2nd Sunday in Lent – Year A
Transfiguration: Towards an Experience of God in Jesus
 Mountains are perceived to be locations of God-experience in many traditional cultures and in many world religions. This is true also in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  It is not by chance then that one of the classical works of St John of the Cross is called, The Ascent of Mount Carmel (1579); and more recently, Thomas Merton entitles his autobiography as, The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948).
The gospel readings of the first two Sundays of Lent follow a certain pattern in all the three year cycles.  The first Sunday of Lent we always meditate on the temptations of Jesus, and on the 2nd Sunday on the transfiguration of the Lord.  The focal point of the event of transfiguration is a mountain. The narration from Matthew describing the transfiguration clearly has three parts:

Going up the […]

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Temptations: The Journey through the Wilderness
 We say that the Season of Lent lasts forty days, as the Latin word, ‘Quadragesima” suggests.  When I was a young seminarian – sceptical as I was – I took the calendar and wanted to make sure for myself if there were indeed 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.  To my surprise, I found there are actually 47 days.  I had reasons to be sceptical, after all!  So I had a question for the teacher of liturgy, who, of course, was taken by surprise.  Later he came up with a meaningful explanation:  even on Sundays in Lent, we celebrate the Resurrection of the Lord, and hence they are not counted as days of fasting and penance.  So Lent does have forty weekdays of fasting and penance!
 ‘Forty’ is symbolic of a generation, a lifetime. […]

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“You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Mt 5:48
Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp to be opened.  It was basically a forced labour camp. Today it is open to the public. In this memorial site, there are different churches and a synagogue that have been built. What impressed me most during my visit to the memorial site was the Church of Reconciliation. The peculiarity of this church is that its structure/architecture has no right angles. The irregular shape is a symbolic protest against the orderly layout of the camp in which all the buildings are set in perfect array.  As I was leaving the memorial site, I thought, an exaggerated sense of order could be a sign of neurosis. And it could be life-threatening.
In the gospel text of today, as Jesus continues his ‘Sermon […]

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Your righteousness must go deeper (Mt 5:20) 
The powerful invitation of the Sermon on the Mount, that we continue to listen to in the gospel reading of today, is to embrace the previous revelation of God and to be available to the God who is here and now.  It is also an invitation to embrace the Law and to go beyond it.  And to be part of the Kingdom of God, your righteousness has to be go beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees (Mt 5:20).
This is the time of New Dispensation.  Righteousness is not legalism. The word ‘righteousness’ could be translated as justice, uprightness, virtue, perfection. Matthew is constantly proposing a new and deeper meaning of righteousness.  It is not mere conformity to law, but a response to the plan of […]

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5th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year A
You are the salt of the earth… and light of the World (Mt 5:13-14)
The sentences that we hear in the gospel reading of today immediately follow the Beatitudes. It is still part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth… you are the light of the World” (Mt 5:13-14).  Maintaining the same tone of the Beatitude (Blessed are you…), the opening line of today’s gospel is a promise and an invitation:  You are the salt of the earth…you are the light of the world, and you be the salt of the earth and light of the world.  What does that mean? 
Let me start with the easier part – at least in meaning if not in practice:  You are the light of […]

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