SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

  God sends his son into the world: to use a modern sociological expression, God conducts the most revealing, most expensive social experiment; God sends his son into the world to love, and only love; you shall have no other powers than loving. You shall not judge, you shall not condemn, you shall not punish; If someone slaps you on one cheek, show the other cheek as well, if someone takes your shirt, give your coat as well, if someone asks you to go one mile with them, go two miles; be gentle and only gentle; in the words of Isaiah 42, a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not put out; it highlights the extreme gentleness, compassion, and restorative care of the Messiah. The words of gospel may be most fitting to him, I send you out as a sheep among wolves (Matthew 10:16). He became Immanuel (God with us). He worked like us, ate like us, drank like us, lived like us, except that he did not sin, meaning he did not do anything against the will of one who se...

 From the reading, John 13: 1-15, and the actions that are unfolding around us, we could reflect upon two significant events: Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and the Last Supper. Jesus washing the feet of his disciples After the meal has begun, Jesus breaks the feast to draw maximum importance and focus to something that he thought as important as his suffering and death. Jesus gets up from the table, removes his outer robe, ties a towel around his waist, fills a basin with water, and begins to wash his disciples’ feet. In the ancient world, foot-washing was assigned to the lowest servant in a household; and not just any servant; Jewish law considered the task too degrading even for a Hebrew slave. It was the work of the outsider, the foreigner, the one with nothing left to lose. Jesus, the one they called Rabbi, Lord, the one some believed would restore a kingdom, takes that position on the floor, one pair of feet at a time. Washing of another’s feet is an antidote; it is ...

 The upper room is a study in contrasts. Twelve men recline at a well-laid table—bread, wine, the smell of roasted lamb—momentarily lost in the comfort of a good meal, unaware that history is unfolding around them. And in the centre of them sits Jesus: fully awake, fully aware. He knows what is happening in Jerusalem. He knows what is coming for him in the hours ahead. He knows the betrayers and deniers. He knows this is the last time he will break bread with the people he loves most. To carry that knowledge and still pour the wine; to know the end and still kneel down to wash feet; that is the beginning of any meditation on priesthood. The Priest is not Free of Suffering; He enters it Willingly and Knowingly The Scriptures show us something startling about priesthood in the paradigm of Jesus as a priest. He knew that most of the seeds he had sown had been scattered, choked, scorched, and taken away (the parable of the sower Matthew 13: 3-9). He knew that among the twelve reclining...

 Here we are standing in the silent shadow of impending sacrifice, Jesus did not just talk about love; he showed that love is a verb that requires us to get our hands dirty for the sake of others. In that quiet, humble moment, he taught us that no one is too important to serve, and no one is too broken to be served. The Company Jesus Kept There is something worth pausing over before anything else is said: the company Jesus chose to keep on the last night of his life. He had been arrested, in the eyes of the religious establishment, for precisely this crime; eating with sinners, tax collectors, the disreputable, the morally compromised. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record the scandal of it. And yet here, in the upper room, on the very night before the cross, he does not surround himself with the devout or the dignified. He gathers, one last time, with his disciples — men who will, before morning, betray him, deny him, and run. He knew this. He knew all of it. And he stayed at the t...

 There is a truth that no one escapes: every person who has ever been born will one day die. And yet, tucked inside this story of grief and stone and a man wrapped in burial cloths, Jesus makes a breathtaking claim—that death is not the last word. This is what John 11:1–45 is really about. The one you love is sick. It is interesting to note that the word Bethany means place of poverty/poor; but in spite of it, this family often received Jesus and his disciple in their house, and provided for them; Jesus loved them too. Being in the love circle of Jesus does not give Lazarus any worldly advantage; rather it is a guarantee that you will experience humanity in its most brutal form. Lazarus died, in in his ripe old age, but when he was still young, fallen ill and is dead. Geethanjali , born in Bombay in 1961, who was loved developed blood cancer as a child. She died at sixteen years old. After she died, her family found poems she had written, hidden under her bed. The one she wrote ...

 The Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard ( Matthew 20:1-16 ) is a story Jesus told to describe God's generosity. When the master had gone to the market in varied times of the day, 3rd hour, 6th hour, 9th hour, and even at the 11th hour, he was told that these workers were standing there because nobody hired them for work. What would we be if nobody puts us to use? There is a particular kind of pain that has no appropriate name, we could call it rejection. It is not the pain of being unworthy; but the pain of being exactly what you are ; fully, beautifully, completely, and still not being what someone needs. You were a rose. You were a perfect rose. And they were simply, quietly, a people who loved lilies. That is one of the loneliest feelings in the world. Because you cannot even be angry at anyone. When Vincent van Gogh was alive, he sold exactly one painting. One. He was not a bad painter, history has made that embarrassingly clear. He was, in fact, one of the most gif...

 In Matthew 25: 14-30 Jesus tells the parable of the talents ; three servants given different amounts by their master before he leaves on a journey. Two of them invest what they were given. They multiply it. They let it be fully what it was meant to be. The third is afraid. He buries his talent in the ground to keep it safe, to keep it from being too much , to manage the risk of it. When the master returns, this is the one who is condemned; not for wickedness, not for cruelty, but for smallness. For choosing safety over fullness. There is a kind of shrinking that happens slowly, so slowly you don't even notice it. Someone flinches at your depth, and you apologise. Someone can't keep up with your current, and you go still. Someone stands at your shore and says this is too much ; and you, out of love or guilt or the old fear of being too much, make yourself smaller. A pond. Calm. Manageable. Safe. But here is the truth no one says plainly enough: not everyone is meant to be a pu...

 Watching a video by Bobby Jose Kattikad ofm Cap on the “ Cross of Christ ” ( https://youtu.be/wouU58uqS-0?si=JS1Il-fagR8Fr0Cy ) was an eye-opener to me. St. Francis of Assisi beautifully referred to the cross as "My Book". The cross is a profound "book" filled with dynamic, life-altering pages. Everything Francis understood about life, love, and sacrifice was read and absorbed from the pages of this ultimate book. By immersing himself deeply into the love of the Crucified One, he internalised its teachings so profoundly that the very wounds of Christ (the Stigmata ) were imprinted upon him. John of the Cross has read this book and found it a source of light in the darkest cells. John was imprisoned in a tiny, dark cell for nine months. Despite his intense physical and emotional suffering, he meditated deeply on the cross. From that utter darkness, the cross offered him the radiant spiritual light that eventually birthed his classic work, The Dark Night of the S...

 We have spent two thousand years cursing Judas Iscariot . His name has become synonymous with treachery itself, to call someone a Judas is to say there is no lower thing a person can be. And yet, if we sit long enough in the uncomfortable silence of honest reflection, a disturbing question surfaces. “ What would have happened without him?” The crucifixion—that event upon which the entire architecture of Christian salvation rests—required a betrayer. The authorities needed someone who knew Jesus intimately, who could identify him in the dark, who could navigate the inner geography of his movements and habits. Without Judas, the machinery of what Christians call redemption could not have turned. He was not incidental to the story. He was load-bearing. The cross stands, in some terrible sense, on his shoulders. This does not excuse him. But it transforms him, from a simple villain into something far more spiritually complex: the man chosen to do what love could not ask for openly. Wa...

  As I heard this Turkish fable , “When the axe came into forest, the trees said, the handle is one of us” what came to my mind was an figure and an event from the Gospels — Judas entering the garden to betray his master. The random violence of a stranger carries its own horror, but it is clean — it comes from outside, from the other, from the unknown. What undoes us far more completely is the wound delivered by a hand we once held. When the axe came into the forest, the trees did not tremble at its iron head. Iron was always foreign, always cold, and always enemy. What silenced them—what stilled the whole canopy in something beyond fear—was the handle. Wood from their own family: grain and fibre they recognised. Perhaps from a tree that had fallen nearby, one they had sheltered with their roots, shared soil with, stood beside through decades of seasons. The forest could not rally against the axe, because the axe was partly themselves , the apostles could not rally against Judas,...

 Jesus heals a man who was sick for 38 years—what else would you expect him to do? The man who was sick for all these years had suffered enough; the man had known no difference between a Sabbath day and other six days. The Jews accuse Jesus of working on a Sabbath. Jesus found no reason to defend or explain himself, except that he said that my father is always working, so am I. They again accused him further for calling God ‘his father’ and equating himself to God. Jesus was unapologetic. We often limit ourselves to fit in, be accepted, and be right, sometimes even to systems that are corrupt and unkind. Here the pressure on Jesus is to fit in. Jesus’ life began to be at risk, for it is said that the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him. Society is hard on people who do not fit in. Jesus continued his good works. Jesus went with the flow ; with an absolute trust in father, here in this passage is a long monologue by Jesus underlining his trust in the father, “Truly, truly, I ...