Making Friends With The Lord Jesus

The New Sabbath is Sunday, the first day of the week. Sunday marks the triumph of God in recreating the universe. The universe succumbed to the wiles of the devil because Adam and Eve trusted more the devil and distrusted God and thus, they ate the forbidden fruit. Thus, man and woman, being the head of the material universe, led the material reality to be part of the devil's kingdom. All this was...

Nathan the prophet was sent by God to confront David regarding his adultery and murder of Uriah the Hittite. He narrated a story in which a blatant injustice was committed. David rose in anger against that barbarian, only to be exposed by Nathan to be as criminal as the character in the story. We need to know ourselves well. We tend to hide and flee from the admission of our sins. Confession arres...

St. Paul addresses his spiritual son Timothy in the first reading of the mass today. He reminds him of the gift he received by the laying of the hands of Paul on him. That phrase "laying of the hands" refers to the passing of sacred power to the recipient. This power is the power of the priesthood. This is a responsibility of the recipient to use this power responsibly. This applies to every one o...

Today, we celebrate the feast commemorating the Conversion of St. Paul. His importance cannot be overemphasized. He has 14 letters in the New Testament. He narrates his conversion story in the first reading of the mass. Furthermore, he was humiliated when knocked off his horse on his way to Damascus. We need such humiliation to keep us in our place and humble. With humility, God can work wonders i...

We hear this prophecy mentioned in the first reading of the mass today. In the process, God shows forth His loyalty to the people He had chosen to be His own. Although Israel would be unfaithful, God will not withdraw the predilection He has for Israel. He would punish them for their transgressions, but they will remain His people.

David shows us his behavior at the presence of God symbolized by the ark of the covenant. Lots of sacrifices are offered to God while they move the ark of the covenant to the tent David set up for it. David himself danced like a madman throughout the route to the tent. All this behavior was to recognize and give adequate worship to the God symbolized by the ark of the covenant. Imagine what we mus...

Our Lord Jesus Christ inverted the existing conventions regarding power. People more easily grasp that to have power means the ability to bully others, to get what one wants, to take away the lives of others, to torture them, etc. But Christianity corrected that and made it mean the ability to serve the others and to be useful to the needs of the others.

Mark 10:13-16  It is to such as these little children that the kingdom of God belongs. People were bringing little children to Jesus, for him to touch them. The disciples turned them away, but when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does...

As we appreciate the stirrings and activity of David's mourning the death of his friends, we learn of the affective power we have in our hearts. We need to use these emotions. We need to train them so they help us in our service to God and so that they would not enslave us to sin. We need to realize that these emotions are not bad in themselves. After granting an allowance to the falleness of our...

David has the chance to kill King Saul as he rests in the same cave he is in. The king was having a respite from the search for the criminal, who in this case was David. According to Samuel's account, some people were feeding the king with false information regarding David's supposed disposition to harm the king. David proved to Saul that that was false because he did not touch the king when he ha...

Envy, jealousy and unity are some of the virtues and qualities exhibited in the narration of the first reading of today's mass. King Saul became envious of David because the people acknowledged that David had done something more amazing than the king. He wanted to kill this simple shepherd boy. Jonathan, however, King Saul's son, dissuaded him by pointing out that David was his servant and that wh...

We can apply today's story of David and Goliath to our own stories. We do feel in our struggles against evil and temptations that we are at a disadvantage. We are weak. We are limited. We are sinners. But we need not count on these negatives. The fight belongs to God. We are in His Hands. By His Providence, we shall conquer, and thus it will be patent that it was God who won the battle for us. Pra...

In the first reading of today's mass, we read about God's choice regarding who would succeed King Saul. David was his choice. Interestingly, Samuel visited Jesse as God had instructed him to do, and he had thought that an elder son of Jesse was God's choice. He paid attention to the external qualities. But God looks into the heart. Only David, the youngest of the brood, made the cut. He was anoint...

We read in the first reading of the mass today about the fall from grace of King Saul. The cause was his disobedience to the command of God. He disguised his disobedience by citing his good intentions. However, the prophet Samuel points out the utter disobedience of the king. He was punished for that.

The first reading of the mass today tells us about the disappointment of Samuel with the failure of King Saul to obey God's commands to exterminate a group of people. He did this with flimsy excuses. We should learn from his sin how we sometimes justify our faults using specious reasons, partly true and partly false. God removed his favor from Saul because of his disobedience. It is obedience that...

St. Paul was looking for a way to encourage the Corinthian converts to avoid the sin of fornication. He employed the second reading of the mass today where he states that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Our bodies are members of the Body of Christ. We cannot countenance the Body of Christ to be united to a prostitute, right? Thus, we should avoid fornicating where we unite ourselves-...

The first reading of the mass today tells us about the call of Saul to be the first king of Israel. Samuel anointed him king. But the thing is that for us to hear God calling us, we need to foster a collected attitude, a habit of focusing ourselves on the Lord and to deal with him. Otherwise, we would be drowned by the noise, that apparently modern man is more confident in. This just distracts us...

The Gospel tells us of the Lord's episode with the show of faith of four men who brought a paralytic to the Lord to be cured. Jesus seeing their faith forgave the paralytics' sins. The scribes and Pharisees present resented that since, according to them, only God can forgive sins. And the one who claimed to forgive the sick man's sins was human. But Jesus broadens their minds. He performs a miracl...

In their battles with their enemy the Philistines, the Israelites missed answering this most basic of questions regarding the conduct of our lives: is it God that we truly seek or is it ourselves and our selfishness and pride? The Israelites were devastated by the Philistines twice in row, even when in the second battle the Israelites had brought in the Ark of the Covenant to fight for them. They...

The Christ arrived into the world that had been given up to the Enemy of God, namely the Devil. Adam and Eve went over to his side because they had distrusted God and disobeyed His Commandment of not touching the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So, Jesus in a manner of speaking, parachuted into enemy terrritory. He went behind enemy lines to reclaim what God had lost to the Devil. So, the...

Today, we celebrate his birthday anniversary. What better way to celebrate it than by thanking God for giving us this holy man as another model of holiness! In the mass of St. Josemaria, we usually read a text from Genesis, the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, and St. Luke. Each of these readings gives us some lessons that the Saint taught when he was among us. First, we were made to work. Second...

We celebrate today the last feast day of the Christmas Season and with it, the season officially ends. Today we commemorate the Lord's Baptism. He identified himself with us human beings in need of salvation by becoming man, and then he had himself baptized. What humility of the Savior! We should be reminded of the need to be repentant of our sins. No matter how we claim that Jesus has forgiven ou...

I beheld this reredos in the private oratory of the Prelate of Opus Dei, who at that time was Blessed Alvaro del Portillo. It was a magnificent painting of the Holy Family in the lower part of the frame and the Blessed Trinity, complete with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, at the upper region. The saying goes, and this is attributed to the Founder of Opus Dei, Saint Josemaria...

The world will not be able to suffice to bring us real lasting happiness. Only God can! St. John in his First Letter tells us so much in the first reading of the mass today. He sums up the problematic nature of the world, not taken as the result of God's creation, which would then be utterly good since they come from Him, but taken as worldliness consisting of the sensual body, the lustful eye and...

This assumes that Jesus Christ is our model. He is our example because He is a perfect Man. His life therefore is normative. He need to imitate how he behaved. This is summed up in the commandments of God. Jesus is our light with regard to living correctly and in accordance with God's Will.