COLLECT SERIES
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The Mass: Collect Series Icon. |
COLLECT
The Collect for the Sixth Sunday of Eastertide
Year B reads as follows:
Grant, almighty God,
That we may celebrate with
heartfelt devotion these days of joy,
Which we keep in honour of the
risen Lord,
And that what we relive in
remembrance
We may always hold to in what we
do.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
who lives and reigns with You in the
unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
In making this prayer tangible, the
following reflection questions emerged:
- In what ways do I celebrate with
heartfelt devotion the Pascal mystery?
- How do I relive in remembrance the suffering,
death and Resurrection of Christ in my daily life?
- What difference does honouring the
risen Christ make to my life?
- How shall I honour the risen Christ this
coming week?
GOSPEL REFLECTION
The Gospel for today is from St John
15:9-17.
As each Sunday passes, we can easily
forget that only a few weeks ago, we
celebrated Good Friday when we commemorated the agonizing death of Christ on
Mount Calvary. It is important for us to
realise that crucifixion was an excruciating, shameful death reserved for
hardened criminals who deserved it.
Yet
Jesus, our loving Saviour, the innocent lamb of God, one who had never offended
God or neighbour endured it to show the depth of God’s love for humanity. Reflect on it in front of a crucifix, read
the passion account regularly. Do I
personally feel moved by His suffering and death for me personally? What
caused Christ that torment and death on the cross was our sins, the sins of all
mankind and not the spite and hatred of his Jewish opponents, who were only
instruments in the tragedy. Atonement had to be made to God for the sins of the
world, so that mankind could reach the eternal inheritance which the
incarnation made available to them. However, not all the acts of the entire
human race could make a sufficient atonement to God. A sacrifice, an expiation
of infinite value was needed. The death of the Son of God in his human nature
was alone capable of making such an expiation.
Christ willingly accepted His father’s
will and embraced His crucifixion for the sake of humanity. Surely this proves the
depth of God’s love by allowing His own Son to die this shameful death. It should also be remembered that even though Jesus had this love for
humanity and laid down his life for us, it did not make his sufferings any
less, did not ease any of the pains of Calvary. His agony in the Garden before
his arrest shows this: he foresaw all the tortures and pains which he was to
undergo and sweated blood at the thought of what awaited him.
Despite this, Jesus kept His Father's commandment "not my will but thine
be done."
Is my heart a heart of stone and do I
lack understanding and gratitude when I fail to appreciate fully what Christ
has done for us and deliberately offend him! Christ died to bring us to heaven but we tell
him, by our sins, that He was wasting his time. We do not want to go to heaven,
we are making our happiness here!
Christ told us, through the disciples
on Holy Thursday night, that He had made us his friends, rather than being servants
in the household. We do not merely earn a daily wage and have no intimacy with
the family and no hope of ever sharing in the family possessions. Instead, God has
given us the opportunity to be adopted
into the family by Christ becoming man, we have been guaranteed all the rights
of children intimacy with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the future
sharing in the eternal happiness of that divine household. Christ's incarnation
made us God's children; Christ's death on the cross removed sin. Sin is the one
obstacle that could prevent us reaching our eternal inheritance.
Because God gave us a free will we can
in a moment of folly, a moment of madness really, deprive ourselves of the
privileges and possessions which Christ has made available to us. We can choose
to exchange an eternity of happiness for a few fleeting years of
self-indulgence on earth. We can fling Christ's gift of love back in his face
and tell him we don't want it. God forbid that we should ever act like this,
that we should ever forget God's purpose in creating us. If we realise that
this is what we have done, Jesus provides for us His mercy through the Sacrament
of Reconciliation. We can simply tell Jesus through the priest that we are
sorry. Jesus absolves us ( through the
ministry of the priest) and we are restored again to being a child of God.
Life on earth is but a short prelude to
our real life with God in Heaven. We need
to make the choice to use our life on earth as Christ has told us how to use
it, then death for us will be the passage into the eternal mansions.
Let us be grateful to God, Father, Son
and Holy Spirit; love the Blessed Trinity; prove your love by loving your
fellowmen every day. In this way, we are keeping the commandment of love and
fulfilling the whole law and the prophets. We have to ask ourselves do we
really want to go to heaven to be eternally happy? Do I really want to claim the prize of eternal
life with God which Jesus offered to us through His death and Resurrection?
If so, our happiness starts today with what
we do and say and how we live our life today. Live today and every day with the
goal of eternal happiness and Heaven in mind as that is where our real home is.
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