Making Friends With The Lord Jesus

Today's gospel is simple. Love your Enemies!

We have heard the principle, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Our Lord requires His followers not to seek revenge, but to be merciful. This is the most difficult challenge perhaps in Christianity. Anyhow, Jesus never said it would be easy to follow Him. We need to let the Holy Spirit help us. We need to pray for it.

Today we celebrate our faith's highest mystery. Let's learn how to live it in our lives.

Honesty and simplicity may not be in vogue nowadays. What is in is complicatedness, wordiness, falsehood, misinformation, etc. Jesus reminds us in today's gospel about the importance of truthfulness and the commitment we each make in declaring each truth.

We read today's gospel about Jesus teaching about the requirements of His Law. He discusses the nature of sin originating in man's higher powers. Hence, any sin begins in our thinking and willing. Then, He instructs us to flee from occasions of sin. Lastly, He clarifies the evil of divorce.

We celebrate today the best gift we have in Jesus Christ as the Priest. With His priesthood we have been saved. All His actions on earth were transformed by His priestly nature and mission that we can now enjoy filiation with God and destiny in Heaven. We are all called to assume a priestly soul, in imitation of Christ.

Our Lord Jesus Christ reveals in the gospel today His mind and intentions with regard to the Law that Was revealed before His coming. He had no intention of changing it, but to fulfill it. Just like what we saw yesterday when He introduced a clarification regarding the sixth commandment. Adultery is not only committed in physical terms, but also in the realm of thinking and willing.

What would you say of a lighted bulb not giving off light? Or a live charcoal not giving off heat? A Christian is supposed to change his environment and to bring it closer to God.

Jesus gave us His Mother to be our Mother too! Mater Dei, Mater nostra! Children look like their parents. How do we try better to imitate her?

Today, the Church opens so officially with the coming of the Holy Spirit in the fullest sense, enough to send each of the weak and fearful apostles to evangelize the Church, and even face martyrdom. We need Him more, nowadays.

We end the reading of the gospel written by St. John, the Apostle. This ending comes with two details. The first one is about the preoccupation of St. Peter for the future of St. John. St. Peter just received his mandate to take care of Jesus' flock even though he had denied Jesus three times. Jesus only asked for his love. Jesus admonishes him not to be concerned about what the vision of the othe...

St. John, the Evangelist's gospel ending is the focus of today's mass. He tells us two things. First, St. Peter, after having been told about how he would die, wondered what would happen to St. John. Jesus teaches us also about focusing ourselves in fulfilling God's Will for us personally, instead of making the call of others a factor in how we respond to our calling. Second, St. John assures us t...

Today's gospel reveals to us God's attitude and disposition with respect to any of us sinners. He only asks us one question. Our imagination and egoism worry us with meant questions to rob us of self- worth and peace. "Do you love me?"is all He is interested in. That question launches us to the great adventure of working together with God to become a saint and help others to become one as well.

Let us each contribute our share to seek unity in the Church.

The gospel today brings up the matter of Jesus' priestly prayer for unity. It is a divine attribute. Jesus prays that we be one with Him. Unity is a attribute of the divine nature. He is One, indivisible in Himself where everything in Him is identified with His nature, although we by the limitation of our knowing and nature, we see Him to be composed of different parts; He is One because there can...

Take courage, I have conquered the world! We should listen to these words of Jesus all the time to remind ourselves that we belong to the Easter people and Alleluia is our song, borrowing the words of St. John Paul II. He conquered death. He won our salvation. We fear nothing now. What the devil does is try to scare us, make us doubt, etc. Events, tragedies, failures, uncertainties etc may stagger...

We celebrate today the Lord's departure for Heaven in His Ascension to Heaven to sit at the right hand of His Father, from there He shall come to judge the living and the dead. This is what we contemplate in the second mystery of the Glorious Mysteries. I we have been looking at Him when He was on earth, we will then continue to look up to Him, eager to join Him there. Against our tendencies to fa...

Let us rush to do good, like Mary making haste to help her cousin.

Today, the gospel continues to tell us about joy. That no one will remove our joy from us is what Jesus assures us. Very much part of our Christian vocation is being joyful. Are we happy? We should be happy--not in the sense of an animal that is excited because it is going to eat--in the sense of celebrating life. We are joyful because we are headed for Heaven. We are joyful because God is our Fat...

Our dear Lord Jesus seems to like to play hide and seek. Life is full of this, just like He made Our Lady and St. Joseph look for Him for the 3-4 days He was missing and was found in the Temple. In today's gospel, He apparently meant something like that, that He was leaving His apostles and that He would be found after a short while. Listen to the homily about this.

Jesus reminds us that the Holy Spirit will come. He will guide them to the Truth. Normally, we depend on our thinking power to navigate through our lives. Jesus reveals to us that He will send the Spirit to guide us. That guidance will come in the form of enlightenment so that we can see better. The Lord has already revealed all the truths He needed to leave with us in the Church regarding the jou...

The Lord Jesus prepares His followers for His departure. He explains to them the reason He needed to leave them, even though this would bring them grief. He emphasized to them, and to all of us and those who will follow Him till the end of time, that the Holy Spirit should come to act on us, to transform us to another Christ, Christ Himself!

The Church in today's liturgy of the word is more explicit in mentioning the Holy Spirit, Who will be sent from the Father. Jesus says that He is another Advocate for us in front of God. He is also the witness of Jesus before us. The reason is that He is the Author of our sanctification, that is, us becoming more and more Jesus Christ. This is to be expected because the life of grace is the very l...

Today, the Church proceeds in Her plan to introduce to us the Third Person of The Blessed Trinity, namely, the Holy Spirit. For that, she continues to preach about love. A result of love is unity. The bond of the Blessed Trinity is the Love of God. In fact, God is Love! Now, the Holy Spirit is the Love of the Father for the Son and vice versa. The Blessed Trinity is a solid Unity because of this u...

Thus, we have the explanation of many of our problems in this world. There is sin and its allies in the world, the flesh and the devil. Jesus speaks about this opposite force against His desire to save and redeem man and the universe. Let us be aware that we are not made to find our home in this place. Our proper place, or we should say, our home is in Heaven, that is, to be with God. We can be an...