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.

Remembering God’s Mercy

1. Mary’s faith

At the Anunciation, the Angel Gabriel said to Mary, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women…” The Angel was asking Mary’s consent and cooperation in the great mystery of divine power and mercy. Since Eve and until our Lord first spoke, no word more meritorious and full of promise of joy, was pronounced by a human being than Mary’s act of faith: “Be it done unto me according to your word.”

Certainly, Mary knew what she was entering into; she knew God was using her to accomplish his plan of salvation in his mercy towards humanity. For she acknowledged in her Magnificat, “God has come to help of his servant Israel, for he has remembered his promise of mercy.”

2. Man’s fall and God’s promise of salvation

God made man in his image and likeness, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity. Only man has been called to share in divine life and life forever. But man sinned. And yet after his fall, man was not abandoned by God. He might have lost everything because of sinning, except God’s mercy. In his steadfast love and faithfulness, God called man again and gave him the promise of restoration, the promise of a Redeemer.

We read of this promise in Genesis: A Messiah and Redeemer would be born of a Woman, and a war would be waged between her and the serpent, but a descendant of hers would have the final victory. Mary is that woman.

3. God’s mindfulness of his promise

God has always been mindful of his promise of redeeming mankind from sin. To work his plan, he chose the people of Israel as his instruments. He made covenants with Abraham, Moses and David, and through these covenants, he showed his great love and mercy for his chosen people. “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

God’s covenant with the people of Israel through Moses was crystallized after their great deliverance from their slavery in Egypt. For many, many years, the Israelites, as slaves of the Egyptians, were like “dead people”. God made them “live again” when, in his great mercy and mindful of his promises, he led them out of that land of bondage. The Exodus-event typifies what the great sacrifice of Jesus, son of Mary, would effect in the lives of fallen humanity. Man has become a slave of sin, and Jesus came precisely to unshackle him, his cross being the key.

But even before the foundation of Israel, God already showed his mercy in the renewal of the world through the Great Flood. There was a general perversion in Noah’s time, and to cleanse the world, God sent the flood. Then after the flood, he promised not to inundate the world again. God gave the rainbow as the sign of that promise. When God would see the rainbow, he would remember that promise, and he would act mercifully again.

4. The fulfillment of the promise in Jesus Christ

Jesus came announcing that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that the day of salvation is near. This strong message he substantiated with his teachings, healings and many other wondrous deeds. His redemptive actions reached their climax with his passion, death and resurrection.

During the last supper, Jesus commanded his disciples: “Do this in remembrance of me.” “Remember” is a powerful word. When the Lord bade his disciples to “do again the last supper” in remembrance of him, it was not only to celebrate his memory, it was not only to imitate what he did, it was not only to gather in fellowship and participate in that commemoration. It was to remember God’s bountiful mercy so truly present, so evident in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. It was to make that sacrifice present again in the here and now.

The rainbow was the sign of the covenant of God with Noah. But now Jesus Christ himself is the sign of the new covenant of God with man. God recalled his promise not to destroy the world again with flood when he saw the rainbow. But when God sees the Body and Blood of Jesus, his Son, raised in offering in the celebration of the holy mass, he will remember his promise of mercy. God will see the sign, he will remember and he will act again with mercy.

5. The holy mass as memorial of God’s mercy

The holy mass or the Eucharist is a re-enactment, in a bloodless manner, of the sacrifice of the cross. In the last supper, Jesus had every one of us in mind to save. Through the sacrifice of his life on the cross, he saved every person – past, present and future. His sacrifice was once-for-all; that’s why, it need not be repeated anymore. By that singular sacrifice, he gained the merits for the salvation of all. Now, every time the holy mass is celebrated, the sacrifice of the cross is made present once more, and the graces won by Jesus Christ are made available again for the people in the present. And in every celebration of the mass, God remembers his promise of mercy to humanity, and we ourselves remember how merciful God is to us sinners.

God’s richness in mercy and the coming of Jesus as man are two things inextricably joined. It was because of God’s overflowing mercy that he sent his only Son to be the ransom for our sins, that we may be released from the bondage of eternal death into the glory of eternal life. It was precisely the coming of Christ that finally fulfilled God’s promise of mercy.

6. Mary’s participation

Could all this have happened without Mary’s consent and cooperation in God’s merciful plan? We don’t have to think about it. But we thank Mary for saying her unconditional “yes” to God.

Mary knew the history of her people. She knew their desperations and hopes. She knew God’s promise of salvation. She may not have thought even once that she would be playing the vital role of carrying the Redeemer in her womb and bringing him up, until the day Angel Gabriel appeared to her. But when the fullness of time arrived for God to work out his plan of mercy, Mary, herself mindful of God’s mercy, said, “Be it done unto me as you have said.” And she became, as it were, the receptacle of God’s mercy.

7. Our response

Every time we celebrate this memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection, may we remember God, our God, who is rich in mercy for us. Through Mary’s “yes”, God has truly come to help us, for he has remembered his promise of mercy.

Mary at the foot of the cross

I would have been 22 years dead last March 19. When I was yet a first grader, I figured in a motorcycle mishap, which left me fatally wounded and totally unconscious. I could picture myself, as though dead, in the middle of the highway. My mother must have been hysterical and cried a river over my fate, and hers. My father, who was about a couple of hundred meters away, must have sensed that something was wrong with his family, and ran like a meteor to where he almost lost his only son. The left portion of my skull was bashed in, and three blankets could barely help reduce the bleeding. They knew my situation was very precarious and that they could lose me any moment.

But by God’s singular graciousness, I survived what my father and my mother might count as the hardest blow in their life as parents. For two or three days, I was like down for the count. When I regained consciousness, my body both sore and numb, I was being carried along a corridor by my father. I could see my mother, who was a couple of meters behind, and all the sorrow and the pain on her face. From hindsight, I could say that she looked and walked as though she were a mater dolorosa following her son. Of course, figuratively speaking, it was not yet her time to see her son to his Calvary and reenact the pieta.

That must have been how the Blessed Mother had felt, and much more. Already almost immediately after the Blessed Mother had given birth to her child, she learned the bare truth about the dreadful destiny of her son and that her heart would be pierced by the sword. It must have taken time for the prophecy of Simeon about the sorrows to come to sink in her. But certainly she came to realize that accepting that prophecy was fundamental or central to the fiat, to that “yes” she professed at the Annunciation. Given this, it is not amiss to claim that in some sense the passion of the Blessed Mother already began at Jesus’ birth. Isn’t it true that the anticipation of some horrifying event is more dreadful than that event itself? The expectation of death, for example, would be more terrifying than the experience of death itself. Naturally, thinking about the future brought much misery and pain to the Blessed Mother in regard to her son.

As teacher, the Blessed Mother exemplified in her life how graceful dealing with suffering and pain can be beneficial to our Christian discipleship. I would think, the Blessed Mother carried that misery, that pain, from her child’s birth unto the foot of his cross. Look, not long after the prophet Simeon told her of what was coming, she, together with St. Joseph, had to protect their child from the deadly hands of Herod, and so they had to run to Egypt for safety. Consider, too, the hysteria losing her child in the temple must have caused. And when her child, now grown-up, returned home after being away doing great things every high and low in support of his battle cry that the Kingdom of God was at hand, he was rejected. I wonder how she must have felt on hearing this, and the news that their townmates even wanted to push him over the cliff to have him killed. And what could be more painful than seeing her son, carrying that heavy cross towards Calvary, his face like a workshop of blood, of sweat and of derisive saliva? But she patiently endured everything unto the foot of the cross. This was her martyrdom.

Don’t we call the Blessed Mother the “Queen of Martyrs”? Indeed, she is. To be a martyr, the Blessed Mother did not have to submit herself to an executioner’s sword. But she did suffer, in the words of St. Bernard, a most bitter sorrow of the heart. This she endured in obedience to God’s will. And if not a moment in her whole life did she break loose from her original fiat, then she endured her martyrdom throughout her life. Her standing at the foot of the cross testified to her total submission to the will of God, in whose love and faithfulness she trusted so much.

Sorrow is an inseparable reality in our earthly life. It is the consequence of the ills that befall us either from within or without. When we lose a loved one, when we fail the bar or board exam, when malicious tongues destroy our good name, when the people we expect to understand us do not seem to care, we suffer outwardly. My mother has had a big share in this. When we are humiliated, when we are tempted, when we think we have caused God pain by sinning, we experience interior suffering. And when we suffer and are down with sorrow, there is the temptation to think that after all God is not infinitely good and loving. But God never intended that we experience pain and undergo hardships. The truth is, He wanted us to be happy. By one man’s disobedience, everything crumbled, and happiness was turned into sorrow. By the Blessed Mother’s obedience as well as, and more importantly, her son’s obedience, happiness is man’s once more. The Blessed Mother’s obedient disposition teaches every Christian soul how to deal with suffering and sorrow.

We should be on guard against the many false ideas about suffering. Many of us might erroneously think that Christianity exalts suffering for its own sake. Our Father in heaven, who loves us so much, does not rejoice to see his children suffer. But if, in fact, we do suffer, we must use our suffering as a means of virtue, to turn evil into good, to accept pain as an atonement offered for the Body of the Son of the Blessed Mother. Suffering is not good in itself; it is indifferent. It can prove to be either a blessing or a curse. It can do or undo a person. What makes suffering good or evil is our attitude towards it. The Blessed Mother valued her own passion as participation in the suffering of her son. She, who kept everything in her heart, perceived God as visiting her through her every cross. And she was purified and refined by the sorrows she patiently endured for the love of God.

As mother, the Blessed Virgin stood by her son the Lord Jesus to the bitter end. The blessed Mother stood near the cross. We do not know how near but we can be sure she stood as near as the soldiers would let her. She might not have been able to touch or caress her son or wipe his bloody face, but she could stand where he could see her and take comfort from her presence and her encouraging and understanding looks. From her fiat at the Annunciation to her fiat at the foot of the cross, she was in solidarity with Jesus and his mission. Isn’t this how mothers – and fathers – should stand by their children? The Blessed Mother was silent all throughout the passion; not a word issued from her lips. In like manner, there are times when all that parents can do is to stand in comforting presence when their child is on his or her times of sorrow, pain or tragic news. It may be all they can do but it may be the best they can do when words do not come or are empty.

The Blessed Virgin is our teacher and our mother. This Lady of sorrows is our mother. And so we can be sure that we are not alone in our sufferings, in our moments of sorrow. She, who endured much suffering, would understand us and intercede for us before her son, who suffered much for the salvation of the world. (July, 2004, inspired by Terence Cardinal Cooke)