Making Friends With The Lord Jesus

How He does it is the subject of this Gospel and homily. He prays the entire night before He chooses them. Then, we chooses not in the manner we choose people who would be like salesmen of His teachings and get others to learn them. He does not decide on the best. In fact, He picks mere fishermen. Most of them were experts in catching fish. They were not educated like the Pharisees were educated....

The crux of today's Gospel centers on the tension between the Jews and the Lord in the synagogue. Such tension was all about what was licit on a Sabbath, the eminent day of the week for rest. Jesus asked this question about whether it was all right to cure this man with a withered hand. His enemies were ready to pounce on His first wrong move, i.e., if he cured on the Sabbath. This was a no-braine...

Today, we celebrate her birthday. We celebrate her Immaculate Conception on December 8. So, counting forward nine months, we get to September 8. Liturgically, we cannot celebrate the liturgy proper to her birthday. In any case, today we read in the Gospel about Our dear Lord's making a deaf and dumb man able to hear and speak. The Lord placed His hands on him. The mere touch would cure people of a...

Jesus, Our Lord, clarifies His teaching about the observance of the Sabbath duties. The Pharisees and scribes argue about the absolute necessity to observe these duties that they invent new rules that suffocate man. The apostles eat grains of corn as they weave through a corn field. The Pharisees and scribes observe that they do something prohibited on the Sabbath. They are so unreasonable! Thus,...

This was a question very much in the Jewish mind. It is clear that fasting was required. But regarding the extent and intensity of fasting, this would depend on each person's piety and relationship with God. In Jewish society, there were different camps following different ways in this matter. From the Gospel today, the Pharisees and scribes observed that their disciples and those of John were str...

This is the eternal invitation of God to all of us in our lives. Parallel to the Gospel narration about the miraculous catch of fish and the subsequent call of the first apostles, God makes us understand that He stands in the midst of our circumstances, work, and relationships. He hounds us to get our attention through qualms of conscience, what grabs our attention in our affairs and in those of t...

Today's Gospel brings us various points for consideration. First, He cures Simon Peter's mother-in-law. For our lesson, that woman immediately got up from bed and waited on them. With our gifts from God, we need to use them for serving the others. Then, we see Jesus curing everybody who was sick and brought to Him. This is when He expels the devils from possessing persons. The devils proclaim His...

The Lord addresses today a prevalent concern we all suffer from in this fallen world of ours. That is about a tinge of doubt lurking in our consciences about the goodness of God. This originates from the way the demon or serpent deceived our first parents. He gaslighted them. Although God forbade them from eating of a certain fruit in the garden of Eden, the devil made it appear that God was withh...

We need to get this straight. Our Lord Jesus Christ became man to lead us to Heaven. His very life is our model to reach there. Hence, the scriptures that talk about Him are what should enlighten us regarding how we should live. And if we follow their lead, then what scriptures say is also being fulfilled in us today. Our Lord lives in us today!

Our beloved Lord Jesus Christ clarifies with the Pharisees and Scribes about what truly defiles a man. Defilement is sourced from outside man, and that is the reason we need to wash vessels and hands. Hence, they criticized the Lord's disciples because they did not follow the tradition of the elders. Our Lord continued calling them out because they, under the guise of concern for their traditions,...

Today, we read the second of three stories in Chapter 25 of St. Matthew's Gospel. It is usually referred to as the Parable of the talents. By the way, the term "talent" as employed here referred to a certain amount of money. It could, however, we used to designate those innate qualities and aptitudes one may have as gifts of nature like the ability to sing, dance, play basketball and so forth. The...

Today, we celebrate the martyrdom of the Precursor of Jesus Christ, St. John the Baptist. How he was beheaded is fairly well-known. It can be traced back to the illicit affair that King Herod had with Herodias, who was Herod's brother, Philip. St. John called them out. Herodias wanted to kill him for reminding them of the irregularity of their situation. But Herod protected him since he liked to l...

Jesus continues to read the riot act for the scribes and pharisees. Basically, he called them hypocrites. This is like what we saw in the Gospel yesterday. He points out again their inconsistency in how they behaved and lived vs what they taught. They appear as good men but inside they are full of lies and immorality. They, therefore, were bad examples to the people they were supposed to teach and...

Jesus continues to point out to the scholars of the scriptures what they were doing wrong. The scribes and pharisees were so particular of the external fulfillment of the Law, without having the interior movement of purification and repentance. What mattered a lot was their invention of so many demands in the fulfillment of the Law of Moses. They were so many and complicated that it was practicall...

Jesus was referring to the teachers of Israel, composed of the scribes and Pharisees. They were experts of the law of Moses. They were scriptural scholars. Furthermore, they tended to interpret the requirements of the Law making petty distinctions and made up demands that would confuse the sincere practicing Jew. Imagine when they went down to so many details regarding what can be and cannot be do...

We listen to the Gospel today telling us about the desertion Jesus experienced from many of His disciples. Why did they leave Jesus? It was because they could not accept His teaching about the Holy Eucharist, that we need to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood so that we be saved. It was ludicrous to them. So, Jesus braced Himself, in asking His closest associates. St. Peter replied by asking a rhet...

This is the remark of Nathanael or Bartholomew to the announcement of Philip, his friend, about what he had discovered, namely, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was, according to Philip, the one their sacred scriptures had prophesied to come to save them. Can anything good come out of each of us? This is the discouraging challenge of the devil to each of us, who may be having a hard time in the spiritual...

Today, we celebrate the feast of Mary's Queenship of the Universe. We also read in the Gospel about a king who invited people to attend his son's wedding. No one wanted to come. The king sent his attendants again to invite them, but they excused themselves by claiming they had to do other things. Some maltreated his envoys. So, he sent soldiers to punish them and burn their villages. Still, he wan...

Our Lord replied to a question posed to Him about the greatest commandment of God. Every Jew knew this by heart. We need to love God with our entire being: with all our heart, mind, and strength. But the novelty was that He connected this with a second commandment, which was not unknown to an average Jew. Love your neighbor as yourself. Their connection is intimate. Check this out in the homily.

The Gospel in today's Mass tells us the story of Jesus about a landowner, hiring at different times of the day workers for his vineyard. He agrees to pay the first batch a denarius each for the day's work. When paying them arrives at the end of the day, he gives one denarius to the latest ones hired. So, the earlier employed thought they would receive more. But they also received one denarius each...

Impossible, right? But that is how Jesus described the difficulty with which those who are rich in this world--meaning enslaved and attached to creatures--to enter Heaven. The apostles acknowledged that much. So, they ask Him what would happen to them since they left everything to follow Him. Jesus assures them of the reward! The reward who being here with the hundredfold and later in Heaven for e...

We all have an innate desire to be perfect. We certainly demand this of the others. Perhaps we ask ourselves less. But we all have this tendency towards perfection. This was the concern of the young man who asked Jesus in the Gospel today about how to enter into eternal life. Our Lord detected this desire in this person. He asked him to follow the commandments. The good man assented and acknowledg...

We arrive at the last installment of the text of Chapter 6 of St. John's Gospel on the Holy Eucharist. Here Our Lord explains the sacrament using the imagery of bread. He underscores the need to eat it and here He moves to another imagery, i.e., His Flesh and Blood, as food and drink. These nourish us in the body, while His Body and Blood nourish us in the soul. Let us listen to the Gospel how He...

We read today the version of St. Matthew found in his Chapter 19 of Jesus and the children. His apostles tried to turn them away when they approached Jesus for a blessing. Jesus corrected them. He reiterates that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as them. Hence, it is not difficult to imagine that God will somehow bring those babies and fetuses aborted, although not baptized, to Heaven. He is...

Jesus corrects the practice of the Jews regarding divorce instituted by Moses during his time. Husbands were permitted to write a document of dismissal to bid away his wife. This was never done the other way around. Our Lord clarifies the marriage institution. Absolute divorce is repudiated and rejected as a possibility for validly married spouses. What is permitted in present Church practice in h...