“BEHOLD, I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW”

As followers of Christ, our hope ultimately rests in the promise that Christ will come back for us one day and make all things new. But what about the here and now? What can we hang our hope-hat on today, tomorrow, and every other day of the year? There are so many ways and signs that God provides fresh and ongoing hope for each of us in our daily lives. However, let me offer some ways that God creates an ongoing newness for our good as an ongoing hope for us.

First, God restores. Restoration means that we once had something; we lost it and later got it back. God can restore. In other words, God can restore anything according to His will. And remember that when God restores us, He not only restores what we lost but also adds more blessings that will amaze us. Our total surrender and faithfulness to God will always open the door for God’s restoration to begin. For example, God restores us to a right relationship with Him through the gift of forgiveness and justification. Additionally, God restores life, security, and

hope to broken people, the broken world, and to all of us. Whether it’s our hearts, finances, relationships, or lives that need mending, God always has a plan to heal and restore. Although we don’t know God’s exact plans for our future, we do know He is good, and we fully believe restoring our hearts and our lives is on His holy to-

do list.

Second, God reconciles. The mission of God in our fallen, broken world is reconciliation. God’s reconciling mission involves the very in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, as realized through Jesus’ incarnation, His life and ministry and

preaching, and through His death and resurrection. God’s initiative of reconciliation through Christ transforms us into God’s new Creation. This is to say, God is reconciling to Himself all things through Jesus. By restoring our right relationship to God, Jesus also opened the door for us to live in the right relationships with each other, creation, and ourselves. Christ is God’s ambassador, bringing the divine message of reconciliation to us. We are then invited to become Christ’s ambassadors, bringing the message of reconciliation to our family, to our parish, to our community, and to our world.

Last but not least, God resurrects. God makes dead things alive again. Literally. He has power over death in every sense, and He demonstrated that to us when He raised Jesus from the dead. As human beings, we can get so easily

discouraged when we think about all the times we have failed and given in to our temptations. However, remember we have the same power and spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, dwelling in us. That power, that spirit, that grace is much bigger than our sins and gives us great hope. If we lay down our weak, flawed, and imperfect existence, we trust that God will resurrect it with new life, new grace, and new resurrection.

The vision disclosed in this weekend’s lesson reveals the true end or goal of life, the destiny of creation that has been taken up into the life of Jesus Christ, our Risen Lord. On that day, He would make all things new. However, we don’t have to wait until that day to see it happen. Our Risen Lord is making all things new, here and now. With His ability and authority of restoration, of reconciliation, and of resurrection, He is making all things new. He is transforming our life, our security, our imperfection, our weakness, our hope, our Church, our world, so on

and so forth.

And the source and summit of God’s ability to make all things new happens in the Eucharist celebration. In the Mass, the world is young again. In the liturgy, the Word bespeaks a freshness that does not age. In the Eucharist, bread and wine, given to us centuries long past, become food for the morrow. In the Words of Consecration, Christ’s command for us to love one another becomes anew than ever. And in His Body and His Blood, like a woman giving birth, God makes all things new.