It has been, undoubtedly, the strangest year of our lives. Thanks to a tiny, unseen virus that can be destroyed with some soap and water, our lives and lifestyles have changed. Our religious practices have changed, too. We used to go to church every Sunday. A good number of us don’t anymore. We used to give the sign of peace to those standing close to us during Mass. Now we just nod, and physical proximity is not possible any more. Our faith has been tested.

Many times throughout this year Matthew has been trying to help us understand what it means to be part of the Kingdom of God. Through the parable of the two sons he showed us that it’s not a matter of words, of just saying yes to the Father, but of actually doing what the Father would like us to do. Jesus repeatedly speaks about love and forgiveness (‘seventy seven times’, he tells Peter). It’s about helping the brother who has erred to rise again, rather than judging him. It’s about giving to God what really belongs to Him, of putting on the right garment by living as beings created on His own image, walking on His footsteps the path which eventually led to the cross. Ultimately, it’s about living the greatest commandment which is Love, as he unhesitantly answered the law-scholar.

This Sunday we conclude this journey with Matthew. This is the last Sunday of the liturgical year of the Church. Next Sunday we begin a new year with the first Sunday of Advent. As always, this last Sunday celebrates the solemnity of Christ as King of the universe. It might sound a bit archaic, out of place in today’s world. But considering all that we’ve been reflecting upon, a good reflection on the make-up of this Kingdom is very fitting. To help us do this the Church presents to us the well-known passage of the Last Judgement. The King, who is judging the people of “all nations”, separates the good from the bad, or the sheep from the goats as the story tells us. Then he gives us the criteria on which He is basing His judgement. It’s not about the hours spent in prayer or the number of days I actually went to church. Let’s be clear: prayer and worshipping with my fellow-Christians is important or, rather, indispensable. Because it is there where I get the strength needed to live out my faith in my daily life. But stopping there is not enough. Christianity is never selfish. It’s not about me. My faith has to be lived out in my daily life – no need for extraordinary stuff. Jesus identifies himself with the people I meet in my everyday life. I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick. It’s all about the needy. Whether these needy people find themselves in this state due to their own mistakes, or whether they are lovable or unloving people does not matter. What matters for me as a Christian is that if they need my help I am expected to reach out to them.

​This is what belonging to God’s Kingdom is all about. Living the greatest commandment in my daily life. Putting in practice the command which Jesus gave us at the Last Supper after washing the feet of his disciples (Judas included): “I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.”

As we enter into the month of November, we continue to remember our beloved dead. There are, naturally other times when we remember our loved ones. How can we not remember them on anniversaries, birthdays, and other significant days throughout the year, for example? But there is something special about this month during which many of us visit cemeteries, light candles and place flowers, and offer masses. All this is introduced by the very beautiful feast of All Saints, which we celebrate on the first day of the month. This helps us keep things in the right perspective.

It’s true that, in some cultures at least, all this is preceded by Halloween, during which skeletons and open graves and ghosts abound. If anything, this should remind us of the reality of death. We cannot, and there would be no point in running away from it. But for us Christians death is not the end of the story. All Saints’ Day reminds us that there is much more after death. The moment of death is the moment when we meet our God for the last time, which lasts for eternity. Jesus himself went through the experience of death, and it was not an easy moment – neither for him nor for his loved ones. But he came out of the tomb victorious, and this is the basis of our whole faith. St Paul reminds us in one of his letters that if Christ did not come out of the dead, our faith would have been in vain. In today’s second reading he expresses this same thought in a very beautiful way: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”

The moment of death will be the last time when we meet our God, but definitely not the first time. God visits us in different ways throughout our lives, and we have to be on the alert not to miss those encounters. In particular, God meets us in people around us. “Whatever you do to anyone of these little ones, you are doing it to me,” Jesus once said. And how could we forget that beautiful passage from Matthew’s gospel which gives a context to this phrase, when Jesus explains to us how we shall be judged? “I was hungry”, “I was thirsty”, “I was naked”, so on and so forth.

Today’s parable comes slightly before this passage in the same chapter of the gospel. Half of the bridesmaids were prepared for the coming of the bridegroom, while the other half were not. The latter group, unfortunately, missed out on enjoying the banquet, simply because they were not prepared.

​Let us make sure that we are prepared to recognize the “groom” when he comes to visit us in the face of our brothers and sisters, especially those who are needy. This is the oil we carry with us so that we can enter the final banquet and meet him face to face, for which we are all invited. 

Happy Feast-Day to You!

That’s right, because today we are celebrating All Saints’ Day. It is one of those solemnities that are so important that, when it happens to fall on a Sunday like today, the Church skips the liturgy which would have been scheduled for that particular Sunday to celebrate this feast. We love celebrating feasts for saints. Some of us come from places where the feast-day of the saint is one of the main celebrations in the calendar of our town or village. Yet today the Church reminds us that the saints are not only those whose days we celebrate with such gusto. They are not only those whose names are on the liturgical calendar of the Church (unlike the ones above, some of them are simply unknown to most of us). Only God knows how many men and women have journeyed the same journey of faith that we are doing and, in spite of the difficulties and failures which exist in everyone’s life, they managed to make it. These, too, are saints.

When I was still a little boy, I used to love listening to stories of the lives of some saints which spoke of miracles, wonders, and much of the extraordinary. As I grew older, I came to know stories of saints that were much more akin to my own story. Stories where the writer made sure to show that the saint is a normal person like you and me, people who had their struggles in their lives, men and women who sometimes erred, but did not stay there. They are people who did not perform extraordinary miracles, neither in their lives nor after their death. They are, therefore, not listed in the list of people who are formally recognized as saints by the Church. And yet, we believe that they are enjoying God’s full presence like the other more popular saints.

As I write this, I am accompanying my mother on the final leg of her life journey. As I gather with my family around her, we reminisce about many memories that shaped us into who we are today. Thankfully, many are beautiful memories. Others were of hard times or difficult experiences. Looking back, we are grateful for all of it, and we have no doubt that our mother did her best to live out her vocation as a Christian mother and wife. Prayer was always important in her life, because she knew that God had to be her constant companion on her journey. And we have no doubt that when the time comes, she will be joining her own parents, her siblings and her other son in God’s wonderful presence. The life of the saint does not have to be extraordinary!

In today’s first reading St John speaks of the vision where, after seeing 144 thousand in God’s presence, he sees “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages”. The number is infinite, and no tribe, no race is excluded. These are all people who had a similar life like we have. They had problems in their marriages, they struggled to do what they believed was right, they sometimes made mistakes, they had their moments of doubt in their faith.

Today’s feast reminds us that, if these people who were normal people like you and I made it, so can we. Celebrating their feast-day should inspire us to learn from and imitate their lives. And because we believe that they are alive (albeit in a different way) we can ask them to help us in our own journey. That is what praying to the saints is all about.

​During this coming week think with a thankful heart of some of those people who can be an inspiration for you in your life. Speak to them, ask them to help you. And believe that, with God’s help, you too can make it. 

It should be very clear by now that the religious leaders of Jesus’ time were out to get him. They could have accused him of anything: he did not respect the Sabbath, he invited himself to eat with sinners at their homes, he did not pay taxes, he made friends with Samaritans (sworn enemies of the Jews), he loved everyone, even sinners. Still, they wanted a statement from him which would have made their accusation fool-proof. This time they try to test him with a question about the Law. Their beloved Law, given to them by God Himself. The question seems simple and innocent enough: which commandment of the Law is the greatest? We know that, in reality there were disputes amongst various Rabbis about which commandment is the greatest. We know that God had given them the ten commandments. But these were, probably, deemed to be too general. So, in time these were developed into 613 commandments, each of them being a specific should or shouldn’t do.

Most of those present (being pharisees) would have expected Jesus to say that the greatest commandment is the observation of the Sabbath, their holy day. The next question would have obviously been, then, “So why don’t you observe it?” But again, Jesus does not fall into their trap, and he cites something which they knew very well. He quotes the “Listen Israel”, which the Jews knew like we know the Our Father or the Hail Mary. They recited it more than once a day, and it says, “You must love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your heart”. Without being asked, then, Jesus adds that the second one is similar: love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus puts these two commandments on a par. It’s interesting to note that here Jesus goes beyond their Law. The only times love is mentioned in the 613 precepts are to love God (4), to love other Jews (13), to love converts (14) and to love the missionary (37). Jesus introduces the love of neighbour. And we remember that when once someone asked him who is my neighbour he gave them the parable of the good Samaritan. This must have been quite a shock to his listeners. No one would have imagined that an enemy (and a very hated one at that!) should be considered a neighbour worthy of one’s love.

Throughout his ministry Jesus never taught anyone to obey the law. His concern was, rather, that we become more like God. He wanted to help us live up to the fact that we are created in God’s own image. Of course, the law is there to help us in this. As he said, “I have not come to abolish the law, but to perfect it”.

God is Love, Saint John tells us. The two words, God and Love, are interchangeable. Jesus is the human expression of this divine Love. My life as a follower of Jesus has to be modelled on his love. Some of his final words were a reminder that we should “do this” in his memory when he was about to give up his life, and to do as he did, when he washed his disciples’ feet (including those of Judas the traitor!).

No wonder he puts the two commandments together. Loving God with my whole being must necessarily lead me to love my neighbour unconditionally, irrespective of who he or she is or of what they have done.

​“On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets,” Jesus concludes. Indeed, on these commandments depend everything for us. 

He had become a common enemy. We have two opposing factions from Jewish life in Jesus’ time. The pharisees, who had the power to decide what is spiritually right or wrong, were against the Roman occupation of their land. The Romans were pagans who profaned the Holy Land with their idols and their immoral life. It was, therefore, morally wrong according to them to support in any way the Roman occupiers. Then there were the Herodians who, as the name suggests, were friends of Herod Antipas, whom Jesus had called fox. He was a puppet in the emperor’s hands, and these people were very much pro-Roman.

Through his teachings, Jesus was becoming a threat for both of them. So, they manage to come together to get him. And what better way is there than to ask him about taxes - something that everybody has to pay but everybody detests! As if to answer this question, St Paul would tell the Romans, years later, “This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor”. Everybody knows that a just tax-system is necessary for every society to function well. The Christian has to give a good example even in this. But Jesus chooses not to address the issue. He does not fall into their trap. Instead, he asks about the image and inscription which are on the tribute coin, the denarius. On one face of the coin we can find the image of the Emperor Tiberius, with the words “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus”. Caesar considered himself divine, a god. And that’s how he wanted others to see him. We remember that many martyrs of the early Church died precisely because they refused to venerate the emperor as god. They knew there is only one God, and their choices were made accordingly. When Jesus tells the people to give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God, he is not talking about taxes or tax-evasion. He goes much deeper than that, and is asking the people (and, therefore, us) to do the right choices in life. Essentially, he is asking us: who is your God? Whom, or what, do you worship in life?

The fact that Caesar’s image is imprinted on the coin implies that the coin belongs to Caesar. It does not belong to us. The image we have imprinted in us, on the other hand, is the image of God. Speaking of this kind of facial recognition, the Jews would have immediately recalled the quote from the opening verses of the bible when God created us in His own image. That is the image we have imprinted in us. And therefore, it is to God that we belong.

Giving to God what belongs to God is what we did in our baptism. There we died for the world and offered our lives to God. With our baptismal promises we made a commitment to live the rest of our lives according to God’s wishes.

Jesus’ invitation is still very relevant to us today. Like the people in Jesus’ time we, too, have to choose which God to serve in our lives. The idols that might want to allure us in life can be many: money, work, self-image, ambitions. As Christians, we belong to God because His image is imprinted in us. Let us give God what truly belongs to him. If we want to see what the image of God looks like, Jesus’ words come to our help when he told us “whoever sees me sees the Father”. So living up to God’s image simply means living the same kind of life that Jesus lived - a life of total, self-giving love.

​Let us live up to the image that is imprinted in us: God’s own image.