Tag: Sunday Reflection

We know that children learn more with the eyes than with the ears. The Christian life of the parents is the best way to give catechesis to the children.

What preparations were running in heaven for the first Christmas! The opera of the preparation for the birth of the Lord is a story of extraordinary joy.

John the Baptist not only prepares the way but also gives way to the Messiah. John is a blameless holy man and an appreciated prophet. People could have easily mistaken him for the Messiah, and some did indeed as we see in the gospel today. He could have taken advantage of that! But he gives way. Giving way is the noblest way.

John the Baptist is a good example for all preachers and leaders who follow Christ. The invitation to every Christian and every minister of the Church is to rewrite the sender’s address and the delivery address to Christ and to the people; not (selfie) to self-address. If the preaching diverts the attention from the message to the messenger, it is no more the gospel that we preach and all efforts will go vain and fruitless.

Expectant waiting needs a good reason because waiting will test our endurance. The ability to wait and pray is a capital that can start us well into a great divine enterprise. Let us begin that enterprise in this Advent season.

We do like closure, don’t we? We have all left a movie or finished a book with a sense of frustration because it did not end adequately. Perhaps, it just stopped without really ending, or left some scenes hanging. Scripture agrees with our frustration. It tells us that as surely as God called human history into being, God will bring it to conclusion. Time ends at the feet of Christ the king of our hearts.

Hell exists, but it is not a place created by God to punish bad people at the end of life. It is a condition of unhappiness and despair resulting from sin. The question, therefore, is not who will be counted as sheep and goats at the end of the world, but on what occasions today do we behave as sheep or as goats? We are sheep when we love our sisters and brothers; we are goats when we neglect them.

Let us re-reflect on this passage: The master entrusts his possessions to the most trusted servants. He knows their abilities, attitudes, competences, and according to these, he establishes how much to assign to each. This gentleman is clearly Christ who, before leaving the world, handed over all his goods to his disciples.

Everything good we do for the sake of Christ gives us the presence of the Holy Spirit, but prayer, which is always within our reach, is a privileged way of helping others in need. Let us pray for our brothers and sisters in the Holy Land, both Palestinians and Israelis.

If the coin had to be “returned” to Caesar because on it was stamped the face of his master, the human person must be “returned” to God. The human person is the only creature on whom the face of God is imprinted. They are sacred and no one can take them as their own. Those who make them their own (enslave, oppress, exploit, dominate, use them as objects…) should immediately return them to their Lord.