Dear friends in Christ, I am so happy to welcome you all for today’s Holy Mass and our special welcome to all our parishioners, cottagers, visitors and everyone here today. Dear friends, every time we come to church we celebrate Christ who gives His the living bread, who gives His body as the source of life and every time we come to church, we eat His body and become like Him our Lord and God.
Past three weeks, we have been hearing the teaching of Christ our Lord who invites us to eat His body and drink His blood and thus to have life that would never end. Many people who saw Him speaking about the life giving bread and they criticized and put Him down. But they were keep coming to Him because He multiplied the five fish and the two fish and thus more than five thousand people ate and were satisfied but as He began to talk about the divine manna namely His own body, they began to murmur and complain against Him.
Today I would like to focus more on the two kinds of faith namely emotional faith and intellectual faith.
Emotional faith
As our Lord Jesus Christ saw the crowd who listened to His divine words being tired and helpless, He had compassion for them and He multiplied the five loaves and the two fish and people who ate were all satisfied and then they began to praise and glorify Him saying, “He is the prophet who is to come into the world. Let us make Him king. Because of the food and physical satisfaction, they began to act emotionally. Their faith was not stronger since it was based on their emotions. When some amazing things happen to people in the name of God, they began to praise and glorify God for a while until they are being challenged intellectually. Once missionaries who went to preach the good news to distant counties, in order to attract poor people they gave them rice and people who got rice from the missionaries, immediately began to follow Christ. As the missionaries began to stop giving rice and start talking about faith and Christ, they went away from them criticizing and even people treated the missionaries bad. The gospels talk about so many incidents of emotional faith. For example, when a man saw Jesus doing amazing things coming to Him and said, “Jesus, I keep all the commandments and I should I do more to enter into the kingdom of god? And Christ said, “go and sell all your possessions and give to the poor and come and follow me”. The man was not happy because he was rich and He went away from Him. Today there are people who would like to die for Jesus and they will do anything for the kingdom of god until something happens to them. When they face certain challenges in their lives, they will immediately blame on God and go away from Him. A person’s faith that is based on his emotions will not take him to the kingdom of god, it is like a seed that falls on the path, and it will soon disappear.
These days we are seeing in the gospel, so many people coming to Jesus not because of His amazing teachings but because of His miracle the multiplication of the loaves and fish. When Jesus asked them to deepen their faith in Him they began to criticize and put Him down.
Intellectual faith
Our Catholic Church invites us to have strong intellectual faith. It is so important to understand the four different types of body of Christ to deepen our faith in Him. they are physical body, resurrected body, mystical body and the sacramental body. The physical body of Christ was the visible one. Jesus was born at Bethlehem like you and me and lived among people doing every day chores for thirty plus three years and those years, people saw him as a person with body and soul. He was just human. The physical body of Christ was conditioned with so many things.
The resurrected body: Jesus after His resurrection appeared to His disciples with his resurrected body and asked them to believe in His name. For example, the two disciples on the way to Emmaus had the experience with the resurrected body. Then comes the mystical body namely the Church. The Catholic Church called the Mother Church of all churches is the mystical church. Because Christ is the one who founded and he is the one who leads the Church to His father. And that is why the Church is stronger than ever and it doing wonderful for two thousand years. And then the sacramental body, every time we come to Church and celebrate Mass, the mere bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ our Lord.
Unless we have a clear idea of these concepts of the body of Christ, it is not easy to deepen our faith in Christ our Lord.
No comments:
Post a Comment