Making Friends With The Lord Jesus

This valley of tears that we all need to traverse is part of God's plan. The discomforts here should help us aspire for the definitive life in Heaven, where there is all perfection with God. There will be no more need for creatures to satisfy us. Heaven will satiate us without any cloying.

Several things should come to mind when we recall her apparitions to three shepherd children. There is God. God is offended by man's sins. We need to do penance, a lot of penance. God's victory in the end is assured.

We cannot shirk from the responsibility of obeying the Lord's last words on earth prior to ascending to Heaven. Go out to the whole world. We find ourselves set up by the Lord in our positions and roles in society. Ask yourselves how we have preached the Good News. We can do this by practicing the Lord's other commandments, especially that of the New Commandment, namely, Love one another as I have loved you. We should practice this with those around us. That means spirit of service with everyone, absolutely everyone, even with those we have a difficult time with.

The name we need to use to get what we ask for is the Name of Jesus Himself. But this name-dropping assumes we have a relationship with Him. Thus, we need to evaluate how our relationship is with Him. In fact, this is the real reply to all our petitions and prayers, namely, Jesus Christ. Nothing trumps Him as the fruit of our prayers. Having this relationship with Him is the bottom line in our existence. Without this relationship with Him, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hope is the theological virtue we all absolutely need to get to Heaven. This world is only a leg of our trip. We have all these difficulties here, even with joy because we hope in seeing Jesus in the end. We need to shore up our hope in Heaven.

According to the Gospel today, Jesus forewarns His followers of His coming departure. He encourages them despite the loss because they would see each other again anyway. Temporary inconveniences should not mar our cheerfulness in our trip to Heaven. If we keep our hopes in Heaven alive, we can still be joyful there on earth because of the hope we have in Heaven.

More on the Holy Spirit! He will move us to love the truth. He will spur us to be united with God. It is proper of love to be united to the beloved, while what is characteristic of knowledge is that we bring the known object to our minds. We reduce it to fit in our minds in an intentional manner. The Holy Spirit will foster in us to seek to be united to the Truth, Who is the Son of God and the Word.

Losing things we value always gets us thinking about the situations. We will miss those important items, and we are moved to re-evaluate ourselves. Losing Jesus apparently is what Jesus lays down as a condition for the sending of the Paraclete. He will convict us of sin and judgement.

This is how our lives as Christians is to be described. The Gospel today tells us so much about it. We need to be loyal, hardworking, honest, charitable to those it is difficult to love, be diligent when everybody wants to waste time and so forth. It is much easier to do evil. We only need to succumb to the temptations. It is much simpler to destroy than to build. But there it is! The consequences of destroying in horrible and perhaps very expensive. But to build, this is our task as Christians. Karl Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. His characterization of Christianity is unfair. Someone challenged Marx--to bad Marx was already dead at this point--to live as a good Christian for one day and then he will see that Christianity is no drug of the people to put them to hallucinate or render them intoxicated.

The Gospel for the Sixth Sunday of Easter tells us about Jesus' invitation to remain in His Love by following His Commandments, just as He remains in His Father's Love by following His Commandments. His Father wanted Him to die on the Cross to save mankind from sin and death. The acid test of whether we truly love God whom we don't see--it is so easy to claim we love Him--is by checking on how we love the others. Loving the others is crucial because God loves them too. He died for all of us. How is our struggle to love the others?

The Lord forewarns us of what we will face if we are truly followers of His. Persecutions! If we become worldly, then we would not expect these attacks on religion and on the Catholic Faith. What Our Lord taught us in the Beatitudes, for example, sets us in collision course with the values of worldliness and evil. Hence, our sufferings are compounded together with the given difficulties of ordinary life itself. This sad and frustrating state of affairs here in earth should not discourage us. Our hope is enlivened to look forward to that day when we go to see God face to face, for eternity!

Jesus taught more than in the manner of Moses. He taught with personal authority. He did not cite any other authority to back up his teachings and claims. The other teachers of Israel taught quoting scriptures or venerable rabbis or traditions. But Jesus had an authority totally unheard of in the land. He spoke with personal, first-person singular, authority. He had no need of any backing. On top of that, He spoke with total integrity of life. People could see that He first lived what He taught and only then would He teach the people. He declared He was the Way, the Truth and the Life. There was no need to look for another for the truth or the life. No need to go elsewhere. He was the total package.

Since He is Love, He cannot but love us. We do not need to do anything to deserve His love for us. He simply loves us. We are able to love the others when we have been loved first by God. We love God in return by following His Commandments. His Commandments are a gift to us. This gift is a guide for us to blossom as human beings. When a trainer trains his dog to do certain tricks and the dog does them well, the trainer is happy. Something like that is what happens between God and us. We please Him when we follow His instructions.

The Church presents again for our reading and contemplation the allegory of the vine and the branches. We underscore the statement of Jesus that without Him or without being connected to Him as a branch is to its vine, we can do absolutely nothing. Hence, we should appreciate the importance of maintaining heroically our prayer life, which is the same as maintaining a relationship with Him. This is the universal reply He makes to any of our petitions. He affords us a relationship with Him. This is extraordinary!

Jesus tells His followers that He pray for peace for them. This is a peace that the world cannot give. The peace it offers is so shallow and temporary. God's peace is not simply the absence of war. It is deep and life-changing. It makes one confident, secure, ready to die, generous and very happy.

We celebrate today a great saint in the Church. In fact, we recall St. Catherine of Siena who was declared by St. Pope Paul VI in 1970 a Doctor of the Church. Only a few women enjoy this distinction in the Catholic Church. We admire her for her availability to the purposes of the Lord in the politics and state matters of 14th century. The Gospel reveals to us two revelations: Our love for God is measured by how much we adhere to His Commandments; The Advocate or the Holy Spirit will be sent by the Father.

The Gospel of the Fifth Sunday of Easter presents us with the teaching of Jesus regarding Him as the Vine while we are the branches. We are connected to the Vine. A vine is alive with life-giving sap flowing through the branches. We are alive with God's life in us. Cut the branch off and it withers. The allegory includes the Father as the vinedresser Who cares for the Vine. If a branch does not bear fruit, it is useless and cut off. For a branch that bears fruit, the Vinedresser prunes it so that it bears more fruit. We can only be alive with the Life of God in us if we remain in touch with the Vine. For us to become more productive of fruit, we are subjected by God to suffering and pain so that we can grow more fruit. So, let us maintain contact with Jesus to continue to live in Him via prayer life. We can also expect God to send us difficulties so that we can grow in our faith.

To go to Heaven, it is not enough to simply do good. We also need to follow what He taught us. All of what He taught us. Just believing a part only, only shows we do not believe that He is divine. The Gospel also reveals to us that He is the Son and therefore He has a Father. Both are one! This means that they are of one substance. The Son is the Word according to St. John's gospel's prologue. The Word is Logos in Greek. Logos means concept or idea. We can form an idea of ourselves. God looking at Himself, then forms an Idea of Himself. Such Self-concept is so perfect that such Logos would also be as divine as the One who has an Idea of Himself. In the process of knowing, we constitute an idea of what we know. We become one with what we know in an intentional manner. Intentional here means we do not actually become the object we know but only in a conceptual manner.

Jesus asks His apostles not to be troubled. This is the trouble that brings us away from God. Jesus was troubled, especially in the Garden of Gethsemane during the Agony in the Garden. Mary, His Immaculate Mother, was troubled at the celestial greeting of the Archangel Gabriel during the Annunciation. If our troubles bring us to God, then such troubles are fortunate. If our troubles bring us away from God, then we are at fault. lt is worthwhile to handle our troubles adequately by trusting Him and His arrangements of things for us.

With St. Mark's feast day today, we may learn about interpreting the holy scriptures. First off, we need to understand the place of scriptures have in our faith. Having sola scriptura of the Protestant reformation of the 16th century cannot be accepted because the bible did not fall on our laps from nowhere. It was the Church who gathered the different books and put them together according to the Canon. The Canon referred to the official list of divinely inspired books. What determines this is not Sacred Scriptures alone. This last does not account for itself. It is the living teaching authority of the Church, as mandated by Jesus Himself. He said that they go out and preach. He did not say that they write down things. There was a time for the writing, but only in the context of Sacred Tradition, that is, the transmission of the faith by word of mouth.