Solemnity
Saints and Blessings
1 November 2018
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year B
When we hear the eight beatitudes that begin the Gospel of Matthew’s sermon on the mount in chapter 5, we can easily drift into very well-known territory. Every Christian is very familiar with these sayings, and this gospel or one of its many sung forms is used at weddings and funerals, graduations and dedications. Some…
Wild Man
24 June 2018
John the Baptist is a great figure. His birth around six months before the birth of Jesus is worthy of celebration. John is an enigmatic figure – yet worthy of honour. He is a wild man with a deep passion for the way of God and a desire to see the kingdom of God break…
Living Festival
2 June 2018
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year B
Think back to the last time that you celebrated with friends or family some significant occasion. Was it a special birthday, an engagement party, graduation or wedding? The desire to mark such a special occasion with a meal is a deeply human and spiritual instinct. So much happens when we gather together and are bound more…
Gathered and Sent
27 May 2018
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year B
The Church gathers the community together today and reminds us of the mission that we receive through our belief in the Trinitarian God. Like the disciples who had scattered during the passion of Jesus, we are gathered to worship – even if some distazo – the word that Matthew uses to describe the doubt of…
One Holy Nation
20 May 2018
Today is the feast of Pentecost. A powerful, but strange collection of images surround us. Tongues of fire; strange languages; Cretans; mighty winds; thunder; lightning; holy Spirit gifts; smoke … and more. The word Pentecost comes from the Greek language, where it simply means the ‘fiftieth’ day. It is the name for a Jewish feast, which in…
Christ, the King of Justice
25 November 2017
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year A
Justice is something that we learn very early as children. We have this strong instinct for when something doesn’t just seem to be fair. Perhaps as a result, justice is one of the most profound longings of the human race. When there is no justice, then we know that something is wrong from deep within…
Declare before God
24 June 2017
Discipleship, Season of Growth, Solemnity, Teaching, Year A
Commitment Sunday The Gospel today invites us as a church to ‘declare ourselves before God’ as good stewards. God loves giving – he gave no lesser gift than the wonderful gift of Jesus to ensure that we are not alone in this life. We are also invited to not be afraid – the most common…
Corpus Christi – Lessons in Love
17 June 2017
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year A
This Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ does not only draw to a conclusion this extended season of Easter Feasts – it also draws together the whole of the mystery and wonder that we have been celebrating since the beginning of Lent. The twin feasts of Trinity and Corpus Christi hang uneasily at…
Trinity Love
10 June 2017
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year A
For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son… The famous and beautiful Gospel today (from John 3 verses 16-18) is the last part of a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, a man who is called a leading Pharisee and leader of the Jews. Even though he is a teacher of the…
Personal Pentecost
4 June 2017
The Gospel today (from John 20 verses 19-23) takes place on the evening of Easter Sunday. Mary Magdalene, who is the first apostle to see the Lord tells them about her encounter with Jesus. Now these disciples also see him. By saying it happens on “that day” perhaps the author also wants us to remember…
How is this woman mother of God?
1 January 2017
The understanding that Mary – a seemingly ordinary teenager growing up in Judea or Galilee who happened to be visited by the archangel Gabriel to hear the announcement that she would become the virgin mother of the saviour, who would be called Jesus – thereby becoming the mother of this unique person who was both…
The child in whom we live and move
24 December 2016
So many of our Christmas traditions are based on the barest threads of details. For example, in the gospel of Luke, although we are given very complete information about the announcement of the birth of first John and then Jesus, and the details of their parents and travels, when it actually comes to the moment…
Christ the King of mercy
20 November 2016
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year C
Many of the parishes around our Diocese celebrate First Holy Communion on this day – which seems like a lovely idea, given the name of the Solemnity with which we conclude the liturgical year. But I am intrigued about the disjuncture between the apparent theme of the liturgy and the strong and provocative images that…
Compassion raises the dead
5 June 2016
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year C
This seventh chapter of the Gospel of Luke begins with two stories of healing: the first is the healing of the Centurion’s slave; the second is our gospel story today – the raising from the dead of the son of a widow in the town of Nain. In the first story the healing comes at the…
Feeding the hungry
29 May 2016
Discipleship, Solemnity, Teaching
One of the things that might first strike us about the readings that are presented to us for our reflection on this Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, is that we are not given the account of the last supper from the Gospel of Luke. Instead we are given the only account in…
The Trinity and Whole Thinking
22 May 2016
One of the great difficulties that we face in the western church in attempting to appreciate the gift and mystery of the Holy Trinity is the fact that so much of our thinking and even our whole conceptual framework is formed by Greek thinking and the three laws of Greek logic as given to us…
Hope of New Creation 4 – Building for the kingdom at Pentecost
15 May 2016
Easter, New Creation, Seasons, Series, Solemnity, Teaching
One of the things that strikes me about the celebration of Pentecost, are its Jewish roots. When the disciples met in the upper room on that day, they almost certainly would have reflected upon the passages of Exodus 19 and 20 which detail the events around the arrival of the Hebrew nation at Mount Sinai,…
Co-workers in the kingdom
22 November 2015
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year A
The Feast of Christ the King is a relatively new feast day in the Catholic scheme of things. This is the ninetieth time that it has been celebrated, since Pope Pius XI instituted the feast day through an encyclical letter called Quas primas (In the first) which was published on 11 December 1925. Initially the feast…
Saints and Blessings
31 October 2015
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year B
When we hear the eight beatitudes that begin the Gospel of Matthew’s sermon on the mount in chapter 5, we can easily drift into very well-known territory. Every Christian is very familiar with these sayings, and this gospel or one of its many sung forms is used at weddings and funerals, graduations and dedications. Some…
Discovering the breadth and depth of God’s love for the saints
12 June 2015
The scriptures given to us today for the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus take us to the very centre of our faith and our relationship with God revealed in and through Jesus. The gospel ends with the declaration in the Gospel of John that we will look on the one whom they have…
The good gift of the body broken
7 June 2015
On the feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord, we really should begin by re-enacting the Exodus reading – it would be a great sight to haul in a few young bullocks, slaughter them, drain all the blood into huge bowls and then begin splashing one bowl all over the altar and then…
The Trinity and Gay Marriage
30 May 2015
On Trinity Sunday we celebrate the heart of our faith – an encounter with a God of love. The Trinity has often been described using images that in the end always limp and fail to capture the glory and sublime beauty of a doctrine that is only able to be encountered in prayer, rather than…
Good goats did it for me
23 November 2014
Season of Growth, Solemnity, Year A
Bad sheep and good goats Justice is something that we learn very early as children. We have this strong instinct for when something doesn’t just seem to be fair. Perhaps as a result, justice is one of the most profound longings of the human race. When there is no justice, then…
The dedication of the Lateran Basilica
10 November 2014
It is rare for a feast day to bump-off the Sunday liturgy – usually only the feast days and solemnities of the Lord or of our Lady (but only during Ordinary Time) – but today the dedication of a basilica in the city of Rome from back in the fourth century displaces the Sunday cycle…
Perfected in the paradise of purgatory (All Souls Day)
2 November 2014
When discussion turns to the last things – heaven, hell and purgatory – I am amazed how much of the discussion of such crucial questions in church circles is so muddy. We are talking about the destination for eternity – which most people know means a rather long time. In fact, we are more likely…
Peter’s Confession of Faith
29 June 2014
Radio Program, Season of Growth, Solemnity, Teaching, Year A
Today we honour the apostle Peter, who represents that part of the Church which gives it stability: its traditions and the structures which help to give consistency and unity to the Church, spread as it is through so many races, cultures, experiences and geographical diversity. In the Gospel today from Matthew chapter 16, Peter’s confession…
Encountering the Living God
22 June 2014
When you think about God and how God offers a relationship with him, it seems to me that the word encounter is one of the more helpful ways of describing this relationship. Yet, when you look up the word encounter, you discover that it comes into the English language via the Old French word encontre,…
Pentecost – renewing the face of the earth
9 June 2014
When I was a kid it was uncommon for my parents to come and visit the school; in part this was because we lived on a farm and caught the bus to and from school almost every day; the exception was on Tuesdays which was mum’s shopping day and we could go home with her…
The Ascension, Jesus and Heaven in Western thought
1 June 2014
When we come to celebrate the Ascension of Jesus all manner of things can tend to get in the way. For a start, many people can overstate the literal details in the first reading today, from the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, what with all the information of Jesus being lifted up into…
Presentation of the Older Brother
2 February 2014
Discipleship, Solemnity, Teaching
The feast of the Presentation of the Lord, celebrated forty days after Christmas, brings the nativity stories to an end. It is a very Jewish feastday, concerned as it is with the purification of the mother after giving birth to a son (the purification period was doubled for the birth of a daughter – WTF?)…