Tag: humility

Posted in BIBLICAL EXEGESIS, Christianity, faith, governance, Politics, The Christian life

Palm Sunday 2024 – some quick and fast reflections by Noel Ihebuzor

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032424.cfm

Palm Sunday.
We are once again at the start of the Holy Week. Lent is drawing to a close and Easter, with all its significance and reassurances is round the corner.

The readings are all great, engaging and gripping. The first one describes the triumphant entry to Jerusalem! In modern day terms, we have before us a State visit – ecstatic crowds, jubilant masses and all symbols of joy at the visit are there – access road covered with signs and effigies of genuine rejoicing and fellowship over the visit. Then something hits us – a King riding in on a donkey (why not a horse) – there is a clash in the grandeur of the visitor and the deliberate simplicity of the chosen means of conveyance. This is a jolt to our traditional image metaphors, a subversion and a challenge.
Then there are the dialogues that reveal Christ’s omniscience and omnipotence – He sees what will happen, and they happen as He described. He speaks what will happen and they happen as he spoke!
Then the readings from Isaiah – full of power, elegance, prediction and prescience (they split my tunic), obedience and the long suffering servant – obedience and humility tumble on one another – the obedient servant is rewarded, portending Christ’s own reward; the responsorial psalm and the cry of abandonment, St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, an expose on Christ’s simplicity and humility and the rewards that flow from those twin virtues, and then the passion according to St Mark. Easter is round the corner. You can smell it.
Great readings. They carry important messages – the power of sacrifice, true love involves sacrifice, the importance of humility, the fidelity of God, the rewards of obedience and the presentation of a new type of grandeur that is grounded on simplicity and which flees our current display of affluence and presidential/governorship convoys of usually more than Fifty SUVs! Power should never be confused with the display of affluence and material artefacts. But is anyone listening? Happy Palm Sunday l.

Posted in BIBLICAL EXEGESIS, Prose

Wishing you a Wonderful Valentine Day

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

By

Noel A. Ihebuzor

14 February, A Special Day dedicated to Love, a badly needed commodity in our present day world where petty ambitions, greed, short-termism, myopia, concupiscence, materialism, commercialism, ethnicity and all forms of bigotry conspire to strangle all the vestiges of this decent emotion called LOVE in all of us, and to dessicate us and to make us hollow and hollowing men and women. A world without love celebrates the triumph of sterility, hopelessness, emotional drought, angst, social disconnect in manners that remind us of portions of TS Eliot’s “WASTELAND” or Bob Dylan’s “A hard Rain a-gonna fall” – and this is the general direction of our drift in a world now marked increasingly by impersonality, indifference, violence, anonymity and consumerism – all of this because of the death of true love

Without Love, we are thus nothing. Let us then commit today to rediscover, to reinvent, to refresh and reactivate LOVE in each of our individual lives, to show it to all around us, to share it with all we meet and to convert this world to a beautiful peaceful garden filled and blessed with LOVE, a garden in perpetual bloom and blossom, where harmony becomes the background rhythm that inspires, challenges and animates all humanity. As economists and public policy experts would tell us, LOVE is one of those items whose sharing and consumption are non-rival in nature. The quantity of LOVE in the world does not decrease the more you share it with people – rather it increases!
Share LOVE today. Happy Valentine Day……and just to remind us all what love is, here is a link line to one its best descriptions in the new testament of the Christian scriptures. I have also printed it out in full for friends who may not have internet connection. It is a beautiful passage, worth committing to memory and to be called up in each of life’s encounters . One amazing feature of love is this – Love never ends.
The Way of Love
1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.7Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Beautiful passage! Now apply it! Go on, show some love today. Share some love today – I mean real love, not those narcissistic and self serving displays we often call Love. Real love involves giving “a la Mother Theresa”. It demands the control and domestication of our impulses and the recognition of the needs and interests of others. Real love involves sharing and caring. It involves the recognition of a shared humanity with others, a shared humanity which then makes us see God in the faces and needs of those around us. To love is to sacrifice. It is to give in humility and to find love and joy in so giving and helping others to grow, to self actualize, to bloom and to blossom.
Go on, share and show some love today – to your spouse, your partner, your children, your family, your neighbours, your parents, your colleagues etc.. The world will be hapier because you did.
Noel