Rejoice in the Lord! Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

Through this entire period of Lent I have tried to demonstrate that Lent may be a period of fast and abstinence, but it is not, by any means, a period of glumness. Christian life is about love and joy, and these sentiments must animate us always. This fourth Sunday of Lent, when we are more than halfway through Lent, Holy Mother Church makes precisely this point, when while designating this day Laetare Sunday, She asks us to rejoice!

If we rejoice, however, it is, to quote from the prophet Nehemiah, in the Lord that we must rejoice, and the parable of the prodigal song, which we encounter in the Gospel today, teaches us just how!

Relying on patristic readings, that is, the interpretations by the Fathers of the Church, we realise that the parable of the prodigal son offers us a quick review of salvation history. Central to this reading of the parable of the prodigal son is to understand the son as the figure of Adam and his offspring – that is us, the human race. We were in the Father’s house, until through Adam’s desire to be independent, and not have to listen to God, we left the Father’s house. In other words, we left Eden, for this earth, where we often spend the graces that we are given from the Father in pointless ways, or as Or Lord puts it, “in a life of dissipation.”

The life spent away from the Father, is a life without grace. All too often, relying on the graces that we may have inherited or have, we believe that we can rely without the Father – in other words, we do not need to go for Mass, to participate in the sacraments. But, as the parable demonstrates, there is only so long that we can last without getting a refill on grace.

Once the prodigal son has spent what he gathered from the Father, he then turns to a local who makes him herd his pigs. Building on the fact that the local makes the son herd pigs, the Fathers of the Church point out that this man is a reference to the Prince of this world, the devil.  And if we think about it, we realise that very often, after we have spent our graces, rather than turn to the Father, we turn to the various false gods: we seek solace in money, power, fame, pleasure. The “the pods on which the swine fed” are the cheap thrills that the devil provides us to distract us from recognizing who we are, and from our destiny to return to the embrace of the Father; and shamefully, rather than return to a grace filled life with the Father, we often long to eat our “fill of the pods on which the swine fed”.

Fortunately, however, there is always the stirring of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. I believe it was the stirring of the Holy Spirit that made the son come to his senses, to repent for his behaviour and to then turn to the Father.

In the son’s soliloquy, where he practices the little speech he would make to his father, we see also the common attitude we often have when we go to confession. We may confess our sins, but we are not sure if God truly forgives us. The parable should be a wake up call for us, however, of the attitude of God to our every confession:

While he was still a long way off,
his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion.
He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.

The Father is always waiting for our return, and the moment we make the first move, He rushes to embrace us!

And then, what I think is the pièce de résistance of the parable: the father takes the fatted calf and slaughters it to mark the reconciliation. My dear brothers and sisters, we eat meat so often today that we forget that in the old days, meat was reserved for the rich and for special occasions. When the father slaughtered the calf it was a big thing, and a way to bring dignity back to this reconciliation of the son with the father. And according to Peter Chrysologus, the slaughtered calf is in fact a reference to the Son of God who was slaughtered on the cross so that the sons of Adam could be restored to the dignity which they had lost thanks to the original sin.

My dear brothers and sisters, the parable ends with the father saying:

we must celebrate and rejoice,
because your brother was dead and has come to life again;
he was lost and has been found.

Indeed, as Our Lord teaches in the Gospel according to Luke (15:7), “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents.” Let us, therefore, this Laetare Sunday, be the cause for rejoicing in Heaven, when inspired by this parable, we become the prodigal son who returns to the embrace of the Father through recourse to the sacrament of reconciliation, or confession.

(This homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 30 March 2025.)

(Image reference: “The Prodigal Son”(detail), Albrecht Dürer, c.1496, The Met, New York.)

Repent, and enter into Life: Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

I know of a, once very powerful, man. With his power, he usurped land, and  proceeded to build a magnificent mansion, in violation of every rule. And because power makes us attractive, he lived a debauched life. On one such misadventure, he went to a distant city, with the female relative, to engage there in a drug fueled adulterous relationship. Something went wrong, however, and he was struck down by a stroke, a state from which he has not fully recovered, even after the passage of many years.

My dear brothers and sisters, after having heard this anecdote, many of you will be nodding and thinking of how a sinful life eventually gets the punishment it deserves. And yet, in the Gospel this Sunday, Our Lord suggests to the contrary.

Responding to the news report that Pilate had killed some Jews who had just offered their sacrifices, Our Lord says:

“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way
they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?
By no means!

Our Lord then adds another example to drive home the point. This time he speaks about a tower that fell on some people and killed them:

Or those eighteen people who were killed
when the tower at Siloam fell on them—
do you think they were more guilty
than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?
By no means!

In making these two observations, Our Lord was challenging an assumption that is as popular today as it was in His own time, that calamity is the result of sin! In asking these rhetorical questions, Our Lord is making clear that the Jews that Pilate killed, and the eighteen people who were crushed by the tower of Siloam were not more guilty, or sinful, that any other people.

If so, then why did they die? Because it is a rule of this sinful world that we live in that bad things happen even to good people! It is true that, as in the anecdote I just recounted, the sins we commit can catch up with us even in our lifetimes, but it is more often the case that the unjust and the evil people of this world have wonderful lives (do read Psalm 73)! It is often the just who suffer!

But the point Our Lord was, and is, making is not about suffering, but about repentance, which is why after both these examples, he says the exact same words:

But I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!

Repent, he says, and you will live. Do not repent, and then like those in the examples, who had no opportunity to repent, you will have died the second, and more important, death, the death of the soul.

My dear brothers and sisters, Our Lord constantly warns us that we must fear not physical death, but the death of the soul (Mt 10:28), and because death is always so close, so unpredictable, and one could die at any time, without the possibility of repenting, our entire life should be one of repentance.

The Christian life is one of joy, and the call to repentance does not mean a life of fear and mourning. In keeping with this principle of joy, the faith offers us the sacramental opportunity for repentance, in the form of the sacrament of reconciliation, all the time. All we need to do is find a priest and confess our sins. Remember also, that we should not receive communion if we are in mortal sin. A regular confession, therefore, is an excellent way to prepare for a good death.

There are also other ways in which we can prepare for a good death and make our lives one of continuous repentance. We can spend as many moments we have by repeating a prayer that is known as the Jesus prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,

Have mercy of me, a sinner.

Repeating this prayer constantly, and mindfully, will create in us the disposition necessary to lead a life of repentance, one that will regularly lead us to the sacrament of confession, and eventually to heaven.

This is the beauty of the Christian life; the call to repentance does not mean a life of fear and a long face. Because Our Lord has borne the price of our sin, and can take away our sin, our repentance does not lead to a wallowing in unhappiness. On the contrary, it opens the doors to happiness and joy, because we know that there is now a life after sin.

Brothers and sisters, we are halfway through Lent, a period we began with the words “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” This Sunday, Our Lord reiterates that message, inviting us to repent, and enter into life. Let us respond wholesomely to this call!

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda, on 23 March 2025.)

(Image reference: “Saint Jerome in penitence”, Jose de Ribera "el Españoleto", 1634, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.)

Who or What Will You Die For? Homily for the second Sunday of Lent

 

In today’s Gospel reading, which recounts the Transfiguration of Our Lord, we hear the voice of God saying: “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” The divine voice in this episode is imperative. It is not merely an observation, as it was at the baptism of Our Lord: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17 – and a similar tenor is found in Lk 3:22, and Mk 1:11). No, in this case, it is an imperative, listen to him.

When faced with divine imperative, so dramatically articulated, what does one do but listen and obey? Empowered by the fact that they then saw the dead man rise and eat with them, these men, the apostles, listened and spent their whole lives proclaiming the Good News of Our Lord Jesus Christ: that sin has been vanquished, physical death is not the end, and that an eternal life in glory is a possibility. And this was not merely an idea they were preaching. They preached and all, save one, suffered martyrdom because they saw, and believed. Herein lies the Christian difference. We do not die for an idea, but for a fact – that there is life after death and the resurrection of the body, or in the words of St. Paul to the Corinthians, our reading from the epistle today, our lowly bodies will be conformed to His glorious body.

Contemporary life offers us very many ways in which we can live, and die. The verses of the 19^th century Urdu poet Ghalib (1797-1869) come to mind:

Hazaaron khwahishen aisi ke har khwahish pe dam nikle.

Bahut niklay mere armaan, lekin phir bhi kam nikle.

            A thousand desires that I expend my life on each

Many were these desires, and yet I remained unfulfilled.

In this verse Ghalib captures the essence of the consumeristic world we live in. We spend our lives chasing tantalizing dreams, and yet, no matter how many of these desires we fulfill, we remain unsatisfied. I should point out that not all these dreams and desires are necessarily seen as excessive. Some of these dreams are, in fact, those that contemporary society deems worthy and noble. And yet, as St. Paul indicates they are eventually about making our stomach our God. Think, for example, of how material success, or success in the school and university exams, are the only things that our children are prepared for. Everything else falls by the wayside. I have heard some in this parish indicate that their children cannot be altar servers because they must go to tuitions even on Saturdays when the altar servers meet. As someone who has benefited immensely from the graces of being an altar server, I can only pity those whose extra-curricular lives continue to revolve around the school curriculum. All of this while appreciating that tuitions can be necessary.

In his letter to the Phillipians, St. Paul also castigates those whose “minds are occupied with earthly things.” In this context I must share with you that I have noticed a peculiarity among those who come to the Mass in English. People continue to stroll in, after the Mass has begun, such that the congregation can sometimes so much as double halfway through Mass. This is not something that I have noticed as much among those attending the Masses in Konkani. I wonder why this is. Could it be because our minds are not attuned to the Cross of Christ that we bind ourselves to during the Mass? That we are more attuned to earthly things? If so, then perhaps the Lenten exercise we can embrace is to ensure that we are at the Church a good half hour before Mass is scheduled, not waiting to arrive dot on time. The extra half hour could well be spent in silent prayer that we often do not get the time for in our busy daily lives. Once again, I appreciate there are reasons why some may arrive late for Mass, but given that we are in the season of Lent, this is an opportunity for us to take stock if our relationship with Christ is merely perfunctory, and if so, to do something to change it.

St. Paul has one more grain of advice which we might do well to consider this Lent:

But our citizenship is in heaven,
and from it we also await a saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.

St. Paul offers us two guides for our political lives. First, our citizenship is not of this earth, but of heaven, and secondly our only saviour is Our Lord Jesus Christ, there can be no other saviours, political or otherwise.

But if our citizenship is in heaven, what of our loyalties to earthly citizenships? St. Paul’s caution offers us a way to develop a Catholic understanding of our political activity, distinguishing between nationalism on the one hand, and patriotism on the other. In these times, both in India, and without (and we are living in some pretty crazy times internationally), the nation seems to have taken on the aspects of a god, demanding everything from complete obedience to the sacrifice of life itself. Such demands are completely unacceptable to the Catholic because though they do not appear so, these demands are in fact demands for worship, which is due to God alone. But this should not necessarily upset Catholics or nationalists, because in their pursuit of the common good, every Catholic is called to be a patriot! Directed towards the common good of all, and not just those within the nation, the potential refusal of a Catholic to do things that are unjust will still amount to patriotism, because it is directed toward the long term common good, the health and well-being of all. Thus, even though nationalists may hate you in the short term, they will change their minds in the long term, and especially at the end of time, when:

He will change our lowly body
to conform with his glorified body
by the power that enables him also
to bring all things into subjection to himself.

All things already are, and will soon be more completely, subject to Christ. If we live, therefore, it is Him we must live for, if we die, it is for His name that we must die. The temptations to turn away from Him are subtle, and many, but we must persevere, and our exercises of abstinence and fasts this Lent will strengthen our wills to resist temptations in the future. Join with others, therefore, in being imitators of St. Paul who modeled himself on Christ.

May St. Paul, apostle to the gentiles, intercede for us. Amen.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 15 March 2025.)

(Image reference: “Crucifixion of St. Peter” detail, Caravaggio, 1601, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.)

Abstinence and the road to Salvation: Homily for the First Sunday of Lent

There is a Portuguese proverb which goes “o peixe morre pela boca” (it is by its mouth that the fish dies). As with the proverbial fish, so too with Adam, our first parent, who though created to not experience death, but to live forever in the embrace of the Father, encountered death through his consumption of the forbidden fruit. And so, Origen (c. 185–c. 253), one of the important early theologians of the Church, teaches us that it was the temptation of gluttony that led Adam to sin.

As the Devil tempted Adam, so too did he try to tempt the second Adam, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with gluttony. Knowing that Our Lord had not eaten for forty days, and that He was now hungry, the tempter says:

“If you are the Son of God,
command this stone to become bread.”

However, the second Adam, Our Lord, did not descend to this earth so that He could repeat the errors of the first Adam. On the contrary, He came to initiate the great re-set, He came to recapitulate, or start again, so that the error of Adam could be set right and humanity – the children of Adam – could learn how to avoid falling prey to the Devil, avoid death, and thus have eternal life.

And so Our Lord teaches us that the response to the vice of gluttony, and part of the road to salvation, is abstinence. In so doing, he teaches us the discipline not just for Lent, but for the Christian life. As Cyril of Alexandria, a Father of the Church, taught: “By eating we were conquered in Adam, by abstinence we conquered in Christ.”

Last week, after reading my homily for Ash Wednesday, where I described Lent as the pursuit of love, a friend of mine responded: “I love ‘pursuit of love’! [But,] I can’t get behind the ‘abstinence & sacrifice.’”

This friend of mine was articulating a common problem in our times; we don’t seem to understand the value of abstinence. Last week, on Ash Wednesday, I had suggested that the disciplines of Lent should be seen as exercise, spiritual exercises for a soul that is fit, and can fight the tempter when he should appear. Abstinence is a part of this exercise regime, and it should ideally start with small sacrifices, abandoning things we like. For example, I really like tendli (gherkin) pickle, which was on the table on Ash Wednesday. It would have made no difference to my material life had I eaten a little portion of it, but abstaining from it, and postponing the pleasure that it would give me, was the exercise I decided to undertake.  As Our Lord says:

Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. (Lk 16:10)

Brothers and sisters, though the first temptation Our Lord faced refers to the mouth, it denotes all the sensorial organs and the pleasures that they desire. That the mouth is the gateway to more than just gustatory desire I can very easily demonstrate through a personal anecdote. I had gone, some decades ago, to view the jewels of the Nizam, and faced with rubies, diamonds and emeralds the size of my fist, I experienced the very odd desire to physically eat them. These stones appealed to me like luscious fruit. In other words, my mouth was watering, not for some gustatory pleasure, but as a visceral response to the desire that the pleasures that jewels could bring. If the mouth is the gateway to desire, then the mouth should be trained to desire what is good.

The verse before the Gospel captures well what should be in our mouths when it says:

One does not live on bread alone,
but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.

Our mouth should be full, of the word of God. As King David sings in the psalm (104: 33):

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
    I will sing praise to my God while I have being.

One can do this by constantly having an ejaculatory prayer in one’s mouth.

              “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.”

              “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in You.”

“I love you, Jesus; my love above all things; I repent with my whole heart for having offended Thee. Never permit me to separate myself from Thee again. Grant that I may love Thee always; and then do with me what Thou wilt.”

With our mouth full of these prayers, constantly repeating them, so too will our heart. As Saint Paul teaches us today in the second reading:

The word is near you,
                        in your mouth and in your heart
—that is, the word of faith that we preach—,
for, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord
and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved.

Abstinence does not mean, my dear brothers and sisters, that we reject the cornucopia that is placed before us. It requires only that we moderate our response to it, and that we recognize its place in our lives. An example of how to deal with the resources Our Lord has provided us is available in the first reading. Here Moses instructs Israel that having harvested the produce of the land overflowing with milk and honey, they place it in a basket and offer it to God, recognizing that it was God who gave us these gifts and it is to Him that we must return it.  In other words, recognize that these resources are not ours to consume as we wish, stuffing ourselves silly with them, but gifts to be used for the common good.

Abstinence is necessary spiritual exercise dear brothers and sisters, and something we can, and should, practice throughout Lent, increasing the things we abstain from, the closer we approach Good Friday. May St. Joseph the model of temperance aid us in our spiritual exercises this Lent and always.

St. Joseph, model of temperance, highest among the virtuous, pray for us.

(This homily was prepared to be preached to the faithful at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 3 March 2025.)

(Image reference: The Temptation of Christ detail , Juan de Flandes, 1500 1504, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.)