It is very hard to love like Christ, yet this is the command given to us: Love one another as I have loved you, not like yourself, as found in the Old Testament, Leviticus. 19:18. However, it is not impossible to love as he did because he has shown us “how” to love.
Christ is my Good Shepherd, and Pope Leo XIV is his representative on earth and Pastor of his Church! Habemus Papam! What a beautiful moment in the history of our Church, a season, our Resurrected Christ, the Good Shepherd, blesses us with a new Pope: the Chief Pastor of His Church!
Besides holiness and nature, mercy is another fundamental nature of God. God’s mercy is inexhaustible and unfathomable. Jesus Christ is the face of God’s mercy among us. This is why the feast or devotion to the Divine Mercy is one of the revelatory feasts of God himself to us.
Christianity: our lives, testimonies and faith are marked by the power of Christ’s resurrection. The power of the resurrection above sins and its consequence: death. It is also the power over the forces of evil, spirits or demons, and the Devil.
Liturgically, Palm Sunday commemorates or re-enacts the courage of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. A historical and bold entry that eventually leads to his passion, death and resurrection. It is not only a fulfilment of the plan or will of God the Father, as Jesus himself indicated to us. It is a demonstration of the love of God to save us at all costs from slavery to sin and Satan.
The Epiphany manifests Christ’s salvation for all and the universal. Fundamentally, the Feast of Epiphany demonstrates that God is an inclusive God. He does not exclude anyone or anything from his saving grace and mercy.
Suffering is the way of discipleship of Christ. Discipleship is the process of learning to love and follow Jesus and becoming more like him in our attitudes and actions. It is a commitment to the cross that implies pain, suffering and even death.
The broken God or the brokenness of God is the holistic redemption of man. Hence, the joy of suffering in the Christian living is total submission to God’s will. The suffering of a Christian is never a curse or punishment from God.
Christ Jesus is our satisfaction. He is the author and the finisher of our faith. He is the portion marked out by God for us. In life, there is no doubt that we have various pangs of hunger that need to be satisfied but, above them all is the spiritual hunger that only God in Christ Jesus can spiritually satisfy in us.
The Solemnity of Ascension of the Lord is the feast of the Risen Christ with a glorified body taken up to heaven and now sitting at the right hand of God forever. It is plain from Scripture that Jesus’ ascension was a literal, bodily return to heaven. He rose from the ground gradually and visibly, observed by many intent onlookers.