24th Week, Saturday, Sept 20; Saints Andrew Kim & Comp.
1 Tim 6:13-16 / Luke 8:4-15
Paul gives parting advice; Keep God's commands till Christ returns.
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To what extent do we share Calypso’s view of the life of a mortal? “T shall tell you a secret, my friend. Do Not wait for the last judgment; it takes place every day.” Albert Camus
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At the end of his letter, Paul gives as a program of life to Timothy to remain faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Paul ends the letter to Timothy by telling him to keep all that he has been told. When Christ left this world, he gave his Apostles a deposit of Faith, the Moral teaching and the Sacraments. He had not told his church to write the New Testament. He gave his church a tradition, which they had to hand on from generation to generation. This was trust property. The church is the trustee. The church has to keep this deposit till he comes again. That means for the lifetime of the church. He comes back to judge the church and to see what the church has done with the deposit. The church must keep the whole deposit pure and undefiled as given by Christ. It is true the church is the trustee, yet this deposit is also entrusted to us. We too are committed to this truth. We too have to keep this Faith fully, pure and undefiled. We too are guardians of the morality preached by the tradition of the church. We too are to keep the sacraments alive. Alive here means by living sacramental lives, by using them as the visible signs of the grace of God.
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The imagery of a seed being sown in the ground and then germinating into a plant is really amazing and astounding. And to realize that the plant bears almost no resemblance to the seed that it came from is also very intriguing. Maybe perhaps the only visible connection is in the seeds that it bears. Hence, we can say that nature bears an indication to the mystery of life, here as well as hereafter.
In the gospel, Jesus also used the imagery of seeds, with the sower sowing seeds in various types of soil. Yet, Jesus also said: Listen, anyone who has ears to hear!
What we hear at Mass, i.e. the prayers, the homily, the hymns, all these are like seeds of the mystery of God that are sown into our hearts. Whatever the state of our hearts may be, the seeds will remain there and will not go back to God without achieving what they were sent to do.
Yet let us also do what is necessary for the seeds to bear fruit. Just like the seed must die in order to bear a harvest, we too must die to ourselves in order for the Word of God to become alive in us. But we must first listen to the Word of God, and then our hearts will begin to bear fruit that will last.
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We hear today Luke’s version of the parable of the seed. In Jesus’ original intent, it pictured the difficult growth of the kingdom towards its final accomplishment, of which also Paul speaks in the first reading. Luke applies it in the explanation of the parable to the reception of the Word of God and the life of faith in people’s hearts. God sows the seed, but people receive it differently and react to it in various ways, for it is hard to let it grow and remain loyal to it in the humble and sometimes difficult realities of daily life. How does God’s Word grow and bear fruit in us?
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Prayer
Lord our God, we thank you for speaking to us the Word of your Son, Jesus Christ, and sowing in our hearts and minds the seeds of faith. Open our ears to his Word, day after day, that it may grow in us in pain and effort and joy, that it be rooted ever more deeply and bear fruits of justice and love, until the final coming of Jesus Christ, your Son and our Lord forever. Amen
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Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions’ Stories
The first native Korean priest, Andrew Kim Taegon was the son of Christian converts. Following his baptism at the age of 15, Andrew traveled 1,300 miles to the seminary in Macao, China. After six years, he managed to return to his country through Manchuria. That same year he crossed the Yellow Sea to Shanghai and was ordained a priest. Back home again, he was assigned to arrange for more missionaries to enter by a water route that would elude the border patrol. He was arrested, tortured, and finally beheaded at the Han River near Seoul, the capital.
Andrew’s father Ignatius Kim, was martyred during the persecution of 1839, and was beatified in 1925. Paul Chong Hasang, a lay apostle and married man, also died in 1839 at age 45.
Among the other martyrs in 1839 was Columba Kim, an unmarried woman of 26. She was put in prison, pierced with hot tools and seared with burning coals. She and her sister Agnes were disrobed and kept for two days in a cell with condemned criminals, but were not molested. After Columba complained about the indignity, no more women were subjected to it. The two were beheaded. Peter Ryou, a boy of 13, had his flesh so badly torn that he could pull off pieces and throw them at the judges. He was killed by strangulation. Protase Chong, a 41-year-old nobleman, apostatized under torture and was freed. Later he came back, confessed his faith and was tortured to death.
Christianity came to Korea during the Japanese invasion in 1592 when some Koreans were baptized, probably by Christian Japanese soldiers. Evangelization was difficult because Korea refused all contact with the outside world except for taking taxes to Beijing annually. On one of these occasions, around 1777, Christian literature obtained from Jesuits in China led educated Korean Christians to study. A home Church began. When a Chinese priest managed to enter secretly a dozen years later, he found 4,000 Catholics, none of whom had ever seen a priest. Seven years later there were 10,000 Catholics. Religious freedom came to Korea in 1883.
Besides Andrew and Paul, Pope John Paul II canonized 98 Koreans and three French missionaries who had been martyred between 1839 and 1867, when he visited Korea in 1984. Among them were bishops and priests, but for the most part they were lay persons: 47 women and 45 men.
