Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Matthew 6:19-21

The season of Lent is upon us once again. I started writing this reflection on Sunday. It was also the day of the Oscar award ceremony. Usually this does not interest me. However, this year’s Oscar was a little different. A Brazilian movie was nominated for best foreign picture as well as best picture of the year. The whole city was waiting in anticipation. There was a good chance for it to win and it did for best foreign movie. Almost everyone we know has watched the movie. We watched it a couple days ago. We were impressed. We have joined the crowd hoping that it would win. For those who are curious, I am talking about the movie, “I am still here”. In my opinion, it is well-written and directed. The cast were impeccable in the execution of their respective roles. It is based on actual events. In fact, the very final scene of the movie was shot close to where we live. The real life protagonist lived close to our neighborhood and very close to where we meet with our homeless youth. The story is about a former politician who was kidnapped by the military dictatorship. Eventually he was classified as someone who disappeared even though the regime’s secret police had tortured and murdered him and then disposed of his body. This is, by no means, a spoiler but a mere backdrop to the story. The real story is about how the mother and her five children survived the ordeal. It is really a story about a family. The director spent a great part of the movie focusing on the day to day life of the family. For those of us who like to get straight to the point, these trivialities could be a little frustrating. I wasn’t interested in knowing the idiosyncrasies of the family. The movie showed scenes where one of the daughters liked to wear her father’s old shirts. There were long segments of the children playing on the beach and narrating to their father their adventures. There was so much time spent on trivialities. However, these trivialities brought them closer to us. They became more human and real. Finally, when the tragedy struck, we felt the impact together with the characters. There were no explicit scenes of violence. It wasn’t necessary. We could the sense the violence of the situation by seeing how it disrupted the lives of the family. I realized that participating in the trivialities of their daily lives helped us to empathize with their sense of hopelessness and despair. The story is not a complete tragedy. It is about our human struggle. It is about hope.

Perhaps you are wondering what’s all this have to do with Lent. Maybe you are wondering how I am going to make this connection. Well, I am not going to attempt to do it. There is no need for it. The season of Lent highlights the voluntary participation of our Lord in the trivialities of our human existence. We can forget this. We can skip to the main thrust of the gospel narratives; the Passion of our Lord. However, in doing so, we might end up dehumanizing Jesus. We make Him into some object which serves a purpose. He becomes a mere tool to ensure our salvation. Jesus is not a tool!! He is God Incarnate. The gospel is not about the Cross. It is about God Incarnate. Jesus’ ministry did not begin at His baptism. It began the day He was born. God lived as a human being without any special privileges for thirty years and then He spoke of the Kingdom of God based on His experiences as a human being subjected to the trivialities of Life.

I recently heard a Jewish rabbi talk about the term, “Allah”. He was asked what he thought about the Muslim’s concept of God. He claimed the word, “Allah”, is a corruption of an Hebrew word for God. In other words, he stated that the Muslims and the Jewish people worship the same God. However, he emphasized that Christians do not worship the same God as these two religions. We worship a man named Jesus. This wasn’t a criticism but a careful assessment. We part ways with other monotheistic faith because of our faith in the God Incarnate. To imagine God becoming Human is a concept so strange and unbelievable to them. On the other hand, the polytheistic religions have mythologies portraying gods taking on the disguises of humanity. It is not so foreign to their doctrines to imagine the God Incarnate. Obviously, we are not talking about the same thing.

Jesus was not disguised as a human. He was a complete human being. He was subjected to the daily routines of our lives. He lived most of his life doing what we considered the monotonous routines of life which never get done nor completed or, as Albert Camus termed in his book, the Myth of Sisyphus, the absurd repetitious monotony of Life. At least, this is what I understand it to state. Besides this, Jesus spent most of His life as an unknown; a nobody, just like the vast majority of us. Most of us are a mere number in the eyes of the world’s authorities and Jesus was one of us. For Muslims and the Jewish people, it is scandalous to call such a person God Incarnate. Not just the people of these faiths but even the peers of Jesus. They could not believe that Jesus could be the Messiah because He was their mere carpenter.

“Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas?” Matthew 13:55

A Muslim friend once asked me this question. ”Why would God waste precious time subjecting Himself to these mundane things?” It is a good question. It is an existential one, if I am allowed to get technical here. Of course, we can take refuge in doctrinal answers like, “Because He came to die for our sins.” In the history of humanity, many great people sacrificed their lives for the sake of friends, family and strangers. We honor them but we don’t worship them. There is something more profound about Jesus than His sacrifice. At the same time, I could not give my Muslim friend a satisfactory answer. Yet, the answer does not elude me. It is present in my soul. His earthly Life transformed the way I see my daily life.

The humanity of Jesus breaks down the barrier between God and humanity. The Father doesn’t seem like a distant figure oblivious to the tediousness of our human struggles. He came to participate in them so that we could learn to participate in His Life. God could have chosen to be born into any household. He could have been born or raised in household like Moses where servants abound to do the mundane things of Life. He chose instead to be a commoner. A life which is common and assessable to a vast majority of the world especially to the poorest of the poor. Jesus used examples of daily life to teach the profound things of God. He showed us that we can learn of God’s hidden mysteries through our everyday trivial interactions with Life.

In the present time, we heard people term the time spent on doing the trivial things as “unproductive” or “dead hours”. Everything is reduced to function. However, participating in these trivial things is essential in relationship building. Most of our ministry is spent on trivialities. Often times, I wonder in my head, “could we be doing something more productive?”. To be honest, I used to think those thoughts but not anymore.

Recently, the homeless youth informed us that a young man, Igor, was looking for us. He asked for us by name. In the streets, there is never a lack of people named “Igor”. There must be about ten with the same name about the same age. My mind was running through all the Igors we knew and none fitted the description. Finally we ran into him. He just recently got out of prison. He is handsome young man covered with tattoos. His tattoos could not hide his childlikeness. He was genuinely happy to see us. We responded appropriately but both of us were sure that we had never met before in our lives. Finally we asked him how he knew us. He told us that he has seen us playing games with the children and sometimes just coloring pictures with them. Once we bought him a meal. It must have been during the Pandemic when food was scarce. We bought food whenever the youth asked for it. In regular times, it wasn’t necessary because there is ample supply of food. We must bought something for him without thinking much about it. It was just routine stuff for us. However, for Igor, this simple and trivial act meant a great deal for him. It was a special moment. I wished I had paid more attention to it. Thankfully Igor did. He needs some documentation done. He is determined to stay away from crime and wants to register into a government program to help him with jobs. The documents are going to be a long and tedious bureaucratic process. We are going to spend longs hours in life-reducing offices. We told him that we will help him. It seems like an excellent opportunity to grow into the likeness of Christ. This is what we are doing for Lent: paying careful attention to the trivialities of Life.

Have a Blessed Lent!