Coming to see Jesus, the Light of the World

The gospel reading of this Sunday (the 2nd in the sequel) invites us to reflect on the story of the encounter between Jesus, the man born blind, his parents, and the Pharisees, so that we may experience Jesus as the Light of the World. What does light do?  It dispels darkness; it makes us recognise possibilities. In the context of the gospel of today, the light helps us recognise God in person of Jesus. 
The gospel text of today offers us three possible attitudes: (a) indifference towards Jesus – the position of the parents of the blind man; (b) blatant denial of the true nature of Jesus – the position of the Pharisees because they are caught up in the web of their Sabbath laws; and […]

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2nd Sunday in Lent – Year A
Transfiguration: Towards an Experience of God in Jesus
 Mountains are perceived to be locations of God-experience in many traditional cultures and in many world religions. This is true also in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  It is not by chance then that one of the classical works of St John of the Cross is called, The Ascent of Mount Carmel (1579); and more recently, Thomas Merton entitles his autobiography as, The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948).
The gospel readings of the first two Sundays of Lent follow a certain pattern in all the three year cycles.  The first Sunday of Lent we always meditate on the temptations of Jesus, and on the 2nd Sunday on the transfiguration of the Lord.  The focal point of the event of transfiguration is a mountain. The narration from Matthew describing the transfiguration clearly has three parts:

Going up the […]

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Temptations: The Journey through the Wilderness
 We say that the Season of Lent lasts forty days, as the Latin word, ‘Quadragesima” suggests.  When I was a young seminarian – sceptical as I was – I took the calendar and wanted to make sure for myself if there were indeed 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.  To my surprise, I found there are actually 47 days.  I had reasons to be sceptical, after all!  So I had a question for the teacher of liturgy, who, of course, was taken by surprise.  Later he came up with a meaningful explanation:  even on Sundays in Lent, we celebrate the Resurrection of the Lord, and hence they are not counted as days of fasting and penance.  So Lent does have forty weekdays of fasting and penance!
 ‘Forty’ is symbolic of a generation, a […]

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“You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Mt 5:48
Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp to be opened.  It was basically a forced labour camp. Today it is open to the public. In this memorial site, there are different churches and a synagogue that have been built. What impressed me most during my visit to the memorial site was the Church of Reconciliation. The peculiarity of this church is that its structure/architecture has no right angles. The irregular shape is a symbolic protest against the orderly layout of the camp in which all the buildings are set in perfect array.  As I was leaving the memorial site, I thought, an exaggerated sense of order could be a sign of neurosis. And it could be life-threatening.
In the gospel text of today, as Jesus continues his ‘Sermon […]

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