Pit Senyor to all our readers!
Pit Senyor to all our readers! Today is the culmination of our weeklong Sinulog Festival, which is the loud, noisy fiesta of Cebu, right after last night's solemn procession for the Señor Santo Niño de Cebu, which hopefully should remind all the Santo Niño devotees who have come from far-flung places that our devotion to the Holy Child should remind us of our spirituality and that above all, our Lord Jesus Christ, the second person in the Blessed Trinity came into this world as a helpless child, solely dependent on his father and mother just like all of us when we were little children.
When the Sinulog Fiesta is upon us we usually get two gospel readings in our Liturgical calendar because the Vatican acknowledges the importance of the Señor Santo Niño for us Filipinos. The other gospel reading for the third Sunday of Ordinary Time is the Call of the First Disciples which you can read in Mark 1: 14-24. It is rather an uncanny coincidence that the topic is about the first disciples, after all, nearly 500 years ago we Cebuanos became the first disciples of Christ in this part of the world when Ferdinand Magellan baptized King Humabon and Queen Juana as the first Christians in this part of the world.
Today's gospel reading which comes from Mark 10: 13-16, which talks about the Blessing of the Children.
"People were bringing children to Jesus that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. 14 When Jesus saw this he became indignant and said to them, "Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15 Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it." 16 Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them."
***
During the time of Christ, children and women had no place in society and considered as chattel or non-entities. So being a Jew, it was natural or even expected for the disciples of Jesus to keep the children away from their Master, thinking that they were doing the Lord a favor. But instead, Jesus rebuked them and told them not to keep the children away from him. I'm sure that this is because our Lord Jesus was once a child himself.
But it gets better. In Matt. 10:18 the Lord Jesus tells his disciples, "See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven, their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven." This is a very clear command of our Lord Jesus about how we should treat children.
I confess that in the past, I used to be irritated by children many mothers or yayas bring to church where they cry, shout, talk, or play around disturbing the churchgoers. In the US, their churches have places for children to play while their parents are hearing the Holy Mass. However, during one of our Bible encounters, we had a discussion on this exact passage from Matt.10: 18, which made me realize that if the angels of these children always look at the face of God the Father, then the Father is not really far away from all of us.
In the second to the last paragraph of today's gospel, Jesus clearly states, "Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it." Again this is a Divine revelation on how to enter the Kingdom of God in heaven and that means for all of us to have a childlike faith. So the problem lies upon people who may have read the Bible and are able to interpret it like a true wise man.
But then the problem of this learned man is what we call "intellectual pride" when one thinks that he can debate with anyone over anything written in the Bible because of his intelligence. So when you meet Catholics whose devotion to the Santo Niño seems to border on fanaticism, do not judge these people who might just have a childlike faith, something that the Lord Jesus himself wants all of us to embrace.
***
For email responses to this article, write to [email protected] or [email protected]. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.
- Latest
