08 March 2024 – Friday, 3rd Week of Lent (Year B)

by Fr Fabian Dicom

Today’s First Reading from Hosea is very striking in many ways. The Lord, speaking through the Prophet Hosea, calls on His people to come back to Him. And if they do, the Lord promises them to love them, to love them with all His heart. The Lord goes on to say to His people: I am like the cyprus, evergreen. All your fruitfulness comes from me.

Because the Lord alone loves us with all His heart, He alone is the source of all true life for us.

Likewise, the Lord calls out to us today in love. Pleading with us to keep turning to Him as the one who can allow our lives to bear rich fruit, the fruit of the Spirit. God’s life-giving love is the basis of Jesus’ call in the Gospel today. This love of God that is described in the Readings today, this love that Jesus is referring to is a faithful love. This love is unconditional.

And I want to talk to you about this faithful love because we need to understand this. And the response to His love is what Jesus is calling in the First Commandment: To love your God with all your heart, with all your being, a love that is worthy of His love.

And what is His love?

We all know that He loves us. He is faithful. Of late, I have heard from a few people who are going through a very, very rough time in their lives. They are suffering, struggling. In the midst of all that, they can tell me this: God has been faithful to me. And they are convinced. God has been faithful to me.

I am amazed. I am very touched. How could they come to this? It is very clear. They totally believe but they are always open and mindful about God, His presence. And one of the ways that was consistent in every one was a life of prayer. And this prayer is not shouting and screaming. Every one had one element that was consistent: SILENCE.

Silence.

Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, I just got a text from someone from CDM. I think it was one of the quotes from St Faustina, I think. It said: The Lord wants to speak to us. We need to make time. He wants to speak to us in the language of silence.

At that, we begin in our silence, in our prayer, in our mindfulness of who God is, we will be convinced of that love. You can hear this many times unless we are in that disposition.

The second thing is God’s love is unconditional. And again I refer to these people who are suffering. Sometimes they are burdened by what they hear, that perhaps their suffering is caused by some wrong thing that they have done. And that is total rubbish.

Our bodies are mortal. It is not meant to last forever. This is common sense. Whether it is our genetic makeup or we are exposed to something, this body will eventually give way and die. Circumstances on this world, this earth is not heaven, so things may not work very well. There is no cause and effect. It is not because I did something terrible that God has willed it this way. Because God’s love is unconditional.

I tend to think that if we hear things like that and make us suspect or even doubt God’s love, these are sources of evil. I believe that.

So let us be very clear. If we want to experience God, believe that this God loves us faithfully, believe that this God is unconditional. No matter what people say. And only then it empowers us to love other people. Which is the second part of the Commandment. Our loving relationship with God in turn is the foundation of what Jesus calls the Second Commandment: To love our neighbours as ourselves.

So the more we are open to God’s love for us and respond to His love by loving Him, the more we are empowered to love others with God’s own love. And the more we reach out, the more we experience His love as well.

So let us pray for this grace today that we will be always aware and mindful of God’s love for us, every moment of the day.

Click below to listen to the homily and watch the video:-

Click to live-stream Mass on 08 March 2024