Monday, January 29, 2024

Why is Jesus' Ancestry so dysfunctional?

As Christians, we believe that Jesus is God.  This fundamental belief makes it easy for us to accept and follow many things in the Christian tradition, and it includes the many hymns that we hear during Christmas time.  And because we believe that Jesus is God, we also silently have the belief that Jesus’ family tree and bloodline must have been perfect.  However, it was Raymond Brown, the renowned biblical scholar, who said that Jesus’ bloodline was really far from perfect, and we need to reject thoughts that Jesus must have been descended from a line of perfect, scandal-free and bad history.  And this is insightfully true, because there is much in his origins that is rather strikingly jolting, perhaps as shocking as any contemporary church scandal.

 

Within the genealogy of Jesus, the there are in fact many sinners, liars and schemers, like there are in the lives of many of the canonized saints, honest people, and the heroic lives of the men and women of faith.

 

In Jesus’ genealogy, there are a number of men and women who were not the stalwarts of the love, charity, faithfulness and purity of Jesus.  To be clear, there was Abraham who unfairly banished Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, who rationalized that God favors some people over others; and then there’s Jacob who stole his brother Esau’s birthright; and of course, David who committed adultery and then had Bathsheba’s husband Uriah the Hittite, murdered so as to cover up an unwanted pregnancy David created in order to marry her.

 

And of course, there were the few women named in the genealogy who were remarkable for the wrong reasons.  The gospels don’t mention Sarah, Rebekah or Rachel who were regarded as holy women.  Rather, the following get mentioned – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.    Tamar was a Canaanite woman who seduces her father-in-law so that she can have a child.  Rahab was another Canaanite woman (an outsider) who is in fact a prostitute.  Ruth was another outsider (a Moabitess) and of course, Bathsheba, the woman David commits adultery with who loses her husband when David plans to have him murdered to cover up his secret love affair.

 

Isn’t it interesting to know that these four named women were  either strange or scandalous, yet they paved the way to give us Jesus.  And it is no accident that these four woman are linked to Mary, Jesus’ mother, since she too found herself in a taboo pregnancy and in a marital situation that was deemed strange and perculiar. 

 

Whenever I get to read the genealogy of Jesus at Mass, I always tend to glace at the congregation to see if there are any shocked or flabbergasted looks as the names of Jesus’ ancestors are read out.  Without a doubt, there would be quite a few faces that are wide awake, but puzzled whenever some names are mentioned, and it is not because of my bad pronunciation of their names.  They know that some of these names are quite simply taboo to be listed in Jesus’ genealogy.  Quite often, I come to the conclusion that they would rather that Jesus come from a perfect and faultless, and scandal-free bloodline.  Yet, the axiom that “God writes straight with crooked lines” is true, even where Jesus is concerned.  There are some of the names in the list that have nary any specialness or significance.  Jesus’ human blood was a result of a mixture of the great and the small, the holy and the not-so-holy as well.

 

The hard truth is that we may have very high standards for Christ.  But there’s a downside to this – we may be forgetting that we too, are also responsible to continue the story of Jesus’ incarnation.

 

Jesus’ genealogy shows that God did not get stopped by the scheming and the scandalous.  God uses the pure and the impure.  This raises our own standards in life for ourselves, because we too, can be usable by God to write his way into the life of this world.  We cannot too easily exclude ourselves from being people who can be effectively used by God to bring his mercy and love into a world that aches and longs for God’s presence in its very existence.  Don’t write ourselves off too easily. 

 

This gives us so much hope.  None of us is too sinful to be used by God to continue the incarnation of Jesus in the world.  God can use us, simple or dysfunctional that we think we are, to bring the presence of Jesus to the world.  And I believe that this hidden truth is a truism that has not been addressed loudly enough to give everyone hope in this life and it should not be a hidden secret kept because of the fear of embarrassment.  If it is, it will be a shame.

 

Friday, September 22, 2023

The Overiding Despair of Boredom


There is a part of me that has his eyes on myself and sometimes makes certain judgments based on what he sees.  It has to be that vain part of me that is way too concerned about how the self is behaving and how others see me.  Lately, it has been quite clear to me that this other self of me sees Fr Luke as a person who is feeling the dreariness of being bored in life.  How can one emerge healthily if one views life as somewhat boring and unexciting?  I believe this is a perennial question that bothers and upsets many many people.

 

My spiritual readings are wide and varied.  One of the things I read often are the spiritual musings of the spiritual gurus in life.  The acclaimed writer and thinker Fr Ronald Rolheiser is one of my regular pursuits, and it was most endearing to find that he wrote a blog on boredom.  In the way that a master of novices enlightens the minds of the disciples under him, Fr Rolheiser’s writing enlightened me with his insight on boredom.  In a nutshell, he asks his readers why is it that despite the world giving us human beings all sorts of gadgets and technological devices to link us to everything, we are still not insulated against boredom?  The result is that we still wrestle with boredom because stimulation doesn’t make for meaning.  We are bored because so many of us do not take a deeper interest in people and things. 

 

I am not sure if it is because I exist now as a Catholic Priest that I find that lately I have been taking a deeper and deeper interest in the very person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  In my moments of prayer and meditation, I am often just focused on the very life of Jesus, and in my mind’s eye, see him in his ministry activities, moving from place to place and speaking to the people of Israel, loving them, touching them and healing them.  But I do not do one thing that is even more necessary.  I do not enter into his mind and see as Jesus sees.  I only observe as an outsider, akin to a reporter viewing an activity so that he can write a report worthy of being published on paper for others to read.

 

Fr Rohr tells us that the word interest is derived from two Latin words: inter (inside) and esse (being) which, when combined, connote being inside of something.  This means that things are interesting when we are interested enough to really get inside of them.  The key to my being no longer bored in life is to get inside of the mind and heart of Jesus when I enter into my moments of meditation.

 

I realise that I may have been experiencing boredom in life largely because I was too internally impoverished and self-centered to take a genuine interest in the people I encounter and in the case of my prayer, when I fail to take a genuine interest in the person of Jesus.  And it was Einstein who said that ‘Experience is not what happens to us, it’s what we do with that happens to us’

 

This enlightenment puts a whole new dimension into my spiritual life.  It makes going to the Adoration Room such a large and expansive encounter.  I pray that you, my reader, are able to comprehend and are inquisitive enough to want to pursue this journey in your spiritual walk in life.  It will change everything for you, God willing. 

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Forgiveness is often overrated and under applied in life

As a priest who very frequently hears the confessions of penitents, I must admit that I very seldom hear my penitents confess that they have withheld the forgiveness of someone or a group of people who had caused them some pain and turmoil some time ago.  It’s not that these hurts do not occur in people, but it does take a special grace from God to allow people who have been hurt in the past, to look at the hurt that they have nursed in their hearts, and make that often painful decision to let that pain go by extending the needed forgiveness to their tormentors.  I have asked some people why is it that past hurts are so difficult to forgive and let go of.  The answer takes me often by surprise, leaving me somewhat dumbfounded.  The most common answer is that they haven’t heard the apology from their tormentors, causing them to withhold the extension of the balm of forgiveness.  I say that it is a balm because only when forgiveness is given from a willing heart that it truly becomes something that heals and soothes the aching heart.  This is also chiefly because true forgiveness is not a quid-pro-quo agreement, where the forgiveness is extended is only dependent on the hearing of a sincere word or act of sorrow and apology.  I say this with firmness because I am truly convinced that forgiveness in its purest and selfless form can only come when it is a decision to love. 

 

While I am quite aware that deciding to love parties that have caused pain and hurt in the heart is an enormous and hugely challenging effort that is more than herculean, Jesus himself made this clear in his teaching.  He addressed this when he gave us the Lord’s Prayer.  Jesus made it clear that forgiveness becomes singularly the most important of all virtues, and it does decide whether we go to heaven or not.  It was Fr Ron Rolheiser who said that our place at the eternal banquet of heaven is only open to us if we are open to eating with everyone who is willing to sit down everyone – including those who may have been our chief persecutors on this earth.  Only we can open our hearts sufficiently to sit down with everyone for eternity.

 

The character of Jennifer (played by Ali MacGraw) had a very dangerous remark about love in the movie Love Story.  She told Oliver (played by Ryan O’Neil) that “love means never having to say you’re sorry).  If there is a dangerous line that should never be adopted as truth, it is this line.  Not having to say “I’m sorry” in a relationship doesn’t mean that there is love.  Love is when you are so aware that you must not do anything that would cause you to apologise in the end.  If love means never having to say “I’m sorry”, then the sacrament of reconciliation in the Catholic Church should not even exist.  The truth is that each time a penitent enters a confessional, he or she is apologizing to God for having acted wrongly in life.  If we do not love God, it makes the confession of sins superfluous.

 

So, if after reading this blog, you realize that you have been carrying a heavy burden of unforgiveness in your heart, you may be traveling with a bit too much unnecessary baggage.  You will walk with a greater degree of lightness in your heart after you have made the decision to forgive by extending love to your enemies in life.  Hear God reminding you to love your enemies, as it prepares you a place in Heaven’s eternal banquet of love. 

 

Forgive, and travel light.

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Love is not just a feeling. It is a decision that changes everything.

As a confessor-priest, I have heard so many confessions that expose the deepest depths of the penitent’s hearts.  While they truly are varied in what they have been struggling with, whenever it comes to the great challenges of a person, one of the most common angst is that many of the penitents have a great struggle when it comes to loving those who are close to them.  These could be members of their own family, or even those to whom these penitents are married to.  What is common is that many of them tell me that they do not ‘feel’ like loving.  I have a strong suspicion that this is the crux of the problem.  So many people only love when they ‘feel’ like loving.  Many emotions contribute to this feeling – emotions like being light-headed, being warm in the heart, or hearing over and over again the usual words that people utter when they are expressing their love and concern for the other.  While they are not wrong in themselves, just basing love on such feelings isn’t really love at a deep level.

 

What constitutes love is far more than just feelings alone.  Love is truly a decision that one makes to love another, regardless of how great the feelings are that well up in the depths of our hearts.  One spiritual guru I had the benefit of knowing in my Catholic life mentioned this “decision to love” when he taught about how we develop our love for God.  It is basically a decision that the disciple makes in the heart to love God who is not seen with the eye.  This decision to love surpasses the many challenges that any disciple of Jesus may face in the journey of growing to know and love the immutable God.  Certainly, challenges can come in the form of feeling desolate and maybe even abandoned by God.  But when the relationship of love is one that is based on a decision to love, these desolations should not be things that can cause a disciple of Christ to renounce or relinquish that all important relationship with God.  In fact, it is in being persistent in deciding to love God despite all these challenges that will show how strong one’s love of God is.  This principle can be easily applied to the times one devotes to prayer in life.  People pray for many different reasons, but one of the chief reasons to pray to God is because one loves God.  To base the rationale for prayer on the feelings that one gets when praying, or the delight that it gives to the heart, are very flimsy and weak reasons for prayer.  In fact, the theological virtues of faith, hope and love need to surpass any other reasons for spending time in prayer to God.

 

When we reduce love to anything else other than a firm decision to love, we make it something so unstable and flimsy.  And I believe that this is the main problem with so many people who are unable to reach out to their family and fellow man when it comes to displaying stable and strong love.  So many are relying on the feelings that they have in their hearts for these people who God has placed in their lives.  Once a person truly understands that love is more a decision than the feelings that loving others give their hearts, the slightest reason to not love the other becomes the reason one gives up on living in steadfast love toward the other.  If this is true for the link between two or more human beings, it is far more true for the link between a human person and God.  This principle is the same for those who transgress another person in life.  Forgiveness is hard, but it is made more meaningful when the forgiveness is based on the fact that one has made a decision to love, rather than just sentiments which are fleeting and subjective. 

 

I am not concerned with who reads my posted blogs on this website, but whoever it is who has logged in to today’s post, I sincerely hope that it sheds new light on how important it is that we base our love toward those who are in our family and maybe even work circles that we should move toward basing our relationships with these people on a decision to love.  It doesn’t just make loving more meaningful, but it also makes the pain of forgiveness when wronged less of a struggle.  On top of this, we need to frequently reflect on the fact that God has made a divine decision to love us when he made us.  God doesn’t need to love us, but because it was based on the goodness of God’s will, God’s love becomes so much more meaningful to us.  Our living just and righteous lives then becomes something that we naturally want to do in order to return this undeserving love of God to its divine origins. 

 

When we come to this realization, each time we gaze upon a crucifix with the corpus of Christ nailed to it, our hearts ought to beat anew with a strong heartbeat of love.