Making Friends With The Lord Jesus

Yesterday, we celebrated the feast of St. Joseph. He is a model for us Christians, especially his example regarding how he let God use him to accomplish His plans. It is amazing that God who can do things on His own, chooses to need each of us to collaborate with Him to accomplish His purposes.

We take a break today from Lenten penitence and focus on the excellent creature in St. Joseph, the Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We will recite or sing the Gloria in mass in his honor. Rightfully so! He cannot be overemphasized in his crucial role as the protector of the most Blessed Virgin Mary and her Son, Jesus Christ. The first reading in the mass tells us about the promise of God to sen...

We read about the experience of Susanna in the first reading of today's mass on Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent. She was unjustly accused of the grave sin of adultery and infidelity. Two elders had prurient desires for her. They made their move, threatening her, falsely accusing her of having a tryst with a young man. She instead wanted to fall into the complication of being accused falsely. She...

Susanna was accused falsely and unjustly condemned to death. The accusers were supposedly wise men. They were elders of the people. Their word was assumed true when they accused of Susanna of adultery. However, God came to the rescue by having Daniel investigate more deeply the accusers. He had them separated, and he got their testimonies of the supposed crime. They gave different claims of the ci...

The second reading comes from the Letter to the Hebrews. It contains a description of Jesus having a hard time during the Agony in the Garden. He agonized because it was truly difficult to obey His Father to suffer and die on the Cross the next day. But He obeyed! And thus, we were saved from our sins. This means that we can go to Heaven and enjoy God for eternity. This all means that we need to l...

Farmers are familiar with this frequent occurrence. Seeds stop being seeds when they change into seedlings. The sown seed turns into a new plant. Death leads to life. Jesus uses this analogy to explain to His listeners the need to be ready for sacrifice to attain something worthwhile. Athletes sacrifice partying every weekend to train for the Olympic Games and to win a medal. Soldiers undergo diff...

We need to practice meekness because Jesus Christ lived meekly. He invited His listeners to learn from Him who was meek and humble of heart. He lived meekness even when He knew that He was going to be killed. Usually what people do is to struggle and do violence to preserve his life. What ones wants to preserve may not be his life but something of great value in his being, like limb. We can also m...

The first reading brings us a text from the Old Testament book of Wisdom. It is difficult to read because these lines are a prophecy of what the scheming Jews were thinking and going to do with Jesus. At the end of the day, they reason maliciously. They intuit who Jesus is, and that He is divine, but because of envy, they want to test whether Jesus is truly able to be what He claims to be. Because...

Due to original sin, man has the sad tendency of treating a creature as God or assigning to it a divine attribute or attributes. This is the malice of the sin of superstition and idolatry. We realize the impossibility of making ourselves divine, and we try to make a creature divine. But this is futile. Let us catch ourselves in the act of superstition or idolatry and repent from it. God will not f...

The Lord left Israel to be razed to the ground after the Israelites proved hard-headed in continuously defying God and His statutes. Although God sent His prophets and teachers, the people proved defiant. So, God let the Babylonians conquer them, and they were exiled to Babylon for a certain time. All this was to teach them a big lesson regarding what happens to them when they depart from God. But...

It pays to aspire to be converted all the time. It is that goal you want to reach. It is the dream you want to achieve. And if you opt to be with Our Lord, or what is the same thing, to be a saint, or to reach Heaven, or to be the happiest that I could ever be, then I need to have many conversions a day. The Founder used to encourage his listeners to live the parable of the prodigal son many times...

God promises to create a new heaven and new earth in the first reading of today's mass. He recreates what He had created from the beginning. He suffered and died to make us new creatures, i.e., we are now more than human beings. We are children of God. What the devil promised Adam and Eve to become by disobeying God in eating the forbidden fruit, i.e., they would become like gods, would become tru...

We read in the lessons of the mass of today, the 4th Sunday of Lent or Laetare Sunday, about God's requirements of justice and His persevering mercy. The Israelites we punished by God by letting Israel succumb to Babylon and being reduced to slaves again. But His mercy is amazing in that after the punishment He engineers Israel's return to the Promised land and the Persians reconstructing their te...

Our lives as Christians is characterized by the experiences of Israel with respect to the Lord and His dealings with His People. Israel defied God and His multiple covenants with the Israelites. They insisted and remained stubborn. God's patience reached a limit beyond which He inflicted on His Chosen People punishment. So, there went the wrath of God. But this was not the end of the story. God in...

God sends us difficulties to purify our hearts. This purification involves us striving more through those difficulties. Testing will clean our hearts. Our resolve becomes stronger to do things for God. We mature. We grow in virtues. We nourish our love for God.

We need to give God's grace a chance and be patient.

The Israelites insisted in not trusting in God, in not listening to Him. Thus, they were defenseless. They relied on forming alliances with the surrounding kingdoms. This only showed their opinion of the real God. They relied more on these alliances than on God. This is another way of saying that they trusted other gods, rather than on the true God.

When God tells us the instructions on how to use ourselves to live a life here on Earth, we need to listen. He is our manufacturer. Therefore, He should know how we should behave. So, His commandments tell us these instructions. If He didn't tell us about them, that would show how irresponsible a father He is. But He is our Heavenly Father who loves us very much. He gave us the set of commandments...

The first reading speaks to us about how the hagiographer describes God as the Shepherd who takes care of us who are His flock. He as Shepherd brings us to verdant pastures. Part of what He does is to forgive our sins. This is what He wants to do for our sins. He annihilates them that not even God remembers them anymore.

The first reading teaches us the beginning of Joseph's story from the Old Testament, a type of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. The lesson is that from the depravity of man, God can produce good. He is so powerful that He does this par for the course. He does not thwart the evil deeds of free creatures, but He surely can make good come out of them. Truly awesome!

Contingency characterizes everything in the material universe. Hence, creatures here cannot be trusted in absolute terms. They are temporary. Wealth, security, power, and so forth only exist in difficult conditions. Only God should be trusted in absolute terms.

Jeremiah shows us how to complain to the Lord. This prophet felt he was getting nowhere when he spoke for the Lord to the disobedient people of God. He prophesied their destruction if they did not repent. The people got so fed up with him that they plotted to do away with Jeremiah. So, he got tired, discouraged, and stressed out. He complained to God about this.

Sometimes, our resolutions to be good or better fall flat on the ground because we do not study and learn how to do good. Just like the trend of DIY, or Do It Yourself, projects and repairs, we need to do it ourselves. We need to study how to do good. We need to fill the vacuum produced by refusing to do evil. Otherwise, we would still be sucked into evil since there was no alternative to the evil...

Being sinners is our condition in the universe of God. He is the Creator and He is Immaculately poor. Aside from Him, Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary are pure. This condition of being sinners is to be accepted and noted as we go about our lives. Since we are sinners, we need to ask for forgiveness constantly. We need to note our weaknesses in making decisions. God, on the other hand, is S...

The readings in the mass on the second Sunday of Lent provide us with lessons regarding God's testing us and our need to learn to give up things so we can get closer to God. His tests are not after that we fail them. God tests us to see whether we go to loving Him. We need to practice giving up even good things for the Lord.