Look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near; Jesus answers our shame with forgiveness, our fear with love, and our despair with hope, reminding us of the fullness of salvation.

It comes through prayer, participating in worship and receiving the sacraments. It comes through embracing the ordinary, everyday tasks of our lives with a loving and cheerful heart. What we do becomes a means to happiness and holiness, and ultimately, when the end time comes, to our salvation with God.

Our lives are about being on a pilgrimage of trust, of moving from holding back something of our lives for ourselves, just in case, to a complete surrender to God.

Let us decide here and now, today, that we want to become saints, and then do everything we can, put all our efforts, all our attention, into allowing God to make us saints. 

Like Bartimaeus, we call out to Jesus in our need, recognizing Him as the Messiah and gentle high priest, asking for the gift of healing and spiritual sight.

The service that Jesus invites us to, is the way of love. We are called to offer ourselves up for one another.

As he did with the rich young man in the Gospel today, Jesus looks upon each of us with great love. He tells us that while it is impossible for us to be saved by our own efforts, all things are possible with God.

Those who are married are called to deepen their expression of the sacrament by increasingly allowing the Spirit of Christ to penetrate their marriages. Those who struggle and who have failed at marriage, are invited to experience the compassion and mercy of God. We as the people of God are to be Christ to each other, in successes and weaknesses, in good times and bad.

If anyone needs a glass of water, it is us who must offer it. Jesus will be reaching that person through our hands. If anyone needs a visit, we must go. Then Christ will be using our legs. God is at work in us and in every single human person.

This teaching of Jesus is revolutionary. He taught that those who would like to be first, must be last and must be the servant of everyone else.

Today we acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, and we ask for the grace to live as his disciples.

After the Ascension of Jesus there is an image of the Christian community which stands as a beacon and icon for us modern-day disciples in the parish of Our Lady of Good Hope. “The disciples went up into the upper room, with the apostles, and they devoted themselves to prayer, together with Mary the mother of Jesus.”

We should be able to pray the prayer of St Augustine, “You called, shouted, broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, banished my blindness.”

The religion brought by Jesus cannot be reduced to external rites, a moral code or a doctrine. No law, big or small, has meaning if it is not accompanied by love and if it is not consumed in love.

In celebrating the Eucharist, we renew the covenant between God and human beings, a covenant fully realized in the mutual self-giving that the Eucharist embodies, and we are nourished to answer the challenge: ‘Whom will you serve?

Just as God nourished and provided for Elijah on his journey, He nourishes and provides for us as well.

Our deepest hunger has a bread that truly satisfies us, a bread that fulfils our hearts.

Imagine if we could always come to Mass with the consciousness that here we have a privileged encounter with God. That is what the celebration of the eucharist is.

In the busyness and stresses of our daily lives, we are invited to go to the Shepherd-King, a compassionate Good Shepherd, who will give us healing and rest.