This Sunday, the whole Filipino Church is grateful for the canonization of the second Filipino saint: Pedro Calungsod. But, mindful of the liturgical readings this Sunday, his canonization on this day offers us even a close-to-the-heart realization of the message of Word of God to us. Blessed Pedro Calungsod was not known to us until some time when the Jesuit Padre Diego Luis de San Vitores was raised to the rank of the blessed in the Church. For four centuries since his martyrdom on the shores of Marianas, the memory of this boy Catechist may have been hidden from us. Perhaps it may have been forgotten between the brittle pages of history. As the readings tell us today, Pedro did not ask for the greatness of sitting the either side of the glorious Lord in heaven. He only asked for the courage to hold firm to his confession of faith (see Heb. 4.14) so that he could drink the cup and be baptized like the Lord who had passed these through before entering into his glory (see Mark 10:38). By being little and insignificant and had not even asking to be known for his sacrificial death, Pedro had been so humble to imitate the Lord by suffering for the sake of the other (see Isa. 53:11).

Pedro’s life story is not fully known to us. We do know only through the chronicles of the event which report the martyrdom of Padre Diego Luis de San Vitores. We do not know who were his parents, his exact place of origin and his real features. What is just factually confirmed is that he was a Visayan teenage catechist who accompanied the Jesuit Padre Diego. This unknown shade in the life of Pedro is but a meaningful rather than an uninteresting chapter. The suffering servant in the first reading from the book of Isaiah is an unknown person to us. Yes, we may be very quick to tag it as the “type” of Jesus so that we can “name” him and so associate with him. But in himself, in the real and particular authorship of Isaiah, he tried to hide the identity of the suffering servant. We only know that this servant has able to offer his life for the sake of others. Isaiah only wanted to point out what he had done for the sake of all; he is not anymore interested to name him because his identity is not the focus of his suffering. Rather, the focus of his suffering is the other, the many, the sinners (see Is. 53.11).

Pedro’s life which has been mostly veiled from us has even made us to focus on the heroic act that he did. We tried to make a full picture of it. By doing so, we contribute our own selves to it. We identify ourselves to it because we know that it is already impossible to retrieve the lost information of the rest of his life. His hidden identity is not a deprivation from us; it is his own way to share his greatest gift to us. He shares to us his gift of courage to share his life for the sake of the other. By imitating his Master, who is Jesus, he loses his “self” by identifying it to others who like him suffers. The letter to the Hebrews called Jesus a “sympathizer with our weakness” and indeed Pedro enabled to share this burden of his master by owning that martyrdom. We know in the story of his death that he could have escaped, agile and youthful as he was. But no, he chose to sympathize with the threat to the life of Padre Diego. He died with him; they died for the confession on which they really held fast (Heb. 4.14) until their last breath.

Leaving his identity aside as nothing and only offering us the example of his death, Pedro embodies true greatness which the gospel challenges us to take up. True greatness is really the losing of one’s identity, the losing of the self. The “I” is not important now – which embodies the ego that needs to feed with fleeting greatness and honor. Jesus tells us that the true way of greatness is not the seats of glory at the left and right. It is not our preoccupation to fill in: it is a Divine gift and God’s initiative. Our task is how to follow the way of “servanthood” which the two readings have framed out for us. Jesus tells us that the way to glory is the way of the cross, the way of suffering and how we able to integrate that same suffering for the sake of others and not to detach it for the sake of oneself. Thus, the true meaning of being great is the very opposite of going up. It is the going down that counts. It is the downward mobility – using Henri Nouwen’s term – that makes God sympathized with men’s weakness and identifying with others his sufferings. As Pedro embodies this character of true greatness, Jesus really tells us it is not impossible to follow the way of greatness.

In our grateful hearts for the gift of Pedro Calungsod as an example of the way of greatness, let us pray through his constant intercession that we could reached also the bottom of this downward mobility.

Gloria ad Deo per Sancto Petro Calungsod!

Gospel, Mark 10:2-16
2 Some Pharisees approached him and asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?' They were putting him to the test.

3 He answered them, 'What did Moses command you?'

4 They replied, 'Moses allowed us to draw up a writ of dismissal in cases of divorce.'

5 Then Jesus said to them, 'It was because you were so hard hearted that he wrote this commandment for you.

6 But from the beginning of creation he made them male and female.

7 This is why a man leaves his father and mother,

8 and the two become one flesh. They are no longer two, therefore, but one flesh.

9 So then, what God has united, human beings must not divide.'

10 Back in the house the disciples questioned him again about this,

11 and he said to them, 'Whoever divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery against her.

12 And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another she is guilty of adultery too.'

13 People were bringing little children to him, for him to touch them. The disciples scolded them,

14 but when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, 'Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

15 In truth I tell you, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.'

16 Then he embraced them, laid his hands on them and gave them his blessing.


REFLECTION:
Authentic commitment today is a hard-to-find treasure. It is lost anywhere within the bustling human civilization. We rarely find it being valued in its truest sense within a relationship. Rather today, a massive masquerade sugar-coats simulated commitments and substitutes the real ones. “Commitments” nowadays are contractual, short-lived, conditioned and temporary. If we find real ones, we have to search it in the utmost regions of society where lives are not yet contaminated by the post-modern mind-set of materialism and individualism.

The readings today provide us Christians of this post-modern age with an opportunity to relook and rediscover the meaning of radical commitment in every human relationship, marriage being the relationship par excellence. Beginning to meditate authentic commitment in the context of marriage, our Lord Jesus shows us that being committed is not a simple relating of feelings to the other. Commitment is not a selective attitude over possible choices. Commitment is a gift of the whole person to the other; it is the act of uniting oneself not only in the level of feelings or of intellect. It is the capacity to assume the other to oneself, embracing the other even his defects along with the things which initially attracts us.

The book of Genesis retells the story of man’s first days on earth when he tried to search out for a suitable partner among God’s creatures. He names them and from that act man acknowledges the individual sentient beings’ capacity of relating. But he found none of them that can par man’s level or capacity of companionship. Man cannot make a commitment by personally involving himself to an animal who has only the perfection of instinct. It cannot par man’s capacity to love. That is why, God has taken from his “own flesh and own bone” the one who could give him the same companionship and commitment to love. From this man’s existential need, God created “woman”; she is the person who equals man’s capacity to love and to make this primitive commitment on the face of the earth meaningful and indeed God-like.

Realizing how God founded and endowed this relationship with his own initiative, man must therefore look back to this first moment as the principle of every relationship. Commitment, in order to be truly authentic must be founded in love which God has bestowed in the bond of conjugal commitment. Thus, we must respect marriage as an institution which only God can break and no man can split apart; it is also an epitome of every other level of relationship which we are taking up in this life. In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author puts so lovely the act of Jesus’ self-emptying as a way to express real or authentic commitment to his mission. Dying on the cross and taking up the burden of ransoming for us sinners, Jesus was able to reunite the lost children of God. Thus his death is the relinking of the lost commitment of man to God; it is the key to the passage of men who returns to God as their Father. His faithfulness to his mission as savior fills the gap of man’s un-commitment. That is why, in doing so, Jesus calls us his brothers, we who consecrate and being consecrated to the bond of unity which was restored by his death and resurrection.

Now, as he himself offers us a point of reference of this commitment by reuniting what was lost for God, Jesus takes up the ever controversial issue of marriage to profoundly communicate to man the challenge of serious commitment. Now smeared and twisted by the hardness of human heart, marriage lost its real meaning as the symbol authentic commitment and a reminder of God’s loving commitment to his people. Jesus is consistently firm. He upholds the permanence of marriage which only God had founded long before the foundations of the created world. He calls those who modify the meaning of marriage as “hard hearted”, people who refuse to adjust to the Divine Command and expect that the Divine should adjust to their whim. This people who try to attack the foundations of marriage is like attacking God himself and attacking the bond of God’s commitment to us – God’s love for his people. Indeed, Jesus calls those who refuse to heed on the permanence of marriage as hard-hearted because a hard heart is a heart that refuses to love, to accept, to assume and to be one with the other. By attacking marriage and therefore God, these hard-hearted people shut their capacity to openness and decline to assume God in their lives. They are also firm to close a permanent bond between his fellow other thus making commitment a mere “temporary” event which can last until such time when one is tired of maintaining such pseudo-commitments.

Today, the same defiance of those hard-hearted people continued to haunt the institution of marriage and of the rest of divinely-inspired commitment in relationships. A lot of people still challenge the permanence of this commitment. They also try to alter the meaning of marriage. By this, the whole system of life, the moral fabric of society is threatened because if marriage would be deprived from its original meaning set by God before, then, the whole meaning of relationship will crumble with it. All relationships found and draw all its inspiration from the model of marriage which God has set before men as an example of undying commitment of love. If we allow hard-hearted men to destroy marriage and substitute real commitments into false ones, our whole person will live in falsity, too; we will love what is false and, like it, temporary and short-lived, we will not last long. We will crumble with it. Unlike God-founded commitment which is enduring, ours will fade like a passing shadow.


Fray Ric Anthony Reyes, OSA