The Superstar with the Scar!
“Anyone who loses his life…will save it” (Mk 8:35).
       The great orator Bishop Fulton Sheen in one of his many sermons makes a positive comment on the eagerness of Apostle Thomas wanting to put his fingers into the mark of the nails in the hands and feet of the Risen Christ (Jn 20:24-29).  The Bishop says, Thomas wanted to see the scars of his superstar!  Yes, our Superstar Jesus has his scars.  He is a suffering servant!
        The gospel text of today, on the one hand, invites us to a personalisation of our perception and experience of Jesus.  Jesus asks, “Who do you say I am?” (Mk 8:27). On the other hand, the Liturgy of the Word also invites us to acknowledge the role of suffering in the history of salvation.  Jesus says, “The Son of […]

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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
“Look, your God is coming”: The Messiah is here!
 “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christianity.”  May be you’ve heard this expression before.  It was written by one of the Church Fathers, Tertullian (197 AD).  This sentence does not sadistically justify the suffering of Christians.  In fact, Tertullian uses this expression in his Apology that he writes to the Roman Governor defending the Christians.  However, he says, “The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is the seed.”
I think, the high level of indifference to Christianity prevalent in some societies, particularly in the Western societies today, could be seen as a contemporary form of ‘persecution’.  In some societies today, it takes a lot of courage to exhibit in public any form of Christian […]

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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
From Religious Traditions to Religious Spirituality
 Some of the recent, popular books in the study of religion include, Why God Won’t Go Away?, God is Back, and A New Religious America.  What these books suggest is that secularism as a social phenomenon is on the decline.  Perhaps human beings are growing out of their adolescent rebellion against God. On the other hand, what religious people will have to witness is the fast rise of a new type of ‘spirituality’ – a non-aligned spirituality.  For instance, a recent cross-cultural study indicates that 40 per cent of American respondents and 20 per cent of German respondents describe themselves as ‘spiritual-but-not-religious.’  In other words, the current development seems to point out that, after all, secularism was not […]

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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle B
You have the message of eternal life, and we believe! (Jn 6:69)
  With today’s gospel reading we conclude the five weeks of reflection on the Bread of Life from John 6. This conclusion offers a mixed sense of reaction to whatever has preceded in Chapter 6. On the one hand, some disciples have found the saying of Jesus, “Whoever eats me will also draw life from me” (verse 57), very hard to accept.  They say, “This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?” (verse 60). As a consequence, “many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him” (verse 66). On the other hand, this crisis offers Jesus an opportunity to test the commitment of the Twelve: “What about you, do you want […]

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Mary, the woman of contemplation
Today we celebrate a solemnity that commemorates one of the dogmas around the Blessed Virgin Mary, namely, the Assumption of Mary. Dogmas arise out of the Christian tradition. Even so, I would like to present an image of Mary that emerges from the gospels.
To me, Mary is a woman of contemplation. Particularly, as Luke describes her, Mary keeps the Word of God in her heart, she ponders about the events of her life, she wonders…
When she heard from the angel those powerful words: “The Lord is with you”, she was deeply disturbed by these words and “asked herself what this greeting could mean” (Lk 1:29)?  When the shepherds came to see the baby lying in the manger, they reported what they had been told […]

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