The Empty Tomb

It’s fair to say that the Christian faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the Savior of the world stands or falls with the truth of Easter. St. Paul said it just as much: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14).

In vain indeed is our faith if the best evidence we can offer to substantiate the foundational truth of resurrection is just the empty tomb, as so many Christians are still inclined to believe. Interestingly, the theologians, who seem to disagree on almost everything, are somehow in one accord in rejecting the crude reasoning of the empty tomb theory. Objectively speaking, the empty tomb in and of itself can only be taken as an indication that Jesus’ body had disappeared. What had happened to the body gone missing? Possibilities are many. Resurrection, if it happened, can only be one of them. To insist that the body had been resurrected just because the tomb was empty is simply too rash a conclusion.

Some people discredit the empty tomb theory even further due to the fact that it was discovered by women (Mt 28:1), whose witness account was not recognized legally and culturally in ancient Israel. Surprising as it may seem, but this is exactly what makes the Easter narratives of the gospels credible. It is remarkable that the gospel authors would not shy away from presenting women as witnesses even though their lack of credibility in providing legal testimony was common knowledge. If such narratives were faked, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to use male witnesses instead? (Gerald O’Collins made this argument in Interpreting Jesus, p.126.)

One other argument in support of the truth of Easter, as presented so eloquently by Pope Benedict XVI (see Jesus of Nazareth II, p. 275), is that the apostolic preaching with all its boldness and passion, including what we hear from St. Peter in the first reading of this Easter Sunday, would be unthinkable unless the witnessed event – the resurrection – was real.

Equally unthinkable is the notion that St. Paul would falsify the testimony that the resurrected Jesus “appeared to Kephas, then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. After that he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me” (1 Cor 15:5-8). Since most of these witnesses were still alive when this testimony was given, St. Paul took the risk of being corrected and labeled a liar if what he said publicly was not true.

以彩虹為記

四時來去匆匆。看！寒冬已到，加拿大人民本來舒適的日子，又要被她弄得一團糟。跟她一起擾攘的是她的老拍檔：飛雪, 狂風, 冰雹和嚴寒刺骨的氣温, 我們的冬天真不好過！更令人氣餒的是，冬天似乎比她的同儕春、夏、秋更常到訪此地，並持久逗留, 徘徊不去。另一方面，嚴冬峻冷與四旬期所要求的祈禱、懺悔、犧牲和克己的精神非常配合。隆冬苦寒之際, 正值四旬期展開之時，這個主日便是四旬期六個主日的第一個。

四時來去匆匆。去年冬天這個時候，我下定決心要悔改我罪, 尤其是一些年復一年地重覆著的陋習。藉四旬期的禮儀和祈禱的幫助，結果我的決心總算維持了數個星期。但封齋期一過，那些陋習便好像盜賊般, 靜悄悄地潛逃回來, 又再成為我生活的一部份！

因此我們這些軟弱的凡夫俗子，需要不斷儆醒 。我們需要一些實質或明顯的標記, 時刻來提醒我們曾作出的承諾或建立了的關係。這個主日彌撒的讀經一，天主和諾厄立下了盟約，以彩虹為標記。這可見的標記不是用來提醒天主 - 祂永遠不會忘記 - 而是在提醒著我們，在天主和人之間已經透過諾厄建立了一個特殊的盟約關係。

為了實現救世計劃，天主透過人類歷史上五位關鍵人物, 立下了五個不同的盟約, 用來團結祂屬靈的大家庭，且各有明顯的標記：

- 透過亞當，一個丈夫，用婚姻來肯定結合，以安息日為記;
- 透過諾厄，一個父親，用家庭來肯定連繫，以彩虹為記;
- 透過亞巴郎，一個族長，團結部族，以割禮為記;
- 透過梅瑟，一位民長，統一民族，以逾越節為記;
- 透過達味，一位君王，建立王國，以王座為記。

最後天主透過祂的兒子，一位大司祭，以教會來凝聚信衆，用聖體聖事作為祂所訂立的新的盟約的標記（註）。

「天主的國臨近了，你們悔改，信從福音罷!」，這是耶穌開始公開傳道時所宣講的（馬爾谷福音1:15）。在這四旬期，就讓我們重申我們悔改和做補贖的決心，因為我們知道天主的國度，那藉着基督寶血合而為一的國度，就在眼前了。這不是我們憑空想像出來的，因為舊約的標記 - 安息日、彩虹、割禮、逾越節、和王位 - 都在提醒著我們。而這些都衹是過渡時期的標記, 是為指向一個新的標記, 即代表著新而永久的盟約的聖體聖事。

註: Source: S. Hahn, A Father Who Keeps His Promises, p.35.

Why Through Mary and the Saints? Why Not Through Jesus Directly?

Communion of saints is an important theme in the Pauline letters, particularly 1 Cor 12 where St. Paul teaches that "we were all baptised into one body" (1 Cor 12:13) in one Spirit, and in this one body "if (one) part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy" (1 Cor 12:26). In the Eucharist, all members of the Church partake of the bread as one body in communion: "The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf" (1 Cor 10:16-17).

After narrating the faith of many ancient saints down the line of salvation history, the author of Hebrews concludes: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin...while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus..." (Hebrew 12:1-2). Note that he uses present tense - "we ARE surrounded" - in referring to the presence of these ancient witnesses to our faith. And understandably so because we ARE in communion with them.

The communion of saints concept is also illustrated beautifully by Jesus himself in John 15 using the motif of vine and its branches. Every member of the body benefits from Jesus - the Head of the body (Eph 5:23). With us dwelling in him, and him in us, it gives us life - abundant life (John 10:10) - the way the vine gives water and nutrition to its branches. By virtue of our communion in the body of Christ, there's NOT A MOMENT we don't benefit from Christ and, as St. Paul teaches in 1 Cor 12:26, from the other members of the body.

As members in communion with each other in the one Mystical Body, we can intercede for one another. Among all members of the Mystical Body, Mary, the Mother of the Church (John 19:27), is particularly powerful in her intercession, as was demonstrated at the wedding in Cana where Jesus performed his first miracle by turning water into wine on the prompting of his mother (John 2). But wait! Isn't Jesus "the only Mediator between God and the human race"? (1 Tim 2:5) How can a teaching that endorses multiple mediation be scriptural? Correct. This is why whether the intercession is by ordinary members like us, or by the saints in heaven, or by Mary, its efficacy is derived not from the intercessor's own merit but from sharing in Jesus' one mediation in a subordinate way.

Inevitably we have to ask a very Protestant question: In that case, why bother? Why through Mary and the saints? Why not go to Jesus directly who is the ONLY Mediator? Isn't it his mediating power the source that Mary and the saints draw on anyway?

I like St. John Paul II's answer in this regard (see Fr. Michael Gaitley's 33 Days Morning Glory, day 27). Yes, Jesus definitely could have saved us directly without going through Mary. But the fact of the matter is: he chose to do so THROUGH Mary by entrusting his body to her womb! He entrusted his infancy to her maternal care; he entrusted his childhood and youthful years to her guidance and upbringing; and on the cross, he entrusted his Church to her (he made her the Mother of his Church), wanting her to take care of the Church - his Mystical Body - the way she took care of his human body when he was growing up! So yes, we want to go to Jesus directly. But Jesus told us to go to Mary! It's not that Jesus cannot mediate directly, but that he knows we can benefit from his mediation better through Mary and the saints.

This is no different than God choosing to manifest his glory and power through his creation (Rom 1:19-20, Ps. 19:2-5). Always a good teacher who knows our needs and limitations as human beings, God uses intermediaries that enable us to understand his truth better and receive his grace more effectively.

I think this last point is very important because so many Catholics struggle because of it. To whom should we pray? Jesus or Mary? It's as though the two were in competition with one another. Of course we pray to Jesus. But we can pray with and to Mary too (CCC 2679). Mary is a great gift from Jesus (again John 19:27) that's meant to help us, to bring us closer to Jesus. We shouldn't hesitate to use Jesus' special gift for us. Mary doesn't compete with Jesus. She is his coworker, assisting him to sanctify us the way she assisted him in realizing the incarnation and the economy of salvation.

Join Us to Watch Fr. Robert Barron's "Priest, Prophet, King" DVD Series!

If Jesus, the New Adam, is the eternal high priest who agonized over his solitude in the garden of Gethsemane and offered his sacrifice on the cross for our redemption, it should come as no surprise to us that Adam, the Old Testament character prefiguring Jesus, was also a high priest who also agonized over his solitude in the garden of Eden until God made him a partner, Eve.

As the high priest of Eden, Adam was called to be obedient to the Father and to be faithful to his wife through self-sacrifice. Did he carry out his calling properly? No, he disobeyed the Father's order not to eat from the tree of knowledge and he failed to protect his wife, who was left alone to confront the serpent. In contrast, Jesus, the New Adam and eternal high priest remained obedient to the Father and faithful to his wife - the Church, the New Eve - to the end by sacrificing himself on the cross.

But Jesus, the New Adam, suffered on the cross; where's Adam's cross? Remember the "tree of life" in the middle of Eden? What Adam failed to use to fight Satan, the New Adam bore courageously to conquer all evils that Satan could possibly inflict on us in this world order.

If the above reflection resonates in your heart with joy and fascination, you must find more resonance by joining me to explore this topic further under Fr. Barron's guidance. If you find the reflection hard to understand, then all the more reason for you to join me because you have my guarantee that you WILL understand!

What are you joining and how? The details are as follows:

FOUNTAIN OF LOVE AND LIFE DVD SPIRITUAL FORMATION PROGRAM - "PRIEST, PROPHET, KING" MODULE

DVD SERIES TO WATCH - Fr. Barron's DVD brand new 2014 series "Priest, Prophet, King"
MEETING TIME - Every 2nd Monday of the month from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. First meeting: Monday, Feb 9, 2015
VENUE - FLL Evangelization Centre, 9033 Leslie Street, Unit 9 (2nd Floor) Richmond Hill, Ontario (use entrance 10A)
HOST - Edmond Lo, M.T.S., RCIA Catechist, Catholic speaker and writer
FORMAT - Watching DVD segments (in English with captioning), explanations and comments by host (in Cantonese), guided discussion, electronic notes for all participants.
FEES - It's free! Everyone welcome!

Hope to see you on February 9, 2015!

Jesus Brings Glad Tidings on Christmas

“The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners,” (Is. 61:1) proclaimed the prophet Isaiah in the first reading of the third Sunday of Advent.

Back in my university days, I wasn't particularly attached to the Bible. I was more interested in reading philosophy. But Isaiah’s prophetic passage above never failed to touch me deeply whenever I heard it proclaimed. When recited by Luke in his gospel within the setting of Jesus standing in a synagogue, slowly unrolling a scroll of Isaiah, and reading it out to an enchanted and expectant congregation on Sabbath, the prophetic passage took on a new meaning of fulfillment (c.f. Luke 4:16-21) - fulfilled not only in the very person who read it, i.e. Jesus, the Anointed One, but also in the listener to whom it was proclaimed, i.e. me.

I, a foreign student struggling to make ends meet, was the poor; not only because of corporeal deprivation but also because of spiritual destitution. I was the brokenhearted, not only because my life then was filled with hardships but also because the deepest yearnings of my young heart – for love and dignity, for justice and righteousness, for happiness and the truth – somehow just could not be satisfied. I was the captive, captive of so many unrealistic dreams, captive of my own youthful passions. I was the prisoner, chained hands and feet by sin, incarcerated body and soul by the unrelenting grip of death. I was in dire need of the Anointed One’s glad tidings, healing, liberation, and freedom.

When my university chaplain, a young and exceedingly kind Basilian priest whose mission it was to help the lowly and marginalized, told me that in Jesus I could find my glad-tidings Provider, my Healer, my Liberator, and my Freedom, I dived right into his RCIA to find out whether Jesus was really the Savior who could solve all my personal problems. Finally at the Easter of my third year of university, I was baptized into the Catholic Church. Here I am 37 years later, I can honestly say that Jesus has given me everything Isaiah promised and more. There is not a day my heart doesn’t rejoice together with Mary, his mother, in the Magnificat: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior” (Luke 1:46-47).

Yet our journey of faith is a long one, full of ups and downs and potential pitfalls. Like John the Baptist in the gospel reading, we must properly discern the role that God in His infinite wisdom wants each one of us to do. John identified his role as “the voice of one crying out in the desert”; he saw himself as the precursor that “make straight the way of the Lord’” (John 1:23). He was determined to serve the Lord in this humble capacity even though many of his followers wanted to make him the Messiah. In this Advent, let us discern with the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit what our role is. What is the ministry that God wants us to serve? And in serving it, “may the God of peace make you perfectly holy and may you…be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thes 5:23).

God Will Deliver If We Have Faith

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Glory and praise to the Lord!

What a Gala last night! This is the morning after. Hope everyone had a good night of sleep, having heard the good news about the peaceful settlement of the FLL-S+L dispute. Not me. My head is a little heavy from lack of sleep last night. Still trying to recover from the "shock" my team and I went through in the last few days, even if it was a pleasant one. The euphoria – at least for me – from the FLL Gala last night and being in the middle of a huge crowd of nine hundred plus people certainly compounded the problem even more. But it’s a nice problem to have…

It’s not appropriate for me to delve too much into the specifics of what happened, not at this point. But this much I can say: this sharing is a sequel to, and hopefully also the conclusion of, a post I wrote with a heavy heart about a year ago: Blessed Are They Who Are Persecuted For the Sake of Righteousness.

My head is still spinning and I can't remember if I mentioned this to my team during this whirlwind-like process of the last few days in which things unfolded in rapid succession like a floodgate that broke open. One thing that we gained from this long and difficult ordeal is the comradeship of our team members. It's a bonding, a unity or solidarity, if you will, that jelled gradually through a long and agonizing process that took us through the thick and thin, the highs and lows, the triumph and the devastation. This is the "imperishable crown" that we won from this painstaking and excruciating race! (Cf. 1 Cor 9:24-25) While we don’t do good for the sake of getting merits, I’m convinced that this is a great merit that God granted us for our perseverance to follow Christ come hell or high water. It’s going to stay with us; and we’ll bring it with us on that day when the Lord judges the nations assembled before Him and “separates them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from goats” (Mt. 25:32).

It's by no means easy. Sometimes we were just hanging on by a thread, determined all the while to walk in the truth and, if it's God's will, ready to accept martyrdom. There were times when we felt like we were "shadowboxing" (cf. 1 Cor 9:26), that we were standing up against a mighty and unstoppable train hurtling toward us at maddening speed. In the end, it was God who gave us strength and saw us through. It took the courageous and determined intervention of a living saint whose body was completely drained of energy due to terminal illness; and the miraculous intercession of a heavenly saint – St. Mary Goretti – whose incorruptible body will be on its way to visit this part of the world when the Holy Father comes in the summer.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins. Amen! Amen! Amen!

What A King Truly Looks Like

In celebrating the feast of Christ the King, one would expect the Mass readings to showcase Jesus, the Messianic King, reigning supreme in heavenly glory. One would expect to hear scriptural passages such as the final triumph of Christ, the “King of kings and Lord of lords”, over all forces of evil (cf. Revelation 19:11-15); or perhaps the Ascension, in which the exalted Christ was crowned with glory at the right hand of God (cf. Mk 16:19).

Not quite.

What we hear instead is a God whose greatest concern is his sheep, which are “scattered”, in need of “rest”, “strayed”, and “injured”; sheep that need to be shepherded rightly (see the 1st reading). Why are passages such as this the focus of the Christ the King celebration? What does shepherding have to do with Jesus’ kingship?

To God, a king should care about his people the way a shepherd cares about his flock: his duty, first and foremost, is to safeguard the well-being of the people that God entrusted to him. A king’s position of authority is given to him to serve and not to dictate, to give and not to receive, to empty himself (as Jesus did in emptying himself and sacrificing his life for us) and not to inflate. Unlike all the self-serving kings in history who misused the authority that God gave them for self-gratification, Jesus, the “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Rev. 19:16) will take care of his people like a Good Shepherd. For “the Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want” (Ps 23:1), chanted David, whose unique position as a shepherd king is already a prefiguration of Christ. No wonder in the gospel reading, we are told that when the Son of Man comes in his glory, “all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (Mt 25:32).

This is a powerful message for everyone in a leadership position to reflect on. Kings and governors, clergy and church leaders, teachers and parents: Are you using your God-given authority and resources for the edification of the people entrusted to your care and not for your own self-gratification? Do you use your power to serve or to oppress? Are you good shepherds? Your honest answers to these questions may well determine where Jesus, the Shepherd King, will place you when he returns in his glory. You will either join the sheep on his right that go off to eternal life, or find yourselves among the goats on his left that are bound for eternal punishment (cf. Mt. 25:33,46).

As we conclude this reflection on Christ the King, let’s lift up our gaze to the Crucifix where Pilate’s inscription “INRI” (Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews), ominously displayed atop the Cross and strategically placed above the battered and bloodied body of the crucified Christ, reminds the world what a king truly looks like.

The above is my reflection on the Mass readings of Christ the King, 34th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A – November 23, 2014:
Ez 34:11-12, 15-17; 1 Cor 15:20-26, 28; Mt 25:31-46