A Jesuit Adventure

  Dear Friends, today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity and the readings fittingly give us an insight into the nature of God. But before we get to the readings a little note on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Right at the outset we need to acknowledge that the Trinity is absolute mystery, it transcends our human capacity for understanding. However, from the Scriptures and the tradition of the Church, we believe that God is Triune. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are coequal and coeternal and distinct from each other. There are three persons in One God. One of the most important aspects of the Holy Trinity is the relationality between the three persons. In the Trinitarian communion, there is complete equality. No higher, no lower; no before, no after; no superior, no inferior. As all of us are created in the image and likeness of God, God who is the Trinity, God who is communion, by nature we all are communitarian. We cannot live in isolation. We are made to ...

My dear friends today we celebrate the Solemnity of Pentecost. The narrative in the Acts of the Apostles is a vivid description replete with violent wind, tongues of fire and being filled with the Holy Spirit. However, to appreciate the significance of this event we need to look back at the meaning of this festival in the Old Testament. Pentecost also known as the feast of Weeks or First Fruits or Shavuot occurs 50 days after Passover. The word Pentecost comes from the Greek pentēkostēs meaning ‘fiftieth’ (day). This feast was important for two reasons. First, it was a celebration at the beginning of the grain harvest. At this feast, the Hebrews offered their first fruits of the harvest to the Lord and second, this feast also commemorated the first giving of the law on Mount Sinai (Ex. 19-20). Pentecost was one of the three major Jewish feasts, along with the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles. For us Christians, Jesus is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets and therefore ...

  My dear friends, on this Seventh Sunday of Easter we are celebrating the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord and the readings therefore focus on the ascension and the mission command given by Jesus. The Ascension though a Solemnity is generally overlooked in comparison to other feasts, hence, we need to look at the significance of the Ascension. First, Jesus’ ascension is the reason that he can send the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:33). Also, it is because of his ascension that Jesus can give the gifts of repentance and forgiveness of sins. “God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Saviour, that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.” (Acts 5:31) lastly, the ascended and enthroned Christ cares for his suffering people as they bear witness to him. We see this when Stephen becomes the first martyr of the Christian church.  In the first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles, the apostles are to wait in Jerusalem for baptism with the Holy Spirit a...

  My dear friends on this sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A the readings focus on the role of the Holy Spirit and the universal nature of the Church. Philip the Evangelist was one of the seven men chosen to take care of the administrative tasks. In the 1st reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles, we see that though Philip was successful in his preaching to the Samaritans, the Holy Spirit didn’t descend on them. It leaves us wondering what went wrong with their baptism. Was it necessary for Peter and John to be present there? As the text itself doesn’t offer any explanations we need to analyse the text in its context to explore some possible answers. Historically, the Jews and Samaritans were not on friendly terms as the Jews considered the Samaritans impure after Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and repopulated the area with foreigners. We need to keep in mind that this reading is set at a time when the early church believed that Jesus was the Messiah only fo...

Conflict management and organisational development – not words that you would expect to hear in the Bible. But that’s precisely what the readings on this Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A present before us.  In the first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles, we witness the beginnings of friction in the early church community. After Pentecost, the apostles were completely given in to the ministry of preaching and healing and they were witnessing mass conversions much to the chagrin of the Jewish authorities. The Hellenists were immigrant Greek-speaking Christians who had adopted elements of Greek culture. The church had established a system of daily distribution to provide for widows and since the believers had pooled their resources there shouldn’t have been a problem. However, the Greek believers thought that the church was discriminating against their widows in the daily distribution. This discrimination could be financial or perhaps even social – related to the distr...

  Three weeks ago we celebrated Easter and if you were at the Easter Vigil mass then you would have noticed that in the liturgy there was a moment when we all stood with lighted candles in our hands and renewed our baptismal promises. The celebrant began by saying “Dear brothers and sisters, through the Paschal Mystery we have been buried with Christ in Baptism, so that we may walk with him in newness of life. And then he asks: Do you renounce Satan and all his works and all his empty show?? Do you renounce sin, so as to live in the freedom of the children of God? Do you renounce the lure of evil, so that sin may have no mastery over you? On this fourth Sunday of Easter Year A the first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles highlights a very important aspect of our Christian Life - Baptism and our turning to God. In the reading, we see the beginnings of the first mass conversion movement in Christian history. Filled with the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Pe...

My dear friends on this Third Sunday of Easter, the readings highlight the connection between the resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and make us reflect on the presence of the risen Lord in our life. The first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles is the latter part of Peter’s sermon following the powerful experience of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The first part of Peter’s sermon which is not covered in today’s reading is about the fulfilment of prophet Joel’s promise of God’s Spirit being poured out on all people. The second part focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus being part of God’s plan as revealed in the prophetic Psalms. Jesus is both Lord and Messiah as it is in fact the risen and exalted Jesus who has poured out the gift of the Spirit. Thus Peter establishes that Jesus’s life and the giving of the spirit both fulfil the Old Testament prophecies. Also, we see that the resurrection of Jesus and the giving of the Holy Spirit are integrally rela...