Primum Regnum Dei

Fr. Joel Tabora, S.J.
ADNU HS Baccalaureate Mass
20 March, 2010.

On the day of your graduation from our High School, it is with great joy that we celebrate this Baccalaureate Mass in the University Church of Christ the King. We come together in thanksgiving for your years here at the Ateneo, for your friends, teachers, staff members, and administrators who have all been such an essential part of your high school education and formation.  We are thankful especially for your families, your fathers and mothers, relatives, friends and benefactors, who have supported your stay here at the Ateneo.  We thank the Lord for all you have learned and experienced through such subjects as English, Pilipino, Mathematics, Science, History, religious education – and even this year Mandarin. – and through such as your extra-curricular activities, your outreach activities, and your only-in-the-Ateneo Pistaym.  We hope that these have equipped you, through the knowledge, skills, experiences, and values they bring, to perform well in college, and later on also in life. 

Most of all we hope that you have taken to heart, that you never forget, that you learn to live by – through prayer, reflection and action – the school’s motto:  Primum Regnum Dei – First the Kingdom of God.  We hope this happens because your high school experience has helped you gain a deeper, more personal, more intimate, living friendship with Jesus – for whom the Kingdom of God for us was his heart and soul and mind and strength.  In insisting on the truth and validity of the Kingdom of God, he accepted death.

Primum Regnum Dei:  First the Kingdom of God.  Our motto.  To be lived.  Never to be forgotten.  If you reflect on the life of Jesus, this too had to be his motto.  This is what he lived by.  This was his heart and soul.  When as a young boy, his parents chided him for having left them to be among the teachers and holy men of the Temple, he said, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?’  When he later emerged in public life through his baptism by John, his identity and mission was revealed by the Father, “This is my Beloved Son.  Hear him.”  Hear him!  So he spoke, he preached, he taught the joy of God’s Kingdom, that when found, would be like the joy of one finding a pearl of great price, or the joy of one finally finding a long lost coin, a long sought-after treasure.  It is the joy of discovering that in life the Father’s love is the great pearl, his love is the treasure, and that in this love, through the service and sacrifice of Jesus, the power of Satan is broken.  In the Father’s love,  as signs of the establishment of the Kingdom, he cured the sick, he cleansed the lepers, he raised the dead to life, he preached the Gospel, he forgave sins. In his passionate pursuit of the Kingdom, he declared, “I have come to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were kindled.” Going through the great Temple of Jerusalem that had been desecrated, reduced to a market place, and commercialized, he overturned the tables of the vendors and moneychangers, and drove out the merchants with a whip.  Such was how Jesus made first in his life the Kingdom of God.

In making first the Kingdom of God, in bringing out, through his preaching and action, the revolutionary aspect of the Kingdom, Jesus earned the ire of the established Jews and religious leaders.  That is what our readings in today’s Mass are about:  the opposition of the establishment to Jesus, the confusion among even some of their soldiers (“Never before has anyone spoken like this…!”), the troubled conscience of such as Nicodemus (Shall we condemn him without a trial?”), the bullying argumentation of the Pharisees (Do you come from Gallilee, [stupid]? No prophet will come from Galillee!”).  So they plotted and schemed against him, as it was clear to Jesus they were, but he entrusted his life to his Father, and said, “Not my will.  Thine be done.”  “In you I take refuge”  -  Primum Regnum Dei – First, Father, your kingdom!  He conformed his will fully to the Father’s, and confirmed in love his earlier declaration, “The Father and I are one.”  His will was done, his Kingdom did come, with Jesus on the Cross.  On the Cross, in the power and surprise and joy of God’s love conquering death, Jesus was the Kingdom of the Father in person. 

Primum Regnum Dei.  The single, most important, pearl of great price the Ateneo de Naga could have given you these years in the Father’s love.  Keep it.  Don’t lose it.  Wear it around your heart.  Be loyal to it.  Pay the price.

Pay the price when some might say, “First in life, money!” or “First in life, power!” or “First in life, personal fame!”  Pay the price when some might say, “First in life, the stolen election!” or “First in life, the family corporation!” or “First in life, your high standard of living and your pleasure!”  Pay the price:  seek first the Kingdom of God.