who among us can claim to be not responsible for another? All of us are responsible for one another and so, all of us are shepherds in one way or another. It is important to assume the role of the sacrificing and caring role of the shepherds even as we are sheep in the fold of Jesus.

Opening Minds to a New Paradigm of Thinking

Lk 24:35-48

3rd SUNDAY OF EASTER – Year B

The gospel passage begins with the narration of the excited Emmaus disciples about their long-time encounter with the Lord. As they were talking, Jesus appears in their midst, and encounters the disciples who did not know how to make sense of the nature of the figure of Jesus that they were seeing. The Risen One had a special nature that they were not familiar with. He could enter closed doors but had a corporeality to his spiritual body. He was eating with them.

It is a phenomenon that they were seeing for the first time, they did not have categories to understand it, much less explain. So they were startled, terrified, and doubted. They had seen Jesus raising Lazarus. But they knew for sure that he returned with a body that would perish again. There was a certain difference that they could not comprehend with the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus explained to them the reality of his new glorified body. Scripture scholars tell us that this was a way of writing that Luke used to convince the Greek believers and otherwise of the reality of the resurrection.

Jesus is seen convincing the scared and doubtful disciples of the reality of the resurrection. The resurrection is the greatest evidence for the project of announcing repentance and God’s forgiveness of sins. That project is supposed to be announced to “all the nations” of the earth. And it had to begin with these doubting disciples. So Jesus makes extraordinary efforts to invite the disciples to faith. Jesus “opens their minds” just as he had done this “opening of minds” to the Emmaus disciples to understand the scriptures.

Opening of mind requires us to learn new categories of thinking, a whole new paradigm of thinking which is very difficult for us to master. Jesus has a peculiar way of achieving this goal. He starts with individuals, changing their convictions. It does not begin like a mass movement. Jesus begins a change by changing the minds of just a few disciples. Jesus does that to Saint Paul on his way to Damascus. Then the story started rolling on about resurrection, repentance, and the forgiveness of sins. This communication was from heart to heart that breached the borders of nations and epochs. That message is still spreading. We can easily relate the expansion of this message like the spread of the corona virus. It started from an animal and spread to humans in a corner of China, and now the virus has spread to all over the world in spite of all efforts to contain its spread.

Humanity is beginning to learn that large scale changes can be made by making minutest tweaks in the fundamental engineering of things. Even the Covid-19 vaccines are little protein codes that program our bodies to produce antibodies to fight the virus. Likewise, a little change in what we believe and in whom we believe can change the whole perspective and direction of our life.

In fact, God has always used this method. In the Old Testament, we see God, getting just one man to believe in his projects. He called an old and sterile Abraham to believe in a promise to have children as many as the stars of heaven and the sand on the seashore. And that promise was fulfilled. He calls Noah to believe in building a boat in a place where there was not even a pool of water! Yahweh invites Moses, a stammering man to stand up to the mighty power of Pharaoh and speak to him face to face and lead a multitude out of slavery. God makes great things happen by changing the categories of thinking of one person!

Ultimately, it is important that we absorb the message of the resurrection. In the name of the Risen One, repentance and the forgiveness of sins is preached to all the nations, and to me personally as well. The Risen One is giving me peace and forgiveness, liberating me to a freedom of the child of God. If I am liberated to this new faith, I will start a movement too…

The Stories We Tell to the Next Generation

Jn 20:19-31

2nd SUNDAY OF EASTER – Year B

The gospel today presents two apparitions of Jesus to the Sunday (the first day of the week) community of the disciples. The resurrection of Christ had begun to gather the dispersed disciples back into their group, who had dispersed when Jesus was arrested. Most of them disappeared in ways that could have offended the leader who moved and lived with them for three years. One of them betrayed him, the senior most among them had denied him three times. But the risen Christ has given them only peace and joy. There was no sign of condemnation to the disciples who had deserted him. The overwhelming feeling of being forgiven was enough to gather them together into a community.

A community—the Church—was being formed around the resurrection and forgiveness. A memorable scene from the movie “2012” is about how we build a new world, a new community. Adrian, the scientist, challenges the politicians’ decisions to exclude the people who worked to build the safety ships for the flood times from entering those ships. He asks, “If we start our future with an act of cruelty, what will we tell our children and their children?” His intervention would finally change the mind of the politicians to accept the poor people into the ship. What is important is how we build a new community of the resurrection. What are the stories we tell to the next generation?

Jesus began a narrative with the story of forgiveness for sure. And he wanted that the disciples also tell this story to their next generation. So the risen Lord offers peace, first of all to their troubled hearts. He also wants the disciples to start the new community with a deep conviction of hope and resurrection. We will find Jesus also replacing the sad story of the Emmaus disciples with one of hope and resurrection.

Jesus also builds them into a community of strong faith that can witness to the resurrection. So he allays the doubts of the disciples about the fact of the resurrection. Not all the disciples believed in the resurrection (Mt 28:17). Saint John pictures Thomas, the apostle, as the symbol of all doubting disciples. Thomas refuses to believe unless he touches the wounded side of Christ. Jesus invites him to do exactly that, to touch and believe. His obstinacy vanishes and makes his confession of faith, “My Lord and my God.” He actually believes without touching though many paintings show that Thomas touched. Well, they are not scriptural. The invitation to all who doubt is to gather with those who have experience of the Lord (the Church), and you will believe without seeing.

While the disciples were involved in a story of resurrection and hope, the temple authorities were crafting another story of the theft of the body and the failure of the soldiers’ watchfulness. They developed a story founded on lies. In fact, our societies keep spinning stories about themselves and others continuously. Some stories are founded on lies and others on hatred. There are others who evolve stories of care, love, and compassion. It is significant to be conscious of the stories that we use to narrate ourselves, and others use to narrate us. When we become part of the stories of hope and resurrection, we witness to the risen Christ.

Overcoming Death, the Most Painful Coercion Tool

Lk 24:1-12

EASTER SUNDAY – Year B

Easter Vigil presents one of the most dramatic situations in the gospels. The ladies who went to embalm the body suddenly find themselves in unbelievable situations. The heavy stone is rolled off, the body is not found, instead they find two angels telling them that he is alive now and is going to Galilee. From this empty tomb begins a saga of resurrection not only of Christ but also of those who followed him. The Church is built on the foundation of this evidence of resurrection, so much so, Saint Paul writes that if Christ is not risen, in vain is our faith.

With the resurrection, Christ overcomes the power of death. The greatest challenge of any living being is to overcome the fear of death. They have an instinct to preserve life. To overcome that natural tendency and walk into death need an even stronger instinct to preserve something more valuable than oneself. One of the most popular videos that the National Geographic Channel captured recently is of a baby deer and its mother. The mother looks painfully at the unruly baby jumping into the river. Then she sees a crocodile heading for the baby. She jumps into the river and throws herself to the jaws of the croc before it can reach her baby. There are some very natural instincts stronger than self-preservation and this mother deer exemplified it.

But Jesus was walking into death not by natural instinct but by choice. Debating death many times over in his mind, Jesus was fully convinced of the necessity of that redemptive act. The fiercest of the temptations came at the garden of Gethsemane where he was sweating blood to make a decision. He visualized his death many times over. Then he decides to die with an overwhelming love as he mentioned earlier; there is no greater love than to give one’s life for one’s friends. He had embraced the whole humanity as his friends including the ones that are crucifying him.

Death is the fiercest tool of coercion. An enemy uses our fear of death to manipulate our decisions. Many films use this technique to create a climax. If the victim chooses to die, suddenly the enemy becomes powerless. He has threatened the victims with the greatest possible pain, and when the victim chooses to embrace that pain, the enemy has no more tools to manipulate the victim’s values or decisions. Death lost its power since then. Oh! Death where is your sting! You have just become a stingless wasp! No one is afraid of you anymore! Jesus had taught that living the values of the Gospel, dying for LOVE is more worth than living. Martyrs walked that way happily, defeating the fear and power of death forever.

The resurrection also made the return of humans to paradise possible. The floodgates of love that were shut by greed and desire for power are now unleashed, and love has flooded every human heart that chooses to live by the gospel values. The one who dies believing in the Father’s plan will rise again. When Jesus rose again, not only his person but also the whole set of values that he had been teaching came back to life. All his teachings got validated by the fact of the resurrection.

The feast of the resurrection invites us to rejoice for Christ has triumphed over death. It also invites us to reflect on the need to conquer my worst fears and temptations. It is important now not to go back to the tomb where lies our dead sinful self, not to throw our risen selves with what is dead.

Happy Easter. Christ has risen. We have been raised too… Alleluia!

The Dramatic Unfolding of Prophecies

Lk 19:28-40

PALM SUNDAY – Year B

The gospel reading before the procession on Palm Sunday is always the royal entry of Jesus to Jerusalem although the main reading of the day is the passion narrative. The Jerusalem entry is the final backdrop for the capital punishment of Jesus.

It was the Passover season in Jerusalem. Jesus had travelled around 100 kilometers from Galilee with a large caravan of followers. In such pilgrimages, it is usual for the people of a village or town to go together. Moreover, Jesus had become an accepted leader of Galilee with a significant number of followers who accompanied him. Their arrival had become a spectacle in the eyes of the Jerusalemites.

About 20 years ago, another Galilean by the name of Judas had come to Jerusalem rebelling against Rome. The temple authorities had a vivid memory of how the Romans killed them and put down the rebellion. But Judas had left a philosophy with the Jews that they were to be ruled only by God. A large majority of the people might have been sympathizers of this idea. What the temple authorities knew very clearly was that if another uprising took place, the temple and everything sacred would be completely taken over by the Romans, and they were afraid that Jesus and team had a rebellion in mind!

Unlike the warrior kings who ride horses, Jesus enters the temple area on a humble colt. The full impact of the symbolism of the “king on the colt” will be understood only if we read it from the gospel of Mathew who refers to a donkey and a colt, not one animal but two. The text is directly taken from the book of Zechariah 9:9 where 2 animals are mentioned. The donkey and its offspring prefigure the Jewish religion and its offshoot, the Church. Jesus on the donkey will not only recall the prophecy of the Messiah arriving on a humble donkey but also a peaceful taking over of Jerusalem. The Jews of the time might be remembering this part of Zechariah’s prophecy by heart as the back of their palms as expectation about the arrival of the Messiah was rife in the air with the oppression of the Romans.

The previous verse (Zechariah 9:8) speaks of taking possession of the temple. So the drama played in the mind of the people around there was that Jesus was going to take over the temple forever from the Roman forces and the half-blood Jew, Herod, as well peacefully! He is arriving as the King of Peace. Reading the prophecies of Zechariah would bring out in glaring detail how the whole drama of the entry into Jerusalem, Jesus going to mount of Olives, and the conversations during the interrogations were the fulfilment of the prophecies of Zechariah, unfolding in their midst. Jesus was undoubtedly taken to be the Messiah by the people.

Giving this Messianic aura to Jesus was exactly what scared the chief priest and his company. Their conspiracy was to erase that concept altogether from the mind of the people. The attempt to put Jesus to the trial as a Galilean is also to put a doubt in the mind of the people that the Messiah was not supposed to come from Galilee. For the temple authorities, protecting the temple and the business was of supreme importance! The Messiah was not supposed to come at that time!

The people were expecting a physical takeover of Jerusalem by Jesus and beginning his rule from Jerusalem. Such would be the case when you read the prophecies of Zachariah literally. Even the disciples believed this physical taking over. It is in this context that we understand what the disciples were arguing about on their way to Jerusalem. Who would get the more important positions in the kingdom of Jesus? And the Zebedee brothers came with their mother to request for the most important places on the right and left of Jesus. They thought about a kingdom on earth, not a kingdom of heaven! Remember that Jesus was interrogated with that question if he was a king. Never had Jesus spoken about his kingship before. But the kingship came under interrogation exactly because of this prophecy that people were enacting with the entry of Jesus on the donkey. Jesus would break that expectation and teach Pilate a lesson on the heavenly kingdom.

The Jewish belief was that the Messiah would enter the temple mount from the East Gate (the Golden Gate) through which Jesus entered the temple on that day. This is a beautiful convergence of many Messianic prophecies. Remember, even the mention of Bethany which lies to the east of the city is to highlight the coming of the Messiah from the east!

A kingdom has some features. Most significantly, it has a king, some subjects, a territory, and laws and regulations to govern. In the case of the kingdom of God, we know clearly that Christ is the king. His territory is the whole universe and is not limited to the divisions on the face of the earth drawn by people. What we need to do to belong to his kingdom is to live by the laws of his kingdom, which most predominantly is love. He enlists into his kingdom those who are willing to DIE FOR LOVE.

Redemptive Suffering: A Grain Falls to Raise Many

Jn 12:20-33

5th Sunday of Lent – Year B

Jesus is in Jerusalem for the final time before the crucifixion. After the royal entry of Jesus, the leaders of Jerusalem are already plotting to suppress this possible Galilean uprising to keep the powers in balance and prevent a complete takeover by the Romans.

On his way to Jerusalem, Jesus had gone to the house of Lazarus where we find Judas, openly disagreeing with him about the perfume and arguing in the pretext of caring for the poor. The backdrop was getting fully set since then, and the characters in the final act of glorification were starting to take their roles.

In the Gospel passage today, we find the Greeks approaching Jesus through two apostles who, interestingly, bear Greek names. In this apparently insignificant visit of the Greeks, Jesus sees the future of his community unfolding. In their arrival, Jesus reads that the hour of his final act of redemption is set in motion. He realizes that he is no more just a Galilean leader; he is now in Jerusalem and the people who are coming in search of him are Greeks. The Greeks represent the non-Jewish people who will enter the community of his followers later. A border has been crossed; a boundary has been breached. He was going “global.” Then the voice comes from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” Jesus tells the Greeks; this voice came for their sake to confirm them that they had met the true God in their pilgrimage for the Passover Feast.

One of the “troubles,” rather an agony, that Jesus has is about the “glorification on the cross.” He is tempted to run away from it. He is debating aloud almost whether he would take up this pain on the cross or not. Then he resolves in public that he would go through the glorification process on the cross as he understands that his mission is tied up with that process. Then he makes his final prediction of the impending crucifixion. He compares that sacrifice to the fruitfulness of a grain of wheat that decays to give life to many grains. Unless he willingly offers himself to the decaying process (the torture and death), there will be no spiritual fruits. A whole spiritual edifice of redemptive suffering would be built on this foundational thought. Sufferings and pains can be made salvific!

One of the questions that would take us deep in thought is: Was the crucifixion an avoidable one? Did Jesus choose it, or was it a verdict by chance, or was it forced upon him? This gospel tells us very clearly that crucifixion was a choice taken by Jesus, and even Pilate was just playing a part in executing the choices made by God. It was the choice of Christ the King. The king decides. The earthly governors just execute! If that choice was not made by Jesus, then, the crucifixion of Jesus would have been like the ones of the two thieves on either side of Jesus. Crucifixion was a punishment given to them by the governor. In contrast, that voluntary decision made by Jesus to undertake the suffering is what made it salvific. For suffering to become salvific, it must be voluntary and for love!

A meditation on how Jesus lived courageously the values he preached and taught would greatly facilitate our Christian resolves. He decides it is worth dying for those values. His example would be emulated by many martyrs later, joyfully walking into death for the gospel values that they believed and lived. Jesus teaches us to spend our life not for what is worth living for but for what is worth dying for.