Making Friends With The Lord Jesus

We continue to follow Jesus in His growing tense confrontations with the Jews. They challenged His claims. They continue to be irrational in not seeing any connection between the evidence of His power to do what only God can do, and His open declaration that He is divine. Let us not separate Jesus' being divine and His being fully human. This is the miracle of the hypostatic union. Hypostatic...

Jesus continues in the gospel today to equate Himself with God. The Jews continue to resist Him and are adamant with their short-sighted views of Him.

The truth will set you free. If Jesus identifies Himself with the Truth--since He declared that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life--then, He is inviting us to be united to Him.

Today's gospel teaches us the parallel drawn by the Lord between what happened to the chosen people on their long journey to the promised land and what Jesus would do for them also centuries later. To save those bitten by the poisonous serpents during their long journey to the promised land, God instructed Moses to craft a serpent on a standard so that anyone bitten who looked at it would be s...

Jesus is the Light of the World. That assumes that there is darkness first. We need God to shed light on the world, events, natural mysteries, etc. Otherwise, it is so easy to get lost nowadays. There are other creatures peddling their own stuff on the Internet, for example. All of them selling to us their wares for us to buy into them, to imitate them, etc. so we can get a sense or hold of our li...

Truly, this gospel of today is one of the most moving in the life of Jesus. Are we to condemn the adulteress caught in the act of adultery? Off the cuff, we might say we would. It is so easy to condemn the others, to write them off, to focus on their weaknesses and faults, etc. Are we to be self-righteous in judging them, while we let ourselves off the hook so easily? The enemies of Jesus brought...

A division was forming among the crowd surrounding Jesus. On one hand, were those who opined that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah for the usual obvious reasons like His miracles and His teachings. On the other hand, we those who opined otherwise, principally based on the fact that scriptures declared that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. This Jesus was from Nazareth. They took this to me...

It is clear in the gospel of today's mass that His enemies were on the lookout for Him to arrest Him and bring Him to "justice." At least, that was what they had in mind. The text narrates His attending a big feast among the Israelites--the feast of the Tabernacles--. He went to Jerusalem to attend the festivities, but in a surreptitious manner. He did not want to push His luck, so t...

Jesus speaks to us in the gospel about His credibility. In the end, we need to believe Him and His teachings because He provides us with motives of credibility. He does not demand from us belief or faith, with no incentives or reinforcements to believe Him. He is worthy of our faith and trust because of these motives of credibility, such as the miracles He performs and the sublimity of His teachin...

God is the Supreme Being, and therefore, He is One. Inside God, there are three divine Persons, who are One God. Only one divine nature, but three divine Persons, possessing this one divine nature. In the gospel today, Jesus impresses on us His oneness with His Father. In their being, they are one. But more than that, Jesus teaches us, His followers, that we need to imitate this oneness with God....

We read in the gospel of today, Tuesday 01 April 2025, about one of the miracles of Jesus performed in the pool of Bethesda, near the Temple and the Sheep Gate. He pitied a man who has been ill for 38 years already and was there together with many other people with their respective maladies, waiting for the water of the pool to stir. The first one who is able to get to the pool would be cured. Jes...

There are many lessons in the gospel today. We read from St. John's Gospel about a court official who son needed to be healed so he would not die. He had gone to where Jesus was. Jesus was in Cana in Galilee, while the child was in Capernaum. Jesus performs this miracle from a distance, when He assured the official that his son was cured. In the versions of Matthew and Luke, they speak of a ce...

This is what is important. It is a pity how some people want and insist to want to live in the past. They do not want to think of the future and of what they could do. And in this matter, we need to because Jesus wants it. He lived it. He went through it. What is important is to live and to live again, if we have died, literally or figuratively. The end of the story is not that we have died. Chris...

To cure us of our most basic problem, Jesus came to teach us about by example. He always teaches in this manner. He does demand so much from us. He demands from Himself the same thing and He carries the brunt of it all. He treats our deepest wounds this way. In the gospel, He tells a story of two individuals who go to pray in the temple. Their prayers differ from each other. Find out who prays bet...

The principle delineated by the gospel today is the most assaulted teaching in the Church and the world today. It has been attacked since the dawn of history. Hence, the Lord underscores it. We should repeat it often in our hearts and minds. It is the fortress that needs reinforcement and armor to withstand all the onslaughts from the world, the flesh and the devil. What is that principle?

This principle we read in the Gospel today is one we need to read and meditate one regularly, especially because we are exposed in the middle of the world to different points of view and examples and lifestyles and doctrines. So, if we are not careful we imbibe these alien and foreign thoughts, systems, attitudes, outlooks, etc little by little and we water down our belief in the one God.

The gospel today encourages us to pick the side of the truth so that we can find ourselves able to reach Heaven. That is the goal, i.e., to be with the Light. Light is symbolic of Jesus Christ. The gospel tells us of the people accusing Jesus of calling on the prince of devils to exorcise possessed people. Jesus merely points out the absurdity of their claim. The devil possesses us in a manner of...

Today's gospel underlines the fundamental importance of studying the teachings of the Catholic Church in faith and morals.

We celebrate today the first Joyful Mystery of the Holy Rosary, namely, the Annunciation. We celebrate God's work of Redemption that went on to high gear because God became flesh today. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the most pure womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In nine months, He, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, would be born in Bethlehem. Thus, Mary is the Mother of God. P...

The entire creation was waiting for Mary's reply to God's proposal. What happened?

The gospel today tells us of what God is going to do when the initial destination of His Salvific mission, who were the Israelites, would reject Jesus. Our blessed Lord would then go to the Gentiles! God respects our freedom. And we should respect also His freedom. The gospel tells us of Our Lord's town mates who rejected Him. They resented Him for not having revealed to them when He grew up i...

We know very well the experience of comparing ourselves with the others, especially in qualities and achievements. Sometimes we are comforted by the fact that others are worse than us morally speaking. Hence, we like gossip and immerse ourselves in the immoral details of our neighbors or national figures and stories. Of course, in all this, we tend to be blind to our own situation. We sway to comp...

We focus today in this homily on the older son who did not run away, who did not make off with his inheritance only to waste it on himself badly, who what not loyal to his dad, etc. Those were done by his younger brother, who is usually the focus of this parable of the prodigal son. But the older son, although he did not do any of those horrible things, also had his problems of sinning. Find out w...

Our Lord Jesus Christ prophesizes His own demise in the gospel of today. He does this via parable. The story is about a vineyard entrusted to certain tenants. After that, he goes on a journey. At the proper time, he sends some servants to collect the produce corresponding to him. But the tenants rebelled against him and did not recognize him as their master. They abused his servants. They did the...

The gospel assures us of the coming final reckoning. Recall perhaps those times when we saw evil sort of triumph in this life. There are those to be pitied because their just cause fell flat to the ground. Frustration and disappointment! Scandalous government and judiciary officials who do not perform them duties well. They all can be bought. As they say, everybody has a price! But the Good News o...