Emerging with Christ from hiddenness to light

In a muddled-up world like Philippine politics today, the country seems to be plunged in darkness, divided as it were against itself. Nothing seems clear anymore as to who has done the wrong, who tells the truth and lives it or who tells the lies and is able to get away undercover of falsehood. This person points an accusing finger against another and the whole controversy ends in angry bickerings and hollerings at one another. Some well-meaning individuals and people in media try to resolve the problems which beset our nation at the moment; but they cannot get by with effective solutions.

I cannot now remember the saint visionary who saw our world underneath covered with a dark labyrinth so complicated that one cannot find the way to anywhere because the knotted paths lead nowhere not even to the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel. "What way do I follow to find that light?"

The World of God today answers that question. The event of Jesus Christ, for our Christian faith is the supreme miracle, the high tide of God’s providential activity. As such it focuses the presence and activity which we are indeed unaware until such a focusing occurs and the "mystery hidden for ages" is made "manifest." Jesus Christ is then the focus in which the mystery of God is disclosed.

Christ’s coming to the world traces an existence which begins from below-up and emerges to the highest levels of the Godhead. The virgin-birth of Mary by divine initiative, through the power of the Holy Spirit safeguards the mystery of the Incarnation. The full expression of God is Jesus Christ. God-man born in an animal manger hidden inside a cave in the cold of midnight unknown to the rest of the world. Then He was the child growing in wisdom, in age and in grace to manhood hidden for 30 years and known as the carpenter‘s son living the ascetic life of prayer and work in preparation for the work of redemption in obedience to the Father’s will. Picking his first disciples from unschooled fishermen and men who simply followed Him at His bidding, "Come follow me." The proclamation of the Kingdom of God on the lakeshore of Galilee and its environs and towns were spent in teaching, healing of the sick, expelling evil spirits from those they possessed, feeding the hungry and raising the dead to life. The Second Person of the Trinity, only begotten of God was the full expression of God the Father and the Spirit and all the three in one unity. It is through this His most holy expression that God emerges from His hiddenness and comes to light.

All along from birth to death of Christ on the Cross there is an absolutely humbling process manifest in the mysteries of His life, passion and death, a self-giving and emptying which essentially is God’s letting-be. And the pattern is always a very humbling process, that of the self-giving like Christ who say, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart" (Mt 11:29). Only if we do so, shall we find rest.

Already there, we have the answer to the question how we would find our way, lost in the dark labyrinth of the world’s muddled up problems. All these problems proceed from pride of heart. If we are not so after the kind of power money can give us, we won’t go into jueteng or any form of illegal gambling or any form of kurakot for that matter. If we are not so after power and fame we won’t cheat in elections. Or when vanity gets the better of us, we pay exorbitant amount to have all the wrinkles on our face stretched, or presume we can improve the original body God has given us by every surgery to get our flesh which we think is already sunken padded and doesn’t give us the sexual attraction we want to have. We want to be on top of the world by all means violating the laws of God on reproduction indulging in sex and resorting to abortion because we want all the sensual pleasure but not the baby. For all the pride of money, fame, power nations will go to war regardless of the utter destruction to lives of men, women, children and cities that thousands of years civilization have built up.

About all this the Gospel of Jesus Christ utters a prayer of thanksgiving to His Father and enunciates a fundamental truth about our way of life: "I give thanks to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike" (Mt 11:25).

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Matthew 11:24-30