December 16 (Jn.5,33-36): A Saving Event

Today begins our nine-day journey towards Christmas, the feast of the birth of our Savior, our Hero. We call these nine masses aguinaldo masses because they are considered as a kind of our Christmas gift to the Lord who comes, but they are regarded as a kind of gift of God to us as well. Our celebration of the dawn masses is very symbolic of the person of Jesus Christ and the person of Mary. Jesus, whom we are waiting for, is the light of the world that dispels all darkness. When he came into the world more than 2000 years ago, he was introduced by Mary. For this reason, Mary can be called the dawn that brought forth the light which is Jesus. We gather very early for nine days in honor of Mary so that we can experience in the dawning day a symbol of herself and her role in the greatest event that ever happened on earth – our salvation.

If you were to ask me to identify one curious event that happened in my personal history, I would readily pinpoint that which took place in 1982. I was hit by a motorcycle on a provincial road in Pinili, where I come from, and was left gravely wounded. For many years, the saving circumstances that snatched back my life from the clutches of death remained a puzzle to me. It was an amazing event that there was an available vehicle to rush me to the hospital. It was an amazing event how supplies for a major orthopedic surgery such as I had gone through would arrive at the hospital where I would be rushed just the night before my accident. It was an amazing event that it was that particular surgeon, and not any other surgeon, who operated on me. For him who believes, this was a miracle. On my ordination day five years ago, the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. There was a reason for those events – those saving events. I stand before you all today as a priest. As one who believes, I’d say that each piece of the puzzle fell as it did, each saving event unraveled as it did, because I was to become a priest of God.

Events can save. Things happen because they have a particular place and end in the order of history. For many hundreds of years, the Israelites kept their hopes high for the day of their salvation to dawn. They lived a watchful life, as inspired by the prophets, because the dawning of that day would be the day of their deliverance from sin and death. The birth of Jesus was – and is – the saving event.

We easily admire a person who could forget his own life to save another’s. We admire St. Maximilian Kolbe for offering himself to be killed by starvation and dehydration in one of the barracks in Auschwitz in place of a fellow prisoner who had a family. We admire that man who crashed his aircraft against the spaceship of the aliens to be able to implant the virus and kill them all in the process to save the world from utter annihilation in the film Independence Day. We admire Richie Fernando, the Jesuit scholastic assigned in Cambodia, who used his body to shield a physically handicapped student from a grenade explosion. We get to wish there would always be a willing hero when we need him.

Brothers and sisters, Jesus is the name. Jesus means “God saves.” God is with us. Our hero is with us. Jesus was sent by the Father to do the most admirable work of salvation. It is precisely this work that testified that he, indeed, was sent by the Father, as the Gospel tells us. He is with us because in his undying love for us he wills to save us. He is always there. We only have to call out his name in faith, and he will come to us in our misery.

But Jesus is not a name which only you or I have claim to. Jesus’ coming was not only for my sake nor just your sake. He came to save all. So let us tell the world that “there is no other name in the whole world given to men by which we are to be saved” but Jesus. Let us work even only in simple acts of love towards others and so proclaim that Jesus came to save us all. May our lives be as “saving events” for them.