Faith

Monday, 24th August 2026 – Feast 0f St Bartholomew – John 1:45-51

Jesus starts His public ministry, and how does He do it? He starts with borrowed disciples. They weren’t even His yet! They belonged to John the Baptist. It’s John who looks up, sees Jesus, and shouts, “Look! The Lamb of God!” That one declaration prompts two unnamed disciples to start trailing Jesus. They were literally stalking Him down the road! They followed Him close enough and long enough that Jesus finally has to spin around, look them in the eyes, and drop the ultimate question: “What are you looking for?” You can stalk the Savior from a distance, but sooner or later, His grace is going to force a confrontation.

That is your first takeaway today: Simply following Jesus makes absolutely no sense if you haven’t figured out what you actually want. What are you looking for? See, Jesus wasn’t looking for casual fans. He was looking for disciples, not just social media followers! A fan want what’s in His hands, but disciples want what’s in His heart. 

Look at how these two unnamed disciples respond. They didn’t ask for a casual place to crash for the night. They weren’t looking for a hotel room; they wanted a permanent home with Jesus! When they asked, “Where do you live?” they weren’t looking for a street address, which, by the way, Jesus didn’t even have! They were saying, “We want to be with You, always.” They wanted to be disciples, not just followers. Which brings us to point number two: Discipleship is not some one-night fleeting romance; it calls for tough love! It demands your whole life! Jesus is not looking for a casual date on Sunday morning; He’s looking for a total takeover of your entire week.

Now, the third takeaway from this Gospel is incredibly interesting. We usually assume that a call from God, whatever your state of life may be, comes first, and then you enter a process of discernment. But do not close your eyes to what happens in this text today! Long before the official call goes out, we find these disciples already in a process of discernment. They are having a real, raw discussion with Jesus. The discernment actually precedes the call! And only after this process does Jesus drop the invitation: “Come and see.”

Discipleship is a matter of absolute conviction. These two unnamed men accepted the invitation and willingly submitted themselves to Jesus’ “seminary.” They came, they saw, and they were completely conquered! The Scripture says they “remained with Him that day.” That must have been one unbelievable, mind-blowing day, because they said a complete ‘yes’ in less than twenty-four hours! They fell for Jesus, hook, line, and sinker. This makes Jesus’ sales pitch of action before words a seriously hard act to follow! Usually, the best salesmen in the world believe the exact opposite to be true, they talk before they deliver. Not Jesus!

Then, the Gospel finally reveals the identity of one of those unnamed men: it’s Andrew! And Andrew hasn’t just been drawn into the fold; he is now professing it with absolute certainty. He runs straight to his brother to introduce him to discipleship, declaring, “We have found the Messiah!” But let’s be real here: in finding the Messiah, Andrew actually found himself! And just like that, Jesus gets His third disciple, Simon, and immediately renames him Cephas, the Rock!

You need to understand that the seminary of Jesus is a truly itinerant one. It had zero physical structure. It had no campus because it was completely mobile and moved wherever the Master moved! The very next day, Jesus trudges off from the Jordan River all the way to Galilee with His mini-seminary of three. We still don’t know who the second unnamed disciple is, but suddenly we meet the fourth: Philip, who hails from the exact same city of Bethsaida that Andrew and Peter called home.

This brings us to the final reflection on discipleship, and it ties directly to our saint of today. A true disciple must be an evangeliser who is willing to face harsh criticism and cynicism! Look at the text! Nathaniel (also known as Bartholomew) straight-up mocks Philip when he hears they found the Messiah. He sneers, “What good can come from Nazareth?” But Philip does not lose heart in the face of that cynicism! He doesn’t argue. Instead, he hands Bartholomew the exact same offer that Jesus gave to Andrew: “Come and see.” The words of Jesus in verse 39 suddenly become Philip’s words in verse 46, just like they need to become our words today!

The call to discipleship is a call to unity, but it is never a call to uniformity! Look at the mix! You might be pointed in the direction of Jesus by someone else; the way John the Baptist directed Andrew. You might be personally introduced to Jesus by a family member; the way Peter was by his brother. You might answer a direct, sudden call from Jesus Himself; like Philip did. Or, you might initially meet the gospel with total cynicism; just like Bartholomew!

Bartholomew only believed at first because Jesus miraculously revealed his past under the fig tree. But you and I don’t need to believe just because someone reveals our past. We believe because we know that Jesus died and rose again for us and that secures our future! Like someone wisely said: our past is imperfect, our present is tense, but our future is perfect!

And today, the Church celebrates the feast of this once-cynical disciple! Bartholomew wasn’t perfect when he was called, but he strove to be absolutely faithful to his call. The ancient traditions surrounding his apostolic mission are wild and varied. Some rumors claim he travelled all the way to India, though historically that seems pretty improbable. Most accounts hold that he was martyred in Albanopolis in Armenia. One story says he was beheaded, but the most popular, brutal tradition declares that he was flayed alive and crucified upside down!

This radical apostle made such a massive, undeniable impact on history that he even captivated the great Renaissance painter, Michelangelo! When Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment on the massive wall of the Sistine Chapel, he painted a flayed Saint Bartholomew holding his own hollow skin in his hand. But if you look closely at the masterpiece, the face on that empty skin is actually the face of Michelangelo himself! He was saying, “I want to be so poured out for the Master that I am entirely consumed by the call.”

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The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary – 22nd of August 2026 – Isaiah 9:2-7/ Luke 1:26-38

The Memorial of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated annually on August 22, serves as a profound liturgical culmination of Mary’s journey, coming exactly one week (the octave day) after the Solemnity of the Assumption on August 15. This sacred relationship is permanently preserved in Catholic prayer, reflected beautifully in the fifth decade of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, which meditates on the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth.

The theological concept of Mary as Queen has deep ancient roots, dating back to 4th-century. There are writings by Saint Ephrem and old Davidic traditions of the Gebirah (Queen Mother). The universal liturgical feast itself is relatively modern. It was officially instituted in 1954 by Pope Pius XII through his papal encyclical Ad caeli reginam (“To the Queen of Heaven”).

Proclaimed during a special Marian Year celebrating the centenary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (defined in 1854), the encyclical emphasized that Mary shares in Christ’s kingship through her divine motherhood and her parallel role as the “New Eve” in the work of human redemption.

Originally, Pope Pius XII decreed that the feast be celebrated on May 31, positioning it as a glorious “crowning” to the traditional Marian month of May. This history explains why classic Marian hymns sung throughout May, such as Regina Caeli or Bring Flowers of the Rarest, prominently feature themes of her coronation.

However, in 1969, Pope Paul VI issued calendar reforms via the apostolic letter Mysterii Paschalis (effective in 1970). He transferred the Queenship of Mary to August 22 to link it intrinsically to her Assumption, demonstrating that her heavenly coronation is the immediate sequence to being assumed body and soul into glory. To ensure nothing was lost, the Feast of the Visitation was moved into the vacant May 31 slot, perfectly aligning Mary’s scriptural journey to Elizabeth between the Annunciation and the birth of John the Baptist.

The Queenship of Mary bridges the Old Testament prophecy of our first reading from Isaiah 9:2–7 with its New Testament fulfillment in the Gospel from Luke 1:26–38. Isaiah foretells a “Prince of Peace” who will rule eternally on David’s throne, a promise the Angel Gabriel directly echoes at the Annunciation when he tells Mary that her son will inherit that very same everlasting kingdom.

By giving her faithful “Fiat” to Gabriel, Mary consents to become the mother of this Messianic King. In the ancient Davidic tradition, the king’s mother held the official royal title of Gebirah, or Queen Mother, serving as a powerful advocate for the people. Therefore, Mary’s heavenly coronation is entirely dependent on the kingship of Jesus; she reigns not by her own power, but as our loving Queen Mother who continuously brings our prayers before the throne of her Son.

The crowning of Mary as Queen of all creation is the culmination of all the privileges granted to our Lady; the Mother of God, assumed body and soul into heaven. Our Lady’s role in the history of salvation is unique. The same is true, however, for each one of us in a smaller scale. The Lord is with each of us and we have found favour with God and he has a mission for us to fulfil.

There is much to learn from Our Blessed Mother

We all reach a crossroads where God hands us an invitation that looks a whole lot like an interruption. We want to discard the disruption, but God is saying, “No, embrace it, because what is wrecking your original blueprint is actually building my ultimate breakthrough.” We get so protective of our personal scripts, the perfect timeline, the unbroken dream for our lives, the neat little future we planned out for our kids, that when a plot twist hits, we think it’s a tragedy.

God will often allow a situation to break your heart just to shatter your comfort zone. He doesn’t ruin your plans to punish you; He reroutes them to position you. When you stop fighting the friction and finally utter that Mary-style, unqualified “Yes,” you aren’t settling for less; you are stepping into more. Your “Let it be” is the exact moment you trade your fragile control for His indestructible covenant.

The moment you stop auditioning to be the director of your own life and volunteer to be a handmaid of the Most High, the weight lifts. Suddenly, you realize you don’t have to carry the outcome because you’re serving the One who commands the universe. Stop viewing the difficult season as a burial, and start seeing it as a seed. When you surrender your dream, you aren’t losing your future—you are just letting God fund it with His favor.

This call to saying yes requires a predisposition to being in tune with the many invitations of God, if not we would find ourselves fighting the will of God in our lives. The angel said to Mary, ‘You will conceive and bear a son,’ not ‘Are you willing to conceive and bear a son?’ That is how God’s will comes to us; in the things that happen to us; more than in the things we choose!

We know that God does not have favourites and Mary was not the ‘favourite one’ but the ‘favoured one’ of God, which means in reality that her disposition to God found favour with him. He knew that she would never turn him down. She found favour with God because of who she chose to be, a hand maid of the Lord.

Finally, Mary was not ‘blessed’ in the sense as we understand it today as one of having received comforts and privileges. This perhaps is how we use the word blessed when we exclaim, “how blessed am I”. Mary is just the opposite; her blessedness did not come with a list of privileges but with a role of responsibility. She is not blessed because she is going to be the Mother of God, or the Queen of Heaven, she is blessed because she believed and accepted THE word of God even though that call would have a sword pierce her heart.

Today she is crowned Queen of Heaven and we willingly accept her as our Queen

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Friday, 20th week in ordinary time – Memorial of St Pius X – Matthew 22:34-40

Think about this for a second. On Wednesday, we’re cruising through chapter twenty of Matthew’s Gospel. It’s a gentle flow. Then we hit Friday, we turn one single page, and suddenly we are staring down chapter twenty-two!

It’s like a peaceful mountain brook instantly turned into a rushing, roaring, category-five river. In the span of a page, Jesus predicts His death, heals the blind, rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, clears out the temple, curses a fig tree, and drops three massive parables of judgment on the religious elite. Just like that, the environment changes.

And now, we step into chapter twenty-two. The temple isn’t just a building anymore; it has become an intellectual battleground. The religious establishment is coming for Him. They aren’t trying to learn; they are trying to trap Him. They want an error. They want a reason to put handcuffs on the Son of God.

First up come the Pharisees. They bring a political trap about taxes. Jesus answers, exposes their hypocrisy, and leaves them completely amazed. They walk away to lick their wounds. Next come the Sadducees. They who don’t even believe in the resurrection, cook up this bizarre, hypothetical, sci-fi storyline about marriage in the afterlife just to trip Him up. And what does Jesus do? He silences them too.

Now we enter Round Two. The Pharisees see the Sadducees get dropped, so they change their formation. They send in their specialist. The text calls him a “lawyer.” But hold on! Don’t picture a modern-day defence attorney in a sharp suit. This lawyer was a scribe. He was an expert in the Torah. And he asks a question that reveals the absolute obsession of the religious culture of that day: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

The Problem is that these religious leaders had a body but with no soul. The Pharisees had codified 613 different laws. They were so obsessed with the minute, scrupulous, microscopic practice of the rules that they completely missed the point of the rules. They had turned the law into a cold, dead body with absolutely no soul.

They wanted a contract. But God wanted a covenant. A contract is about performance. A covenant is about relationship. A contract says, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” A contract says, “I will do the bare minimum required of me so I don’t get penalized.” But Jesus stands up in the middle of that intellectual cage match, and He puts the heart back into the law. He quotes Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

That is the vertical dimension. It’s total commitment. It’s covenantal fidelity. It’s loving God even when it hurts, even when it isn’t mandated, even when it costs you everything! But Jesus didn’t stop there. He hooks a horizontal dimension onto it. He grabs Leviticus 19:18 and pulls it into the light: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

For the rabbis, the world hung on the Torah till it resembled a stand of hair that held the weight of a mountain; more law, less love. But Jesus looked at them and said, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

That brings us to the memorial of our patron, St Pius X. Think about the time Pius X was stepped into the papacy at the start of the 20th century. The church was facing “Modernism,” an intellectual battleground of its own. It was a world that wanted to analyse God, dissect faith, and turn religion into a checklist or a political statement.

And what was the personal motto of St. Pius X? “Instaurare omnia in Christo” — To restore all things in Christ. How do you restore all things in Christ? You do exactly what Jesus did in Matthew 22. You put the heart back into the faith! You move from the cold contract of intellectualism into the burning covenant of divine love!

Poe Pius X saw people treating the Holy Eucharist like it was a distant, terrifying, legalistic ritual. People felt they weren’t “worthy” enough, so they rarely received communion. But Pius X had the heart of a shepherd. He lowered the age for children to receive the Eucharist, and he encouraged daily communion.

Why? Because he knew you cannot fight the battles of a secular world on an empty stomach! He knew the Eucharist isn’t a reward for the perfect; it is food for the hungry! He was bringing the vertical love of God straight down into the horizontal reality of everyday people! He was taking the law, and he was breathing the soul back into it!

If you only live out the vertical dimension, if you say, “It’s just about me and God, I’m just focusing on heaven,” you know what you look like? You look like a lone pole sticking straight up out of the ground. It’s pointing upward, but it’s isolated. It’s directionless to the world around it. It’s rigid. It’s lonely.

But when you take that vertical pole of loving God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and you crash it together with the horizontal beam of loving your neighbour, loving the broken, and feeding the spiritually hungry…something happens. When the vertical meets the horizontal, the Cross of Jesus Christ appears. The Cross isn’t just an ornament we wear around our necks. The Cross is a collision! It is the ultimate intersection where total devotion to God meets radical love for people.

On this memorial of St. Pius X I ask you, Are you living in a contract, or are you living in a covenant? Are you just checking the boxes of religion, or are you restoring all things in Christ? Stop trying to survive on “more law.” It’s time for more love. Love God with everything you’ve got, and let that love spill over into how you treat the person sitting next to you, the coworker who gets on your nerves, and the neighbour who doesn’t deserve it.

Let the vertical meet the horizontal. Let the world see the Cross active in your life today!

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Thursday, 20th week in ordinary time – 20th August 2026 – Matthew 22:1-14

Yesterday we were in chapter 20 and today we find ourselves in chapter 22. In between this text, in Chapter 21, Jesus has entered Jerusalem and from now on we listen to narratives that would have taken place in the Holy Week. Jesus has cleansed the temple only to return the next day to be challenged by the Chief Priest and the elders who wanted to know his source of authority. Jesus responds with three parables of judgment and we are in the third one today.

This parable is bizarre at all levels; if not scary. It goes from celebration to decimation in seven verses with its tortured and twisted plots; and there are not one but two of them. But remember that parables are allegories and not realism and hence you have to appreciate the absurdities to appreciate the parable.

In an ancient world where people are literally starving, where a hot meal is a miracle who would turn down a royal feast?! Nobody does that! It is both, economic and political insanity! So you need to understand that this wasn’t a scheduling conflict; this was a declaration of war! We are told that they made “light” of the invitation because they were so addicted to the predictable security of their own farms and their own businesses. They were blinded by the tyranny of the urgent, and they missed the invitation of the eternal!

This invite to tie a knot just got tied in knots! It goes from a celebration to total decimation in a heartbeat because a rejected King will always protect the honor of His Son! The guests decided to murder the messengers, and in doing so, they literally signed their own death warrants! But here is the ultimate twist: the text says the king burned down “their city.” Wait a minute, it was his city! But the moment they chose autonomy over allegiance; they forfeited the property! It became “their” city, and it burned to the ground. It is a dangerous thing to treat the grace of a Monarch like an optional accessory to your life! If you treat His presence like it’s cheap, you’ll find out really quick that His protection isn’t free!

And then there is part two! Those not meant to be invited are invited but one of them is not wearing a wedding garment so he is thrown into the outer darkness. Poor chap he came in for a free meal and now won’t even get a ‘get out of jail card.’ So we need to suss this one out to understand it.

This parable is similar to Luke 14:16-24 and one that is found in the Gospel of Thomas (an apocryphal text) however it is Matthew who added the second part of the story and this is found nowhere else in the Gospels. You must put on a Matthean mindset when reading his parables of Jesus. Matthew’s own community were kicked out by their Jewish brothers who lived down the road and made to feel like outsiders. That’s why when the king burns the city it is referred to as ‘their city’ a reference to Jerusalem which was burnt by the Romans in 70 AD.

The invitation to the wedding was rejected by the Jews who made ‘light’ of the bridegroom. Remember that one of the titles for the Messiah was the bridegroom. Having rejected the call to celebrate the messianic banquet, the Jews led by their chief priest and elders now face the full wrath of the king. The burnt down city of Jerusalem was still fresh in the minds of the Jewish Christians.

Yet Matthew has a parable-within-the parable which has no parallels outside of Matthew, so it must reflect his particular agenda. Matthew wants to make a point to his own people, to the Jewish Christians, who have now been invited to the very banquet which was rejected by their elder brothers in the faith.

It may seem a bit unfair to us that the man without a wedding garment has a legitimate excuse for not wearing one; after all it was a last-minute invite and the city had been burnt down by their own king. Yet Matthew wants to also remind us that the other guests did take the trouble to find one and dress appropriately, after all this was the banquet of the King.

Matthew is making a point to his own community. He wants them to understand that there will be no exceptions to following Jesus. Their standards must be high and their guard must always be up. The banquet hall was made available to them and they have to prove themselves better than their Jewish brothers for whom this party was really set up. There is a warning to the newcomers in this text. Replacing the original guests doesn’t give you permission to repeat their complacency. Grace is Inclusive, but not permissive: You are invited exactly as you are, but you are not permitted to stay exactly as you were.

The message must have really hit hard for verse 15 tells us that the Pharisees went out and plotted to entrap him in what he said.

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Wednesday, 20th week in ordinary time – 19th August 2026 – Matthew 20:1-16a

The parable of the labourers in the vineyard is unique to the Gospel of Matthew and found in no other Gospel.  Matthew, who follows the narrative of the Gospel of St Mark, breaks the flow of St Mark to insert this parable. What then did Matthew want to communicate which the other Gospels did not seem to be too interested in?

We have to constantly place the Gospel of Matthew in its historical and social context. Written in approximately 80 to 90 AD, the Gospel is principally addressed to the Jewish Christian community who lived in some proximity to Jerusalem.  However, the Jewish Christians were not the only ones attracted to the message of Jesus.

Paul, by this time, had already criss-crossed the Roman world. He had evangelized in Antioch, Macedonia, Achaia, Asia Minor and finally in Rome. It is possible, that by the time Matthew had written the Gospel, Paul was already martyred under Emperor Nero. From the Acts of the Apostles, we can safely surmise that the message of Christ found appeal in both Jewish Christians and even more among the Gentile Christians. Here in lies the problem

Central to the council of Jerusalem, which took place in about 49-51 AD (Gal 2:1-10; Acts 15), was the contentious issue of the Gentile converts as a result of Paul’s missionary activity.   Some sections of the Jewish Christians felt that these converts needed to be catechised in the Jewish traditions of circumcision, ethics and dietary habits. The council however, swung in Paul’s favour, albeit with a couple of riders. The Church now began to open its doors to the Gentiles.

The Gospel of Matthew, while keeping its focus on its principal audience of Jewish Christians would have definitely been confronted by the reality of an emerging cosmopolitan Church. By the time Matthew wrote the Gospel, Galilee was more Gentile than Jewish. The Gentile congregation perhaps wanted more say in Matthews’s community; a wish that would certainly be resented by the Jewish Christians.

Look again now at the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. The vineyard was always understood as a symbol for Israel. Ironically, the owner of the vineyard would never go looking for labourers at six in the morning; that was the job of the manager. But not this owner; for He is Jesus.  That leaves us with the labourers; who might they be?

Through the parable, we get a glimpse of the situation that Matthew’s volatile community finds itself in. While the Jewish Christians were the first to answer the call to work in the vineyard, they were not the only ones. In time, and perhaps much later, the Gentile Christians were made welcome to labour in the vineyard. The irony is that all are paid the same, even though the Jewish Christians laboured much more. This was a brewing labour problem no modern-day union would want to be drawn into.

There is one thought that must cross our minds on reading this parable; how can God be so unfair? We are not alone with such thoughts for the Jewish Christians must have felt the same. But Matthew wants us to see Jesus as he did and not as we would like Him to be.  The problem is often in our head, especially when we think we deserve more than others because we came to serve the Lord before they did.

The parable forces a shift from a merit-based mindset to a grace-based mindset. It reveals how difficult it is for human institutions to accept that latecomers receive the exact same status and privileges without “paying their dues.”

The Jewish Christians were not actually losing anything; they received the exact denarius they agreed upon. Their anger was sparked entirely by the generous treatment of the Gentiles. True inclusion often triggers resentment not because our own well-being is diminished, but because the gap between us and “the other” has been closed. The text reflects how privilege reacts when equality is introduced.

For Matthew’s volatile community, this was a warning against spiritual elitism. The Jewish Christians were the foundation of the movement, but if they allowed bitterness to consume them, they would end up on the periphery of what God was doing.

Spiritual and social movements are always vulnerable to generational resentment. The pioneers of a movement often struggle when the doors open wide to outsiders who do not share their history or customs.

The JBC well describes the workers and perhaps us, as ‘victims of the revolution of rising expectation’. The parable focuses on a magnanimous God who is not to be evaluated by our levels of human pettiness.  He is generous by His standards; for if He followed our measures of generosity, how poorer the world would be. Be thankful that God does not play by our rules.

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