On this last Sunday before Christmas, the Church’s Liturgy reveals the true identity of our Redeemer: he is, as today’s First Reading says, the “ruler…whose origin is from…ancient times.” He will come from Bethlehem, where David was born of Jesse the Ephrathite and anointed king. God promised that an heir of David would reign on his throne forever.

Jesus is that heir, the One the prophets promised would restore the scattered tribes of Israel into a new kingdom. He is “the shepherd of Israel” sung of in today’s Psalm. From His throne in heaven, He has “come to save us.” Today’s Epistle tells us that He is both the Son of David and the only “begotten” Son of God, come “in the flesh.” He is also our “high priest,” from the mold of the mysterious Melchizedek, “priest of God Most High,” who blessed Abraham at the dawn of salvation history.

All this is recognized by John the Baptist when he leaps for joy in his mother’s womb. Elizabeth blesses Mary for her faith that God’s Word would be fulfilled in her.

Mary marks the fulfillment not only of the angel’s promise to her, but of all God’s promises down through history. Mary is the one they await in today’s First Reading, “she who is to give birth.” And the fruit of her womb should bring us joy—she is the mother of our Lord.

God gives us supernatural joy with hope in his promises: there is a certain paradox for those “blessed” by the Lord. Mary was given the “blessedness” of being the mother of the Son of God. That blessedness also would become a sword which pierced her heart as her Son died upon the cross. Anselm, a teacher and Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke these words in a homily: “Without God’s Son nothing could exist; without Mary’s son, nothing could be redeemed.” To be chosen by God is an awesome privilege and responsibility. Mary received both a crown of joy and a cross of sorrow. Her joy was not diminished by her sorrow because it was fueled by her faith, hope, and trust in God and his promises.

Jesus promised his disciples that “no one will take your joy from you.” The Lord gives us a supernatural joy which enables us to bear any sorrow or pain and which neither life nor death can take away. Therefore, we shall put our trust in the Lord Jesus in all the situations of our lives. Lord, increase our faith more as we go through our joys and our sorrows. Let your will be done in our lives.

Love and prayers,

Fr. Charley

There was a reason that thousands came out to hear John the Baptist’s preaching. It had been many hundreds of years since a prophet had spoken out and performed signs in the land of Israel. God had promised his people through the patriarchs of the old covenant (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), and through the prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, etc., and rulers of Israel like Moses and David, that he would send them a Redeemer who would save them from their sins, free them from oppression, fill them with the joy of his presence, and bring them his everlasting kingdom of peace and righteousness. John broke the long silence with the sudden announcement that the Messiah (God’s Anointed One) was about to appear.

The people recognized that John was an extraordinary man of God and a true prophet who spoke in God’s name. They came out to hear the “good news” which he preached to them. And they willingly submitted to his baptism of repentance at the Jordan River. The people in today’s Gospel are “filled with expectation.” They believe John the Baptist might be the messiah they’ve been waiting for. Three times we hear their question: “What then should we do?”

The messiah’s coming requires every man and woman to choose—to repent or not. That’s John’s message and it will be Jesus’, too. John’s message of renewal and repentance was very practical. He told the people three things: first, every follower of God must share what he possesses (his personal goods and resources) with his neighbors, especially with those who lacked the basic necessities of life. Second, John pointed out the sacred duty to give each and every person what is his due and not take from them what rightfully belongs to them. God commands that each person be treated with respect and that honor be given where honor is due. John told the tax collectors that they must not coerce people to pay more tax than what was rightfully owed. John instructed soldiers not to abuse their authority or power to compel people. And third, John exhorted his listeners to be content with what they had and not covet what belonged to others. John basically called the people to turn back to God and to walk in his way of love and righteousness.

Ask ourselves if we put into practice what John told them. We have the obligation to fulfill all those duties in our daily lives, too. We shall ask the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his fire and fulfill the commandments of love of God and neighbor in our daily lives, especially during this Advent Season.

Love and Prayers,

Fr. Charley

Luke is telling us that the story which he is sharing with us is not a myth or a legend. Luke is telling us that Christianity is an historical religion that makes very real historical claims. He is saying that the saving events that he is about to tell us are not divorced from everyday life. They don’t occur “once upon a time.” They took place in a very special time and place. The incarnation means that the Son of God became flesh and dwelt among us in a particular place and a particular time.

Today’s Psalm paints a dreamlike scene—a road filled with liberated captives heading home to Zion (Jerusalem), mouths filled with laughter, tongues rejoicing. It’s a glorious picture from Israel’s past, a “new exodus,” the deliverance from exile in Babylon. It’s being recalled in a moment of obvious uncertainty and anxiety. But the psalmist isn’t waxing nostalgic.

Remembering “the Lord has done great things” in the past, he is making an act of faith and hope—that God will come to Israel in its present need and that He’ll do even greater things in the future.

This is what the Advent readings are all about: We recall God’s saving deeds—in the history of Israel and in the coming of Jesus. Our remembrance is meant to stir our faith, to fill us with confidence that, as today’s Epistle puts it, “the one who began a good work in [us] will continue to complete it” until He comes again in glory. Each of us, the Liturgy teaches, is like Israel in her exile—led into captivity by our sinfulness, in need of restoration and conversion by the Word of the Holy One.

That’s the message of John, introduced in today’s Gospel as the last of the great prophets. But John is greater than the prophets. He’s preparing the way not only for a new redemption of Israel but for the salvation of “all flesh.”

John quotes Isaiah 40:3 to tell us he’s come to build a road home for us, a way out of the wilderness of sin and alienation from God. It’s a road we’ll follow Jesus down, a journey we’ll make, as today’s First Reading puts it, “rejoicing that [we’re] remembered by God.”

Today’s message of the Gospel is: Luke is telling us that John the Baptist is the curtain raiser to the rescue mission of Jesus the Messiah. Against the backdrop of one of the greatest rescue missions in Jewish history—the return from Babylon—God once again is decisively entering human history in this place and at this time, but now for the greatest rescue mission of all.

Love and Prayers,

Fr. Charley

Every Advent, the Liturgy of the Word gives our sense of time a reorientation. There’s a deliberate tension in the next four weeks’ readings—between promise and fulfillment, expectation and deliverance, between looking forward and looking back.

In today’s First Reading, the prophet Jeremiah focuses our gaze on the promise God made to David, some 1,000 years before Christ. God says through the prophet that He will fulfill this promise by raising up a “just shoot,” a righteous offspring of David, who will rule Israel in justice. Today’s Psalm, too, sounds the theme of Israel’s ancient expectation: “Guide me in your truth and teach me. For you are God my savior and for you I will wait all day.”

We look back on Israel’s desire and anticipation knowing that God has already made good on those promises by sending His only Son into the world. Jesus is the “just shoot,” the God and Savior for Whom Israel was waiting. Knowing that He is a God who keeps His promises lends grave urgency to the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel. He evokes the prophet Daniel’s image of the Son of Man coming on a cloud of glory to describe His return as a “theophany,” a manifestation of God. Jesus says we should greet the end-times with heads raised high, confident that God keeps His promises, that our “redemption is at hand,” that “the kingdom of God is near.”

The Advent season which precedes Christmas and Epiphany reminds us that we are a pilgrim people, aliens and exiles in this age who long for our true home with God in his heavenly kingdom, and who await with joyful hope the return of the Lord Jesus at the end of the age. When will the Lord Jesus come again? No one but the Father in heaven knows the day. But it is a certain fact that we are living in the end times, the close of this present age! The end times began with the first coming of Jesus Christ (his Incarnation which we celebrate at Christmas and Epiphany) and culminate in his final return on the Day of Judgment.

We shall always prepare ourselves for the coming of the King on the last day of Judgment. Also, we shall celebrate Christmas with great joy and happiness. We shall always be alert and vigilant, but not passive.

Love and prayers,

Fr. Charley

What’s the truth that Jesus comes to bear witness to in this last Gospel of the Church’s year? It’s the truth that in Jesus God keeps the promise He made to David of an everlasting kingdom, of an heir who would be His Son, “the first born, highest of the kings of the earth.”

In the First Reading in the vision of Daniel, we hear that He comes on “the clouds of heaven”—another sign of His divinity—to be given “glory and kingship” forever over all nations and peoples. In today’s Psalm, the Psalmist says that “He had made the world” and His dominion is over all creation. Today’s Second Reading, taken from the Book of Revelation, quotes these promises and celebrates Jesus as “the faithful witness.” The reading hearkens back to Isaiah’s prophecy that the Messiah would “witness to the peoples” that God is renewing His “everlasting covenant” with David.

But as Jesus tells Pilate, there’s far more going on here than the restoration of a temporal monarchy. In the Revelation reading, Jesus calls Himself “the Alpha and the Omega,” the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. He’s applying to Himself a description that God uses to describe Himself in the Old Testament, in the Book of Isaiah 41:4,6 and 48:12. We read this way—the first and the last, the One who calls forth all generations.

Christ is King and His kingdom, while not of this world, exists in this world in the Church. We are a royal people. We know we have been loved by Him and freed by His blood and transformed into “a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.” As a priestly people, we share in His sacrifice and in His witness to God’s everlasting covenant. We belong to His truth and listen to His voice, waiting for Him to come again amid the clouds.

As St. Paul tells us: Though Jesus “was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness.” He came into this world to take care of the needs of others, not be served, but to serve. We shall also follow His footsteps in our life, that is “As a servant, to always serve others.”

I wish you all a Very Happy THANKSGIVING. We shall have an attitude of gratitude towards God and men always.

With gratitude, love and prayers,

Fr. Charley

Near to His passion and death, Jesus gives us a teaching of hope—telling us how it will be when He returns again in glory.

Today’s Gospel is taken from the end of a long discourse in which He describes tribulations the likes of which haven’t been seen “since the beginning of God’s creation.”

First, human community—nations and kingdoms—will break down. Then the earth will stop yielding food and begin to shake apart. Next, the family will be torn apart from within and the last faithful individuals will be persecuted. Finally, the Temple will be desecrated, the earth emptied of God’s presence.

In today’s reading, God is described putting out the lights that He established in the sky in the very beginning—the sun, the moon and the stars. Into this “uncreated” darkness, the Son of Man, in whom all things were made, will come.

Jesus has already told us that the Son of Man must be humiliated and killed. Here He describes His ultimate victory, using royal-divine images drawn from the Old Testament—clouds, glory, and angels which we see in the Book of Daniel 7:13. He shows Himself to be the fulfillment of all God’s promises to save “the elect,” the faithful remnant.

As today’s First Reading tells us, this salvation will include the bodily resurrection of those who sleep in the dust. We shall pray for the departed souls of our family and friends and especially for the Souls in Purgatory, especially those who do not have anybody to remember or to pray for them. All those who have gone ahead of us may be able to see the Face of God as early as possible.

When we prepare to partake in the Eucharist, we are given a foretaste of these heavenly mysteries that we are called to announce. It is here that we draw our strength and our source. It is through the liturgy that we can live out our call to be heralds of the heavenly mysteries where we can approach everything we do as an opportunity to see Christ and be Christ to another person.

With love and Prayers,

Fr. Charley

We must live by the obedience of faith, a faith that shows itself in works of charity and self-giving. That’s the lesson the two widows are teaching us in today’s readings.

The widow in the First Reading isn’t even a Jew, yet she trusts in the word of Elijah and the promise of his Lord. Facing sure starvation, she gives all that she has, her last bit of food—feeding the man of God before herself and her family.

The widow in the Gospel also gives all that she has, offering her last bit of money to support the work of God’s priests in the Temple.

In their self-sacrifice, these widows embody the love that Jesus last week revealed as the heart of the Law and the Gospel. They mirror the Father’s love in giving His only Son, and Christ’s love in sacrificing Himself on the Cross.

Jesus taught that real giving must come from the heart. A gift that is given with a grudge or for display loses most of its value. But a gift given out of love, with a spirit of generosity and sacrifice, is invaluable. The amount or size of the gift doesn’t matter as much as the cost to the giver. The poor widow could have kept one of her coins, but instead she recklessly gave away all she had! Jesus praised someone who gave barely a penny—how insignificant a sum—because it was everything she had, her whole living. What we have to offer may look very small and not worth much, but if we put all we have at the Lord’s disposal, no matter how insignificant it may seem, then God can do with it and with us what is beyond our reckoning. Do you really know the joy and freedom of giving liberally to God and to neighbor with gratitude and love? We shall put that into practice in everyday life. God is not looking into the amount but into our Heart only.

We shall try to give all that we can to the Lord—not out of a sense of forced duty, but in a spirit of generosity and love.

Today, let us follow the widows’ example, doing what God asks, confident that our jars of flour will not grow empty, nor our jugs of oil run dry. That is God’s promise to us always.

Love and prayers,

Fr. Charley

In the Catholic Church we have the great tradition of praying for all the beloved deceased souls throughout the month of November. It is good to know why we should be praying for the dead.

Death is not an end in itself. Death is not the final thing in the plan of God. St Paul says in Phil 1:6, “I am confident of this, that the one who has begun a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.” Jesus’ mission on Earth was to save you and me, which he has already begun and not yet completed, but it will be completed only on the Day of His Second Coming. Jesus will continue working in us even after our death in order to save us.

Malachi 3:2-3—“But who can endure the Day of his coming? Who can stand firm when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire, like fuller’s lye. He will sit refining and purifying.” As all human beings are sinners, we all have to go through the purifying process of God. How long may this process take? Mt 5:26 says, “Amen, I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.” Our prayers may let God have mercy on our beloved ones. In Job 1:5 we see Job offering a sacrifice of burned offering for the purification of his (living) children. 2 Maccabees 12:46 says, “Thus he (Judas) made atonement for the dead that they might be absolved from their sin.” So, we can offer prayers and sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins of the living and the dead alike. Jesus prayed for those who crucified him, that their sin be forgiven them.

Does God answer the prayers for the dead? Yes! Lazarus is dead for four days. Martha, his sister, prays to Jesus in Jn 11:21-22, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now [even four days after the death of Lazarus] I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” And Jesus answered this prayer by raising Lazarus from the dead.

In Mk 5:21-43 Jairus prays for his sick daughter, who eventually dies. Still later, Jesus answered his prayer by raising the dead girl back to life. In Lk 7:12-15 Jesus answered the tears and cry of a mother, who was a widow from Naim, by raising her dead son back to life. Death is NOT an end in itself, and the dead can listen to the voice of the Lord. If you pray, your beloved deceased souls will be given God’s mercy and heaven!

May the Lord of Mercies grant eternal rest unto all the departed souls. Amen.

Love and Prayers,

Fr. Charley

Today’s Gospel is about a blind man, Bartimaeus, who becomes the first person outside of the Apostles to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. And his healing is the last miracle Jesus performs before entering the holy city of Jerusalem for His last week on earth, according to Mark’s Gospel.

The scene on the road to Jerusalem evokes the joyful procession prophesied by Jeremiah in today’s First Reading. In Jesus this prophecy is fulfilled. God, through the Messiah, is delivering His people from exile, bringing them back from the ends of the earth, with the blind and the lame in their midst.

Jesus, as Bartimaeus proclaims, is the long-awaited Son promised to David. Upon His triumphal arrival in Jerusalem, all will see that the everlasting kingdom of David has come. As we hear in today’s Epistle, the Son of David was expected to be the Son of God. He was to be a priest-king like Melchizedek, who offered bread and wine to God Most High at the dawn of salvation history.

Bartimaeus should be a sign for us. How often Christ passes us by—in the person of the poor, in the distressing guise of a troublesome family member or a burdensome associate, and yet we don’t see Him. Christ still calls to us through His Church, as Jesus sent His Apostles to call Bartimaeus. Yet how often are we found to be listening instead to the voices of the crowd, not hearing the words of His Church.

Today He asks us what He asks Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?” We must be able to tell Christ: “I want to see people in the way that you see them and to be able help them out in their needs and difficulties.”

Love and Prayers,

Fr. Charley

Balu was a very humble and God-fearing man. He was very knowledgeable about many things in the world. One day while he was traveling along the mountainside, he found a piece of green rock on the side of the mountain. As soon as he saw it, he realized that it was a precious stone, and a very costly stone it was. He knew that it was a very expensive gem, but Balu decided to give that precious stone as a great gift to the king. He gave the gemstone as a gift to him, but the King’s advisory team told the king that it was not a gemstone; it was only an ordinary stone meant to deceive the king. The king was so angry with Balu that he had him put in prison and they cut his toes as a punishment. Though they punished him cruelly, Balu would not give up his effort. After a few years, the king died and a new king came in his place. Balu again took the green gem to the new king and presented it to him as a gift. The king called the gem experts and asked them to verify it, and the gem experts said it was the costliest gem in the world. The value of it was huge, and the king was so taken that he called Balu to come to the Palace and receive great gifts of appreciation.

Many of the people we meet are like the gem that Balu found. When we consider their background and behavior, we have not given them the respect and recognition they deserve. The reason for that is that we don’t see the goodness in them. We have to dismiss preconceptions about other people and try to look inside of them and try to understand who they are really.

The story also reminds us that sometimes our goodness, efficiency, and commitments are not known by others. Don’t cry over it. It is because of the inadequacy of others rather than our own inadequacy. Wait for the chance to come. Do not be disappointed. Balu was not disappointed when the first king treated him badly. If we are not aware of the hidden gems within us, how can others have that conviction? So, the first thing is that we have to develop a better awareness and understanding of our own goodness. We must strive to grow those gems continuously.

As Jesus tells us: “For human beings it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” Wait for God’s response; the time will come. Do not be afraid. Whatever God’s will is, that will happen to us. It may take time, but surely it will take place. So, do not be afraid about what human beings say. Depend on God’s will. May God bless you all.

Love and prayers,

Fr. Charley