Yesterday, June 26, was International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Trafficking.   A sentence from this Sunday’s first Reading struck me: “The creatures of the world are wholesome. There is not a destructive drug among them” (Wisdom 1:14) - at this Mass, we pray for all suffering from drugs and substance abuse.

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Jesus says: “I have come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

We just read in the gospel the healing of the woman with the hemorrhages and the raising of Jairus daughter from the dead.

As Christians, the greatest blessing we have inherited from God is being called children of God in Christ, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, and co-heirs with Jesus to God’s glory and devine inheritance.

The first reading from the book of Wisdom says: “God fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome….God formed human beings to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made them.” - God created all other things (plants and animals) and brought them into the human space when he asked Adamaa to give them names. But he made Adamaa in his image and likeness and breathed into the nostrils the breadth of Divine life. Human beings are at a different level from animals.

In my native language Igbo, the word for human being is “Mmadu” meaning “mma-di-na-ndu”, mma-chukwu-di-na-ndu” (God’s-beauty-is-in-human-beings).

When Jesus made the above statement in John 10:10 therefore, he was indicating that God was restoring us to wholeness or wholesomeness referenced in the book of Wisdom.

Wholeness or wholesomeness here means a state of completeness which one needs to be fully human. And we can  identify 5 levels of this wholeness or wholesomeness that God restores to us in Christ Jesus.

Personal wholeness: Every human being made in the image and likeness of God has the breadth of God in them. We’re invited into personal wholeness when God calls us to walk with him in the journey of Faith through baptism or the Sacraments of Christian Initiation that brings us into his everlasting covenant in Christ.

Family wholeness: We’re brought into it when God blesses us with prosperity and a secure future through offsprings. In Psalm 128, God blesses husband, wife their children and their labor/work with fruitfulness and prosperity on those who fear him.

Physical wholeness: we’re brought into it as often as God restores our physical condition whenever debilitated by disease & ill-health as in the case the woman with hemorrhage.

Sacramental Wholeness: we’re brought into it as God continues to strengthen us, nourish us and fill us with graces.

Beatific wholeness: we are brought into it when that time comes for God to raise us from the dead to enjoy beatific vision of him for all eternity as foreshadowed in the raising of Lazarus & Jairus daughter from the dead, and demonstrated with Jesus’ resurrection.

It is only God who can make us fully whole and fully human.

So we come to God, we follow him, we obey him, we worship him, we make sacrifices for his glory & for the spread of his kingdom on earth - Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven! Amen!

Peace & Bles+sings!

Fr. JT.

Pastor