[stephenkhoo]

Thursday, 03 November, 2011, 31st Ordinary Week, Cycle 1
HAVE YOU LIVED YOUR LIFE IN VAIN?

SCRIPTURE READINGS: ROM 14:7-12; LK 15:1-10

“The life and death of each of us has its influence on others.” Indeed, this remark of St Paul should make us pause to consider whether we have lived our lives in vain. Can we say that our lives have brought greater good to our fellowmen? If we have not contributed to the growth of humanity and society, then it must be said that we have lived our lives in vain. Our conscience will condemn us on our dying day for failing to make use of the resources that the Lord has blessed us with for the good and service of others.

If our lives are miserable, it is because most of us live only for ourselves. Some of us begin well. We have high and noble ambitions. A young man aspires to be a doctor because he wants to save humanity but later on he becomes obsessed with money and riches or even making a name for himself. Similarly, a lady seeks to be a lawyer to fight for justice, especially for the poor and the marginalized. Along the way, she too can be caught up with making money and making a name for herself. So, too, it can happen to a young man who seeks to be a priest to save souls and heal lives, but in the process forgets his calling. Instead he lives a carefree and complacent life without a passion for Christ and His Church. Truly, the tragedy is that many start intending to live for others but end up living for themselves. Of course, worse still are those who know only how to live for themselves, are obsessed with making money, a name and achieving success in life. Yet, we never find anyone so evil or selfish that he or she cannot give.

If we want to find happiness in life, we need to find meaning in what we are doing. Only by giving ourselves to others, can we find life ourselves. This is always the paradox of happiness in life. So long as we give ourselves to others without thinking about oneself, we will find joy in the joy of others. This is the way God shows us in the gospel. We read of the love of God in His desire for all of us to share in the life of His kingdom. He only wants to love us even when we stray from Him. His joy is to share His joy with us.

This love of God for us is so unlike that of the scribes and Pharisees. We read in the gospel that the ones who did not really rejoice were the supposedly religious men of the day. They complained, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” In contrast, Jesus was rejoicing that the sinners would come to Him and seek reconciliation. He remarked, “There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine virtuous men who have no need of repentance.” The sinners too, we read, were delighted as the evangelist noted. “The tax collectors and the sinners were all seeking the company of Jesus to hear what he had to say.”

But what gave them grounds to complain when the sinners desired to hear the Word of God and repent? Why were they not welcoming the sinners, unlike Jesus? The truth is that deep within their hearts, they had no real love for them. Secretly, they even desired their condemnation and punishment by God. In this way, they would feel compensated for their hard work and sacrifices for being faithful to the observance of the laws. It is a kind of vindictive desire. Secondly, it was because they were self-righteous and judgmental. Indeed, the text from Romans must be seen in the context of St Paul’s intent to remind the Jews and the Gentiles that both had failed to observe the laws and had sinned against God. They despised the sinners and selfishly wanted to exclude them from the kingdom. Against such an attitude, St Paul wrote, “we shall all have to stand before the judgement seat of God … It is to God, therefore, that each of us must give an account of himself.” Only God can be our judge.

But God’s love for us is beyond human understanding. Not only does He love us and want us all to repent and be reconciled with Him, His love for each one of us is a personal and individual love. This is the intent of the parable of both the lost sheep and the lost coin. Every one of us is personally precious to the Lord. He did not simply come to save humanity as a whole, but He cares for each one of us in a special way. He did not come to save a herd but every single sheep. This explains why when a sheep is lost, He, as the Good Shepherd, would go all out to look for the stray sheep, leaving the ninety-nine behind. This is not to say that the other ninety-nine are not important to Him, but at this particular point of time, it is the lost sheep that needs more of His attention, love and guidance. Jesus’ priority is for the poor and the sinners. This accounts for the joy of finding the lost sheep.

Such love might seem illogical. How could one abandon the others in search for one? Well, isn’t this the attitude of one who loves? If a house is on fire and the father sees his child caught in the fire screaming for help, will he not leave the rest of his children behind and run back into the house to save his child, regardless how dangerous it might be? Does he think that if he were to die, then all the children would suffer? No, at that point in time, every child is important to him and he would try to save all, not just one or two. Which parent could bear to choose one child over the other? This is the same for God. Each and every one of us is so important to Him. He does not want even a single soul to be lost.

Consequently, we can imagine the joy of the parents when their son or daughter is reunited with the family. At that point in time, even all the love of the other children cannot be compared to the joy of having a lost one returning home to be with them. There is no greater desire for parents than to see the family united in love and care for each other. The truth is that in a family, we are so closely knitted in body and spirit that the joy or sadness, success or failure of another is also ours. So too for God, because we are the members of the Body of Christ! When one member of the body is hurt, we too are hurt because we love. Only those who have no love will not feel hurt because they are not one with that person. From this perspective, we can appreciate the ecstatic outburst of joy when the lost sheep is found, “would he not joyfully take it on his shoulders and then, when he got home, call together his friends and neighbours? ‘Rejoice with me,’ he would say ‘I have found my sheep that was Lost.’” Similarly with the woman when she found her lost drachma, “’Rejoice with me,’ she would say ‘I have found the drachma I lost.’”

The truth remains that we belong to both the ninety-nine sheep that are safe and also the one sheep that is lost. In many ways, most of us are basically good people. We all want to be happy in life and we all want to love and be loved. Yet, some of us are more insecure than others and fearful of our future. Hence, we become greedy, ambitious and even ruthless in achieving our goals. But, deep in our hearts, we do desire to help people and to reach out to them. We do seek for love and truth in life. But quite often, we are ignorant and react from our defense mechanisms. We can be sure that God is a God of compassion and understanding. He knows how much we are struggling and seeking to be saved. He does not condemn us but only feels sorry for us whenever we abandon Him or the truth for evil. If we are feeling condemned, then, like the sinners and the tax-collectors, let us come to Jesus to hear His message about the compassion of His Father for us. He knows that like them, we desperately seek to live a life of integrity, of truth and love, and how much we hate ourselves for being so hypocritical. Like the psalmist, we all desire the one thing, which is “to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord and contemplate his temple.”

So what we need to do is to turn to the Lord regardless of our unworthiness before Him. Like the psalmist, we pray, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear? The Lord is my life’s refuge; of whom should I be afraid?” If we do not fear death or the world or truth, then we can live our lives in a transparent manner since we have nothing to hide. Those who do evil want to hide their sins; those who live in the truth are free from fear. For such people they are totally liberated, since their conscience will not condemn them. Indeed, it is when we see the Lord that we live. As the psalmist says, “I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living. I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.”

In the meantime, conscious of His love for us, we must use our life to praise God in heaven and on earth and glorify Him. As St Paul exhorts us, “if we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord, so that alive or dead we belong to the Lord.” In the light of His love and mercy, we live for Him alone. We continue to die to our sins. As we die to our sins, we live in the Lord. But this is a process. We must be patient and recognize that we are saved and yet in the process of being saved. The moment we think we belong to the ninety-nine sheep, we stop repenting, become complacent and judgmental. We must never forget that we are the stray sheep now and then. Most of all, He loves the just but He loves sinners even more!