8th Sunday in Ordinary
Time
March 2, 2014
Matthew 6:24 – 34
“Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or
reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are
not you more important than they (Mat 6:26)?”
Jesus tells us that we must not be
worried about our lives, about what we are going to eat and about our bodies
and their clothes. Life is more than all of these because God holds us precious
and dear. However, the reality seems to prove otherwise. Every day, thousand
defenseless babies are aborted, enormous number of children and young women
fall victims of human trafficking and prostitution, and millions suffer in
conflict-torn areas. Tablet, the International Catholic weekly on June 8, 2013
reported that 2 million children die out of hunger every year. In Metro Manila,
poorest families living in modified pushcarts is quite familiar sight. Recently,
national newspapers trumpet that more than 12 million Filipinos are technically
jobless (roughly around 13% of the population).
Looking at this staggering
numbers, it seems that God has failed to fulfill His promises. Why does God
allow this utter suffering afflicting humanity? Yet, our God is not a god of
statistics but the God of the living. Jesus is keeping His promises to us in
amazing yet most unlikely ways. Allow me to share the story of Nanay Maria (not
her real name). She is just living at Tatalon neighborhood, one of the poorest
areas in Quezon City, more or less 200 meters away from my cozy room at
Dominican Studentate! She was poor mother staying at a extremely tiny house
together with her husband, three children and a lot of grandchildren!
Sometimes, they have something to fill their stomach, but often they have only
each other. Yet, despite her utter poverty, God’s loving providence manifests
through her.
There was a
Muslim living next to her house. He got no job for months and had no money.
Thus, he could not pay his water and electric bills. Eventually, these
resources were cut from him. To fill his stomach, he sold everything in the
house. Finally he came to the house of Nanay and asked her to buy his very old
bag for 100 pesos. Nanay refused to buy, but then she gave him some kilos of
rice (though the rice in her house was very limited) and two buckets of water
to take a bath because he was very smelly! A friend asked her, “Why are you so good with this Muslim?” “I don’t care if he is a Muslim or a
Catholic. I only know that he is my neighbor, and Jesus teaches us to love our
neighbor as ourselves.” God fulfills His promises!
Allow me
also to share the life of Sr. Aziza of Comboni Missionary in the Holy Land. She
spends a lot of her days in the refuge centers in the West Bank to take care of
mostly African asylum seekers. As a nurse and a midwife, her skills are
invaluable, but she goes beyond her professional talents. She treats also the deep psychological wounds of the
people by being present and listening to their horrifying stories. Jotting down
also their stories, she has collected testimonies from more than 1,300 Africans
who escaped from torture camps in the Sinai Desert. The testimonies record how
refugees found themselves at the mercy of smugglers in the lawless Sinai
territory close to the Israeli border. Some spoke of being held to ransom,
sometimes for years, and of being chained, starved, raped and otherwise
tortured in attempts to extort money from their relatives at home in different
parts of Africa. Others said they had been trafficked on to other countries for
lives of domestic slavery or prostitution. Sr. Aziza’s work formed the
centerpiece of a research project that exposed for the first time the scale of
suffering endured by refugees in the Sinai camps. Without Sr. Aziza, the world
would have remained at its slumber to this monstrous work of the Devil. God
once again fulfills His promise.
Br.
Valentinus Bayuhadi Ruseno, OP
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