visible rhetoric

This Sunday when you enter the cathedral you will feel a little bit spooky and you begin to wonder whether the parish priest decided to celebrate halloween a day after April Fool's. No, its not halloween.  This Sunday, the Fifth Sunday of Lent is Passiontide Sunday, the Sunday we begin using the Preface of the Lord's Passion.  From here on, the gospel according to John will recall the growing tension that would mark the relationship of Jesus and the Jewish authorities until it culminates in Good Friday.  And as an added feature of this Sunday, all crucifixes, all sacred images (except the stations of the cross) are veiled with a purple cloth. The veils have a purpose and some of them will be explained in the homilies by our mass celebrants, I presume.  So I won't dwell on all those reasons.  (Otherwise you won't listen anymore to the homilies.) Veils may make the already spooky cathedral spookier (I remember a high school seminarian who told me that when he w...

Two things from psalm 106 our responsorial psalm.  First when Israel worshiped the golden calf the psalm says, "they exchanged their glory for the image of a grass-eating bullock.  They exchanged their glory."  When we commit sin we do not debase God, rather we debase ourselves.  When we hate, when we take revenge, when we kill, we do not debase God, we debase our humanity, we are making ourselves less human.  This is the effect of sin.  Sin does not harm God, we harm ourselves by sin.

Today we reflect on our psalm, psalm 30.  The fathers of the church see in this psalm the joy of Easter.  In fact this psalm is traditionally entitled as " Christ gives thanks to the Father for his glorious Resurrection.”  So early on, while still in the middle of lent we are already given a glimpse of the joy of Easter. We can see this in the contrast presented by the psalm, " For his anger lasts but a moment; a lifetime, his good will.   At nightfall, weeping enters in, but with the dawn, rejoicing. You changed my mourning into dancing;   O LORD, my God, forever will I give you thanks." The mood oscillates from the terrible and crushing experience of defeat to an experience of liberation and joy of victory.

Today we reflect on Psalm 23, the most famous psalm, the all-time favorite psalm. If you are keen in studying this psalm you will notice that in the first part the psalmist speaks of God in the third person – "the Lord is my shepherd, he gives me repose, he leads me to restful waters, he refreshes my soul, he guides me." Then right in the middle of the psalm, the psalmist changes tone and begins talking to God, instead of talking about God.  And so the psalmist says, "f or you are at my side , with your rod and your staff ; You spread the table before me; you anoint my head with oil."  If you notice the shift happens when we reach that point which says "for you are at my side" "for you are with me." This Hebrew phrase is exactly at the middle.  If you count the Hebrew words before this phrase the total would be 26 words.  If you count the Hebrew words after this phrase, the total would again be 26.

This Sunday is Laetare Sunday.  So many things had been said about the color and the antiphon of this Sunday and so many still will be said about them today, and so I would like to be excused.  Instead I would like to write something that I just discovered about this Sunday and I hope it would add another level of meaning to what we already knew so well. Unknown to many and to me, this Sunday is also called "Dominica de Rosa" or Rose Sunday.  It is not referring primarily to the color of the vestments which is old rose (Not pink, ok! [which is the reason why some priests may not be so at home with the color or wearing it, they elicit some smiles from the faithful] By the way, my professor in liturgy once told us in one of his classes that universally, pink is the male color and blue is feminine [in the Philippines, it's the other way around], which explains the Virgin Mother's color.  Is this true?). 

Today in this 3 rd Sunday of lent, in the middle of lent Psalm 95 a royal psalm is read to us.  This psalm is familiar to all of us since this is usually the first psalm recited in the morning.  If you notice in the psalm there is a call to praise, yet there is an admonition, a reprimand; there is worship and honor and also there is the reminder of temptation and failure.  In Israel, these two are combined - celebration and castigation; joy and penitence; praise and admonition.  It is a reminder that even though the water, the life-giving water of which our readings today are replete today, even though the saving waters of baptism are given us, life is still at best a struggle – good but not yet; holy but not yet; devout but not yet; saintly but not yet.  

This is one psalm, psalm 103, where David is not talking to anybody in particular.  He is not exhorting people to join him in praising God.  No, he is not.  David is actually talking to himself.  He is telling himself, " Bless the LORD, O my soul; and all my being, bless his holy name.   Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits." We are also doing this, talking to ourselves about people, about a situation and even like David, we talked to ourselves about God.  Probably this is what most of you have done today, talking to yourself about God, talking to yourself about your situation, about your stay here in this seminary. It is said that “no one is more influential in your life than you are, because no one talks to you more than you do.” (Paul Tripp) We often talk to ourselves and because we often talk to ourselves we influence ourselves more, we persuade ourselves more, we stimulate ourselves more, we motivate and change ourselves mo...

Today we reflect on psalm 103 and in this psalm there are two words which describes God's relationship with us.  First is the Hebrew word hesed. Hesed means loyal love, it is faithfulness, it is unchanging love, it is love which knows no seasons.  Hesed means he is true to one's promises, she is true to her word.  Remember the time we were small when adults would tease us telling us ay hala mo, wala na si mama mo, ginbayaan ka na ni papa mo.   And we would cry or at the very least we would frantically seek them out if only to be reassured that they are still there.  That is why hesed is a word that can be found in psalms that are usually said as morning prayers. Why so?  Because we have survived the night, we have gone through darkness, and at dawn, when light can be seen again, and all can be seen clearly again, hesed is praised, hesed is recognized. We were not abandoned, nobody left anyone, people are loyal, people are faithful. It is steadfast love, ...

One of the thoughts that gave me strength when I was in terrible pain because of arthritis was not the thought of a powerful God, or of a miracle working God.  Rather it was the simple belief that God too was in pain when I was in pain, that God too was crying with me when I cried in my frustrations, that God was also angry as I was angry because of my disability.  God may not have healed me but he was with me in my pain. This is also the kind of God we meet on our way of the cross.  It is not a God who will carry the cross for us so that we can live a life of convenience.  It is not a God who will not allow us to slip or fall so that we won't bruise our legs.  It is not a God who will miraculously save us from crisis and trials and pain and suffering.   This is not the God we will meet today.  Instead we will meet a God who leads the way of the cross - he stumbles with us, he is pained when we are pained, he is grieved when we are crying, he...

In Psalm 50 our responsorial psalm in this mass, God accuses Israel of becoming superficial in their faith.  They recite his statutes and profess his covenant with their mouth and yet they cast behind their backs the word of God.  In a single word this is what we refer to as hypocrisy.  Lain ang hambal, lain ang ginabuhat; palasimba pero palalibak man; naga-hatag limos sa nagakinahanglan pero wala nagahatag sang nagakaigo sa nagatrabaho. Our actions do not coincide with what we believe; our decisions are not informed and formed by our faith.  There is a dichotomy, a separation between belief and deed.  There is a wide gap between faith and action. Psalm 50 therefore reminds us of the dangers we encounter in our effort to become religious, in our effort to become godly and nowhere is this danger so manifest and so rabid than in lent, in the practices of lent.