Monday, January 28, 2013

4TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (C)


They rose up, drove him out of the town,and led him to the brow of the hill to hurl him down headlong.

Lk 4:21-30

See also >>> Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2010

FROM G. B. CAIRD


Jesus' announcement that the messianic age had dawned was received at first with rapt attention and excited comment, but when the people began to realize that he had incidentally laid claim to central position for himself in the inauguration of God's reign admiration turned first to doubt, then to hostility.

Their earthbound eyes saw in him only the son of Joseph, and it did not occur to them that he might also be Son of God. Jesus saw that behind their scepticism lay injured pride. 'Physician, heal yourself' was a popular proverb, akin to 'Charity begins at home'; but it had an apt reference to the present situation. The people of Nazareth felt that, if the son of Joseph had anything to offer, his own home town should have had the first benefit of it. But those who stand upon their rights and insist on preferential treatment are not likely to appreciate one who offers the chance to spend and be spent in the service of others and of the Gospel which leaves no room for privilege.

The stories of Elijah and Elisha should, indeed, have taught them that with God charity begins wherever there is found human need to call it forth and faith to receive it, irrespective of class or race. In fact, however, the suggestion that Gentiles could be admitted to God's kingdom produced an outburst of nationalist fervor which would have ended in the death of Jesus had the crowd not been overawed by the sheer majesty of his commanding presence.

Monday, January 21, 2013

3rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME


“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” 
Lk 1:1-4; 4:14-21

G. B. CAIRD


Mark records the rejection of Jesus by the people of Nazareth almost at the end of the first year of his ministry (Mark 6:1-6). Luke's account is probably an independent version of the same incident (vv. 22b and 24 may have been added from Mark), and implies a previous ministry of some duration in Capernaum. Nevertheless he places the incident at the beginning of his story of the Galilean ministry, because it announces the pattern which the ministry is to follow, and for this reason he has condensed into a brief compass events which may have taken longer to develop.

Having repudiated in his temptations the various false conceptions of Messiahship current among the Jews, Jesus publishes his commission to bring in God's year of Jubilee. It is greeted first with enthusiasm and then with doubt, and finally threatened with mob violence when he hints at the inclusion of the Gentiles within God's purpose of grace. The rest of the Gospel is simply the working out of this program.

Jesus claims that the scripture has been fulfilled in their hearin. They are listening to the promised preaching, the good news of which the prophet spoke. He has not merely read the scripture: as King' messenger he has turned it into a royal proclamation of amnesty and release. He is the Servant of the Lord, sent to announce to Israel that “'Your God reigns” (Is. 5:27); and that this kingly power of God is t be exercised in pardon, healing, and liberation. Beyond all this the reader of the Gospel is expected to recognize echoes of Jesus’ baptism experience, which would be missed by the Nazareth congregation.

Jesus' announcement that the messianic age had dawned was received at first with rapt attention and excited comment, but when the people began to realize that he had incidentally laid claim to central position for himself in the inauguration of God's reign admiration turned first to doubt, then to hostility.

Monday, January 14, 2013

FEAST OF THE STO. NINO

The Gospel as the same as that of the Holy Family.

click here for the explanation >>> Holy Family. Sto. Nino

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Baptism of the Lord


“You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
Lk 3:15-16, 21-22

G. B. CAIRD


John was a great man. But his greatest contribution to the kingdom of God was one of which he himself was quite unconscious: he excited to open flame the hidden fires in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. The stories of the baptism and temptations must have been told to the disciples by Jesus himself. The pious ingenuity of the early Church could no more have created these stories than the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. On this subject Luke has two pertinent editorial comments. Jesus was praying: the rending heaven, the descent of the dove, the voice are all part of a religious experience which belonged to Jesus' life of private converse with God. But the Spirit descended in bodily form, i.e. not in hallucination or fantasy, but in real event, spiritual and private, but nonetheless objective.

Jesus also was baptized. Why? To be baptized was to ask God's forgiveness, and it is the uniform witness of the New Testament that Jesus had no sins of his own to confess (Acts 3:14, 2 Cor. 5:21, 1 Pt. 1:9, Heb. 7:26, John 8:46). In his own teaching there is no suggestion that he ever experienced the alienation from God which is the most baleful consequence of sin. Yet his scathing attacks on empty formalism forbid us to believe that he would have undergone baptism unless the ceremony had held for him, as for others, a profound significance. The story of his baptism, brief as it is, gives us Jesus' own answer to this question.

The voice from heaven addressed Jesus in a composite quotation from scripture (Ps. 27, Isa. 42:1). Psalm 2 proclaims the accession of the anointed king, who is to rule the nations with a rod of iron. Isa. 42:1-6 is the first of a series of prophecies about the Servant of the Lord, who has been chosen to carry true religion to the Gentiles and who, in achieving this mission, must suffer indignity, rejection, and death.

Thus the words which he heard must have meant to Jesus that he was being designated to both these offices, “anointed…with the Holy Spirit and with power (Acts 10:37; cf. Luke 4:18), sent out to establish the reign of God, not with the iron scepter but with patient and self-forgetful service. Remembering Luke's story of the boy Jesus, we cannot suppose that all this now flashed upon him as a new and startling revelation, that up to this moment it had never occurred to him that God had singled him out for a special vocation. The baptismal experience represented the end of a long development, of deepening appreciation of the divine fatherhood and his own filial responsibility, of growing insight into his mission and the world's need, of meditation on the meaning of the scriptures and their application to himself

Jesus went to be baptized, then, not for private reasons, but as a man with a public calling. John had summoned all Israel to repentance, and with Israel Jesus too must go. He dwelt in the midst of a people with unclean lips and could not separate himself from them. Rather he must be fully identified with them in their movement towards God. If he was to lead them into God's kingdom, he himself must enter it by the only door open to them. He must be their representative before he could be their king. He must be numbered with the transgressors before he could see the fruit of the travail of his soul (Isa. 53:11-12). The words from heaven were more than a: divine appointment: they were the divine approval of the course to which Jesus had committed himself in accepting baptism. To him who had chosen to identify himself with his people in their need and their expectation the ratifying voice declared, “Yes! That is what it means to be my Son, to be my Anointed One, to be my Servant.”