20250905 CHRIST IS ALL SUFFICIENT
05 September 2025, Friday, 22nd Week in Ordinary Time
First reading |
Colossians 1:15-20 |
All things were created through Christ and for Christ
Christ Jesus is the image of the unseen God
and the first-born of all creation,
for in him were created
all things in heaven and on earth:
everything visible and everything invisible,
Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers –
all things were created through him and for him.
Before anything was created, he existed,
and he holds all things in unity.
Now the Church is his body,
he is its head.
As he is the Beginning,
he was first to be born from the dead,
so that he should be first in every way;
because God wanted all perfection
to be found in him
and all things to be reconciled through him and for him,
everything in heaven and everything on earth,
when he made peace
by his death on the cross.
Responsorial Psalm |
Psalm 99(100):2-5 |
Come before the Lord, singing for joy.
Cry out to the Lord, all the earth.
Serve the Lord with gladness.
Come before him, singing for joy.
Come before the Lord, singing for joy.
Know that he, the Lord, is God.
He made us, we belong to him,
we are his people, the sheep of his flock.
Come before the Lord, singing for joy.
Go within his gates, giving thanks.
Enter his courts with songs of praise.
Give thanks to him and bless his name.
Come before the Lord, singing for joy.
Indeed, how good is the Lord,
eternal his merciful love.
He is faithful from age to age.
Come before the Lord, singing for joy.
Gospel Acclamation | cf.Ps18:9 |
Alleluia, alleluia!
Your words gladden the heart, O Lord,
they give light to the eyes.
Alleluia!
Or: | Jn8:12 |
Alleluia, alleluia!
I am the light of the world, says the Lord;
anyone who follows me will have the light of life.
Alleluia!
Gospel | Luke 5:33-39 |
When the bridegroom is taken from them, then they will fast
The Pharisees and the scribes said to Jesus, ‘John’s disciples are always fasting and saying prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees too, but yours go on eating and drinking.’ Jesus replied, ‘Surely you cannot make the bridegroom’s attendants fast while the bridegroom is still with them? But the time will come, the time for the bridegroom to be taken away from them; that will be the time when they will fast.’
He also told them this parable, ‘No one tears a piece from a new cloak to put it on an old cloak; if he does, not only will he have torn the new one, but the piece taken from the new will not match the old.
‘And nobody puts new wine into old skins; if he does, the new wine will burst the skins and then run out, and the skins will be lost. No; new wine must be put into fresh skins. And nobody who has been drinking old wine wants new. “The old is good” he says.’
CHRIST IS ALL SUFFICIENT
SCRIPTURE READINGS: [Col 1:15-20; Ps 100:2-5; Lk 5:33-39]
There are two main challenges facing the Church today, ad intra and ad extra. The first concerns the question of change and adaptation of the Gospel to the modern world and its demands. The second, the danger of syncretism in attempts to foster inter-religious unity and the influence of the New Age Movement. Both are ultimately challenges to the purity of faith in Christ. Do we compromise for the sake of unity and risk confusion, or do we remain faithful to orthodoxy and risk alienation?
The Gospel today reflects the situation in the life of the early Church. There was tension between retaining the practices of Judaism and the Gentiles who had converted to Christianity and were seeking to shed Jewish customs. St Mark and St Luke, writing for the Gentiles, made clear that Christians did not need to adopt the religious practices of Judaism. A case in point is fasting, which was practiced by the disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees. This ancient practice was a form of worship connected with the Day of Atonement (Lev 16:29, 31). Fasting was also an act of penitence. In the case of Jesus, however, He did not seem to place high regard on such ascetic practices. Why, then, did He dispense His disciples from following these practices of piety?
Firstly, He changed the perspective of fasting. One does not fast to gain merit from the merciful God but rather in moments when God seems absent from our lives. Although the Old Testament speaks of Israel as the bride of God, it does not mention the Messiah as the bridegroom. Jesus hinted that He was the bridegroom who would be rejected. Only then would fasting be appropriate. When Jesus died on the cross, we were called to reflect on the meaning of His suffering and death for us. This explains why the Church insists that all Catholics must fast and unite themselves with Christ’s death on the cross on Good Friday.
Secondly, Jesus underscored that His presence marked the arrival of a new order of God, inviting us to a new way of life – one that transcends mere obedience to the laws or external observance, and is rooted instead in faith in His love for us. Through the forgiveness of sins we are brought into union with God in the Spirit. Salvation is no longer through the observance of laws but through faith in Him as the Son of God, who delivers us from the bondage of sin and death. God’s commandments are kept as expressions of love for Him who first loved us.
Thirdly, the new way to God cannot be reconciled with the old. There can be syncretism. The examples He gave was that of the seamstress and the wineskins. It would be a mistake to take a new piece of cloth and patch it onto an old garment: the new cloth would shrink and tear the old, and the mismatch would ruin both. So, too, the new way of salvation brought by Christ cannot be mixed with the old way of Judaism. To accentuate this incompatibility, Jesus gave the analogy of the new wine and old wineskins. The fermenting of new wine would burst the old, hardened wineskins, destroying both. Hence, “new wine must be put into fresh skins.”
Unfortunately, the truth is that “nobody who has been drinking old wine wants the new. ‘The old is good’ he says”. Indeed, not many are ready to change. We are all creatures of habit and often traditionalists. On the other hand, there are radicals who demand change. How does the Church accommodate such extreme positions? In trying to blend the old and new dispensations, the Church risks causing confusion on one hand, and dissatisfaction on the other. What is necessary is that growth and development in the Church must always be understood as continuity with the old. Any development cannot be alien to its roots. The New Testament does not contradict the Old Testament; Christianity is the fulfilment of the Old Testament.
The key to resolving the tension lies in whether we believe that Christ is all sufficient for our salvation. If Christ is totally adequate, then our focus must remain on Him alone. The other danger today is the belief that Christ is not sufficient, and that we must complement Him with other religions. This was the challenge faced by the Christians in Colossae. Gnosticism corrupted the purity of their faith by claiming that Christ was insufficient to save. For the Gnostics, Christ was not God but merely one of many emanations between the world and God. Nor was He truly human, since matter was considered evil and only spirit good. Thus, according to the Docetists, the humanity of Jesus was only an illusion. Creation itself was opposed to God. Salvation, therefore, did not come through Christ’s forgiveness of sins–even if He were the highest of the emanations–but through acquiring secret divine knowledge and passwords to attain salvation.
In response to such Gnostic distortions, St Paul underscored that “Christ Jesus is the image of the unseen God.” As image, Christ not only represents God but is identical with Him, the perfect manifestation of God. As He told Philip, “To see me is to see the Father.” (Jn 14:9) In the Old Testament, wisdom is described as the image of God (Wis 7:26). Among the Greeks, the Logos, or Reason of God was believed to create and sustain the world–otherwise the order of the universe could not be explained. In saying that Jesus is the image of God, St Paul was declaring Him to be the fulfilment of the Wisdom of the Old Testament and the Logos of the Greeks. He is therefore the Word of God. St John captures this in his prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing came into being… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of a father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:1-2, 14).
But to call Christ the image of the invisible God also reminds us of our own calling. In Genesis we are told that we are created in God’s image and likeness (Gn 1:26). Because of sin, however, we have lost that likeness. Yet we remain called to be the image of God — His children. Christ, as the first-born, holds the highest honour in creation. He is not only the perfect manifestation of God but also of man. In Him, we discover who we are and what we are called to be.
As the first-born of all creation, Christ is the one through whom God created the world. He is not just one among the intermediaries but all things were created through Him. And not only through Him but for Him as well. Christ is not just the agent of creation but the goal of creation, to whom we are all called in maturity “to the full stature of Christ”. (Eph 4:13) This is possible only because Christ “holds all things in unity.” He sustains creation by being the head of the Church, His body. As head, He directs His body to work in union with Him, “because God wanted all perfection to be found in Him, and all things to be reconciled through Him and for Him.”
In light of Christ’s sufficiency, Christians do not look to other religions for direction or salvation. He is “the Way, the Truth and the Life”. (Jn 14:6) Any attempt at syncretism, especially by incorporating esoteric or mystical philosophies of the New Age Movement, would compromise the purity of our faith in Christ and confuse our beliefs. The message today is clear: Christ is all sufficient. There must be no compromise and adulteration of our faith in Him. By His death and resurrection, Christ vindicates our faith in Him as the Son of God and our Saviour. We too will share in His resurrection.
Best Practices for Using the Daily Scripture Reflections
- Encounter God through the spirit of prayer and the scripture by reflecting and praying the Word of God daily. The purpose is to bring you to prayer and to a deeper union with the Lord on the level of the heart.
- Daily reflections when archived will lead many to accumulate all the reflections of the week and pray in one sitting. This will compromise your capacity to enter deeply into the Word of God, as the tendency is to read for knowledge rather than a prayerful reading of the Word for the purpose of developing a personal and affective relationship with the Lord.
- It is more important to pray deeply, not read widely. The current reflections of the day would be more than sufficient for anyone who wants to pray deeply and be led into an intimacy with the Lord.
Note: You may share this reflection with someone. However, please note that reflections are not archived online nor will they be available via email request.
Written by His Eminence, Cardinal William SC Goh, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Singapore © All Rights Reserved.
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