God needs to prune us

THE gospel reading for the Mass on the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B, talks about Christ telling his disciples that he is the true vine and God is the vine grower. Every branch that does not bear fruit, he said, would be taken away by God, and the branch that does would be pruned for it to bear more fruit. (cfr. Jn 15,1-8) 

 It’s quite clear from these words of Christ that we really need to be fruitful and productive in our life, not so much in terms of material and temporal gains as in terms of the real fruit that we need to bear: our sanctification, our identification with God who created us in his image and likeness, and who is testing us in this life if what he wants us to be is also what we would like ourselves to be. 

 In short, it’s a matter of whether we choose to follow God’s will or simply our own will! 

 We need to realize that our life is first of all a “project” of God before it is our own. He is the one who started it and who wants it to go along the way of his plans and designs. Ours is simply to correspond to his will as best that we can. This is what is meant by being fruitful in our life. 

 We have to be wary when we fail to bear the fruit God is expecting from us, because according to Christ’s words, God will cut us off from the true vine, Christ himself who as the true vine, offers us “the way, the truth and the life” proper to us. 

 We actually have no excuse why we cannot follow God’s will. That’s because Christ, the God who became man, has offered us and continues to offer us everything we need to achieve our true purpose in life. 

 This realization should urge us to make Christ truly the center of our life. He should be everything to us. Any moment or any aspect of our life where Christ is set aside should be considered as an anomaly in our life. 

 But given our tendency to say enough to whatever effort we make to follow God’s will, we should not be surprised that we experience some kind of “pruning” that God does on us to make us more fruitful and to continue doing good. 

 This pruning can take many forms—more challenges and trials in our life, some problems and crises that we are made to experience, etc. All these are meant to make us a better person, polishing the rough edges in our personality so we can become more and more like Christ, humble and willing take on anything for the glory of God and for the good of mankind. 

 This pruning is meant to develop more virtues, more skills, or to grow more in them. We are quite notorious to saying enough to what we already have accomplished. But we have to realize that the pursuit for the fullness of our humanity will never have any limit. God will be the one to complete and perfect things. Ours is simply to continue going as far as we can, without stopping or saying enough. 

 We should not be surprised, much less complain, when we notice that God continues to prune us in different ways. It can only mean that we are being made to become more and more like him which is the real fruitfulness meant for us!

Christ as “the way, the truth and the life” for us

THE readings of the Mass on Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter (cfr. Act 13,26-33; Jn 14,1-6) remind us of our duty to really know who Christ is since he is the very pattern of our humanity, the savior of our damaged humanity. How he is is also how we should be. And given our journeying condition here on earth, Christ offers us “the way, the truth and the life” proper to us. 

 We have to realize very deeply and abidingly that we all have the need to know Christ well. This need involves not only a few of us. It involves all of us. And so, we just have to see how we can go through these theological sciences of Christology (Christ as the Son of God made man) and Soteriology (Christ as our savior), which can be done both formally and informally. 

 As the gospels narrate in many occasions, in spite of all the miracles and the wonderful teachings he gave them, many of the people continued to be doubtful and even suspicious of him. On several occasions, they even tried to harm and eliminate him. Of course, in the end they got their way. They managed to put Christ to death in the most ignominious way to die, i.e., to be crucified. 

 It is a phenomenon that continues to take place today, in spite of the most convincing of all the miracles of Christ—his own resurrection that later led to his ascension into heaven that was witnessed by a good number of people. 

 That many of us continue to doubt and even to be suspicious of him can be seen in the fact that we continue to take him for granted, to put him aside from our daily affairs as if he is irrelevant or just a drag to our activities and concerns, and even to openly reject and to be hostile to him. 

 We need to correct this predicament immediately and strongly, otherwise we would be fully cut off from the very source and keeper of our humanity. There are many ways to resolve this problem. We obviously cannot cover all of them, but we can at least mention a few. 

 One way is to disabuse ourselves from banking our belief in Christ mainly on some tremendous miracles and extraordinary events. That would be like testing or doubting God always. We should believe in Christ, with or without miracles. 

 Christ himself complained about this. “Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe,” he said to a court official whose daughter was dying. (Jn 4,48) We should avoid having some ulterior motives before we confess our belief in Christ. 

 We need to strengthen our belief in Christ by undertaking the relevant study of his person and mission, and by submitting ourselves to a certain plan that would make our personal and collective relation with Christ alive. 

 We certainly have to learn how to pray, how to offer sacrifices. We have to develop virtues that would resemble us little by little with him. We need to avail of the sacraments where God’s grace, his way of sharing his life with us, is channeled to us. We have to learn to wage a lifelong ascetical struggle since we will always be hounded by the enemies of God and of our own soul, starting with our own weaknesses, etc.

“Ite, missa est”

THAT’S “Go forth, the Mass is ended” in Latin. With these words, we are reminded that all of us who attend Mass are being sent forth the way Christ sent his apostles to “go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” (Mk 16,15) 

 May it be that we are always aware of this mandate Christ is giving us. We are being sent to go as far and as widely as possible to proclaim the Gospel. We are being sent to make Christ known and loved by as many people as possible, because Christ is actually everything to us. 

 To be sent by Christ to proclaim him in all corners of the world is for us to be a missionary. But we need to make some drastic updating of our understanding of what a missionary is. We should not get stuck with the common textbook idea that a missionary is usually a priest or nun who goes to a far-away place, and literally starts a settlement there. 

 While this concept of a missionary is still valid—it will always be—it now cries to be expanded to reflect its true character, especially given today’s fast-moving and more complicated world. 

 We have to understand that everyone, by virtue of his sheer humanity and much more, his Christianity, is called to be a missionary, and that he does not need to go to distant lands because his immediate environment already needs a more effective, down-to-earth evangelization. 

 Yes, even the ordinary guy in an office, the farmer, the businessman, the politician, the entertainers, artists and athletes, are called to be missionaries. That’s simply because as persons with a prominently social dimension in our life, we have to be responsible for one another. 

 And the biggest responsibility we can have for the others would be their moral and spiritual welfare, much more than just their economic or social wellbeing. It is this responsibility that we have to learn how to be more serious about and more competent in fulfilling. This is the current situation and challenge to all of us. 

 And so, we have to reconcile ourselves with the reality that we actually have to be missionaries right where we are. In fact, I would say that to go to the deserts of Africa or the forests and rivers of Brazil could be far easier to do, since in these places we only have to contend more with physical and material difficulties. 

 The people in these isolated areas may exhibit primitive violent attitudes, but their minds and hearts can easily be converted by simple and elemental gestures of goodness and, of course, the grace of God. This has always been the experience of missionaries who went to these places. 

 It’s rather in the paved jungles of the big cities inhabited by very sophisticated people immersed in very worldly things where the more demanding kind of missionary work is needed. 

 In these places, the people tend to be so confined to their own world, already made beautiful and comfortable by the new technologies, such that any talk about spiritual and supernatural realities, especially about prayer, sacrifice and the need for the sacraments, could easily fall on deaf ears. 

 These urban dwellers may not openly profess atheism or agnosticism. They can even show many acts of piety, and can even show off some good work. And this is the more difficult part, precisely because with that condition they can think they are already ok insofar as religion is concerned. 

 We need to sharpen our sense of our missionary identity to face the tremendous challenge we have today to make Christ known and loved.