Renewal Is A Natural Necessity
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
After Consecration Sunday of the Church, we celebrate today the Renewal of the Church. With Renewal Sunday, our Church continues her journey, through our Liturgical Year, towards her Redeemer and Saviour Jesus Christ. On this Sunday, our Mother Church calls us to reflect on readings from John’s Gospel and the epistle to the Hebrews.
Today’s readings remind us of our identity! We are the sheep of Christ. This is our character and our hope that we aspire to renew. Only his sheep believe in him, as our Lord Jesus said to the Jews who were arguing with him in the temple while he was walking up and down in the Portico of Solomon. As usual, Jesus puts his teaching in the relevant temporal and spatial context to make it easy to understand. From the temple of Jerusalem and on the very day of the Renewal Feast, Jesus revealed that he was the Son of God and the Master of the sheep. The Renewal Feast was celebrated to remember the purification of the temple by Judah Maccabee in 164 BC, after it was profaned by the King of the Seleucid Antiochus Epiphanes who had placed a statue of Zeus, the greatest of the Greek gods, in the Holy of the Holies. In this context, Jesus was talking to the Jews who believed that they were doing the right thing in worshiping the true God while they were in fact closing their ears to his voice, even seeking to kill him to silence his voice.
Jesus confirmed to the Jews that he was the Son of God, yet they wanted to stone him. “You do not believe,” Jesus said to them,
“because you are no sheep of mine. The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice; I know them and they follow me.” The epistle
confirms this revelation, as we understand from it that the Lord is the Good Shepherd who dies for his sheep and redeems them with his blood so that “those who have been called to an eternal inheritance may receive the promise.” This calling which is directed to each one of us as we are his sheep compels us to renew ourselves on the Renewal Sunday of the Church since we are his Church and every one of us is a living member in her and a stone in her structure. Without this renewal, we cannot be worthy to be really among those called to the eternal inheritance.
Renewal is one of the life’s rules, a natural necessity. Every living being renews its cells to continue to live, and every society that does not renew its ways of life and traditions, ages and dies out. It is the same with the Church. She has to renew herself so her faith in the Son of God remains a living faith that develops with the society without change or decrease.
God has blessed us with a perpetual renewal in our parish through its priests and committees. On Monday, all members of the Parish Council held a meeting to discuss the preparations for the Season of the Glorious Birth of Our Lord. Once more, we renew our spiritual and temporal preparations for this sacred season. The Parish Council is a sign of blessing from the Lord to our parish. Last Saturday, the Elderly Committee organised a trip for the elderly in our parish. We are grateful to this committee which is another blessing that the Lord has bestowed upon us. And from our elderly to our children, the future of our parish. Today we are witnessing the great commitment by the Fersen who are renewing their promise, with a new group making their commitment for the first time.
Furthermore, the Word is alive in our parish and is in perpetual renewal. For many years, the bible study evenings are continuing with the Family of Divine Word without interruption. This too is a sign of blessing. Participate in those evenings and give the Lord of Harvest some of your time. It is indeed a blessed parish, in which the Lord is constantly present with the intercession of our mother Mary and the commitment of its parishioners, the sheep who know his voice and whom he knows, they follow him and renew themselves in him.
