PAN DE LA SEMANA

Catholic Homily / Sunday Reflections / Sunday Worship Guide 5th Sunday of Lent(B) March 29, 2009 Readings: Jer 31:31-34 / Heb 5:7-9 /Jn 12:20-33 The apostle Philip must have exuded some kind of inner resourcefulness that gave people around him the impression he could lead them to things or persons they were looking for. Today, we are told that some Greeks approached him asking for advice on where to find Jesus, saying to him, “We would like to see Jesus.” The same resourceful Philip, we are told elsewhere, was the one whom the Lord asked, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” (Jn 6:5) Philip, as practical as he was resourceful, had a ready answer: “Two hundred days wages would not be enough for each of them to have a little bit.” It turned out, however, that Andrew the fisherman, who had a quick eye for opportunity, was the one who “discovered” that there was a young man who had a few loaves and some fish with him. I have a couple of curious insights in today’s Gospel passage...

Sunday Morning Worship / Gospel Reflection / Catholic Homily 4th Sunday of Lent Year B March 22, 2009 It was the lowest point in the history of the chosen people of God! Worse than the situation they were in, there was none… being on exile, being far from the land promised to their forefathers, far from the temple, far from what they have gotten used to, far from the familiar sights and sounds of home, far from the security that comes from the knowledge that what one does is never foreign, never strange to anybody around him or her. The chosen people of God were down in the depths of communal humiliation and suffering… at Babylon, where the purity of their faith could not find perfect expression. “ By the rivers of Babylon, there they sat and wept, on the poplars that grew there, there they hung up their harps.” On top of all this, Jerusalem, the holy city was left in ruins, destroyed by the gentile conquerors. The Israelites, for all intents and purposes, were “pitched past pitch o...

Catholic Homily / Sunday Reflection 3rd Sunday of Lent - Year B March 15, 2009 We humans seem to have it in our heads clearly enough… the answer to evil is retribution. Anybody guilty of doing wrong ought to be punished. The more impulsive among us would demand immediate retribution, as in the case of capital punishment for “heinous crimes.” The more pacifist among us, especially those whose faiths have been hijacked by New Age doctrine would rather believe that the evil one does already has a built-in retribution mechanism in the very act itself. What goes around comes around, and it would just be a matter of time when karmic retribution would haunt the doer of the evil deed, so they say. The former takes the act of retribution actively into one’s own hands… “an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth”… Revenge, many times violent, is the way to go for these people who think that every action demands an equal, (more often, it is unequal) and opposite reaction. This is behind the populari...

Catholic Homily / Sunday Reflection 2nd Sunday of Lent (B) March 8, 2009 Something must be wrong here somewhere! God must be kidding. Or He must have missed some little detail somewhere. Why did He have to give, only to get it back cruelly after? Why the gift of Isaac to old Abraham and then ask him to do the ultimate sacrifice? It just does not make sense. There is simply no logic here, no rhyme, nor reason to it all. We all are familiar with these questions. Most of us, if not all – who have lived a life beyond celebrating birthdays with cake, clowns, chocolate, and cotton candies galore have gone face to face with the mystery of suffering, the unfathomable reality of pain and loss and disappointment and disillusionment. We know well enough by experience… that at times, things just do not add up; events in our lives just do not follow cut-and-dried rules, no matter how simplistically, at times, certain newfangled doctrines would try to explain them away so facetiously. Life, an...