COULD YOU BE MESSIAH TO ME?

Tuesday of the 1st Week of Advent
Ps 72:1-2, 7-8, 12-13, 17

The Messianic age is described to be a time when justice will flourish and complete peace will have no end. This is what the responsorial psalm today tells us. This is our prayer too.

We pray for justice because there is so much injustice in the world. We seek for peace because we live in troubled days. But the justice of God is not “an eye for an eye”. His peace is not the absence of trials.

The justice of God is mercy. This is totally absurd for the world because God’s justice takes the form of forgiving love. Love is justice-anticipated. Did not St. Paul write, “After many transgressions came justification”? God’s justice does not demand the death of the sinner though it requires restitution. God’s justice does not deny the need to set aright whatever has been rendered wrong or return whatever has been stolen, but it does not rationalize vengeful deeds.

The peace of God is faith. It completely goes against the strong pull of the world to trust in one’s self, one’s capacity, one’s ability, one’s knowledge, one’s power. It is the peace that the world does not know. It is the peace that the world cannot give nor take away because it is the kind of peace that does not depend on what happens in the world or what the world makes happen to us. It is the peace that only God can give. It is the peace that resides only in the heart whose faith in God strong and deep.

The justice and peace of the Messiah is mercy and faith. When we strive to be more merciful and live by faith in God, the Messianic age has truly already begun. When we treat one another with love and give witness to the strength and depth of our faith in God, we are blest indeed because many prophets and kings wanted to see what we see but did not see it and to hear what we hear but did not heard it.

Once, the abbot of a very troubled monastery consulted a guru from a far away land. He asked the guru what could dissolve the discord among the monks. The guru whispered to the abbot, “Know and believe that one of you is the Messiah!” The abbot went back to his monks with the astounding revelation. Immediately upon arriving, he broke the news that one of them is the Messiah. Since then the monastery became a haven of true fraternal bonding. Charity reigned in the monastic community as each and every monk tried to treat one another as he would treat Jesus, the Messiah.

But the Messiah lives not only in the monastery, does He?

Could you be messiah to me?