THE SKEPTIC

The 1st reading reminded me of my co-participant in a training that I attended in Japan. He is from Korea. The duration of the training is almost one year so it is important to have a good rapport among the participants. Unfortunately, our personalities do not go well together. I sensed something different about him and was confirmed when I found out that he didn't believe that there is a God. He claimed to be an atheist. At first, I was trying to be really extra careful and nice to him and was even injecting discreetly some Christian values and ideas to him whenever we are engaged in a conversation. I should say that next to the challenge of my research work there in Japan, he posed to me a difficulty that I never thought I would be able to handle and surpass. Everyday especially during our 1st few months in Japan, I would pray hard for strength in order to withstand whatever challenges that lie ahead of me during the day. This involves putting up with his manners and attitude on top of the fact that we are from different countries with very diverse cultural background and beliefs. After several weeks of constantly praying and putting on hold my temper and practicing patience, gentleness and courtesy to the best of my ability, I finally succumbed to the pressures I've been experiencing then and blurted out all my repressed and bottled up anger. Whew! You could just imagine what I did by how everybody who saw me reacted. They had the impression that I am the Filipina who can pulverize people with an iron fist like Pacquiao. Although it worked since he stopped bothering me from then on, I also regretted what I did for I know that getting back at someone in that manner is not pleasing before the Lord. I am a professed believer of God and should embody this faith. Just like what the 1st reading tells us, I am sure that what I did is not a reflection of a person who believes in God. It is imperative that we act what we believe in our thoughts and words. Amen. Hallelujah!

2 Chr 36:14-16, 19-23
...and the people added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations and polluting the LORD's temple ...Whoever, therefore, among you belongs to any part of his people, let him go up, and may his God be with him!"


The story about my Korean co-participant in Japan did not stop there. It is not yet over until God says so. God arranged for something else to happen. Another participant got very sick and was hospitalized and we ended up visiting her together. On our way to the hospital, I started a conversation with him which unexpectedly led to his unbelief in God and the theory of the evolution. Judging from where it was going I thought it would end up in disaster that is why I am still in awe at how things happened the way it did. I could never understand or figure out up to this time how I was able to speak those words that I spoke to him. It was as if someone else was speaking in my behalf. Instead of opposing his ideas I just found myself even agreeing with him. This is what I said, “Let us say the evolution theory is true, but consider even for a moment the hardship with my research work wherein I needed to transform the microorganism or simply put it as, improve the strain. I need not change the microorganism which was a fungus to another microbe like a bacterium but just introduce a tiny bit (DNA) of characteristic to improve it. Just the thought of changing fungi into bacteria is already an impossibility that I could never even think about since the transformation alone and the maintenance in itself is already hard work. I told him I've been putting all my efforts and whatever intelligence left in my brains after slaving myself to work beyond midnight just to succeed in my experiments and there was no room for mistake or even a short period of neglect for timing and strict maintenance is a must or else everything I worked for will be gone. I asked him in the light of his being a science researcher himself, that if he believes that humans evolved from a single cell to a very complicated human body like we have right now, a genius must have sustained, maintained and watched over our evolution to our present condition, wonderfully made and crafted by none other than the greatest Genius, Researcher and Scientist of all time. Amen. Hallelujah!

Responsorial Psalm

Ps 137:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6

R. Let my tongue be silenced, if I ever forget you!

How could we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand be forgotten!

As I was talking to him, his face suddenly lit up as if he was like a person who was losing his way and finally found it. He said, "Well I guess that was what I've been waiting to hear, I should say." From then on, he became nice and polite to me for the rest of our stay in Japan. He even went with me to mass in a Catholic Church after that. Amen. Hallelujah!

Eph 2:4-10

...For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast. For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.

We are just set to discover wonderful and marvelous things that are beyond our imagination if we let God just like Nicodemus in today’s gospel and my co-participant. They were skeptics before but eventually became believers. The gospel also contains the most famous words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” The purpose of this gospel is stated in Jn. 20:31: “These things have been written so that you may go on believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that believing you may have life in His name.” Everything comes through God’s grace in the form of the scriptures as it is written from of old and revealed right before our very eyes and within our hearing. We owe everything to God and nothing else can ever be enough for a God who loves us with such impact and intensity. The gospel is an evidence of the concrete relationship of the scriptures in the Old Testament with the New Testament. They are interconnected in a very amazing way. If there's one thing that amazes me even more, it is the thousands of years apart in terms of BC (Before the time of Christ) and AD (Anno Domini/During and after Christ) that separates these events and the tremendous power of God that defies the length of time by connecting them and allowing every single thing in the entire history of mankind to fall into its perfect place and pattern. Amen. Hallelujah!


John 3:13-21
13 Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.