Sunday reading

In both Luke’s and Matthew’s Gospels, Jesus begins his public life with a retreat into the desert.

In the Judaic tradition, the desert is the place where one encounters God.

Jesus goes into the desert to pray, and in the course of his 40 days in the wilderness, he is tempted. Read more »

What’s the key to the story of the ’miraculous catch of fish’?

It’s simply this: where human effort alone often brings failure and emptiness, obedience to God’s word brings success and abundance.

The miracle story is also a vocation story. In other words, fishermen by occupation are led to see that there’s more to life than catching fish – even loads of fish! Read more »

This week the liturgical season of Lent begins. Here are nine things you need to know about it . . .

1. What is Lent?

According to the Universal Norms for the Liturgical Year and the General Roman Calendar [.pdf]:

27. Lent [is a liturgical season that] is ordered to preparing for the celebration of Easter, since the lenten liturgy prepares for celebration of the paschal mystery both catechumens, by the various stages of Christian initiation, and the faithful, who recall their own Baptism and do penance. Read more »

Matthew Festing - aka His Most Eminent Highness The Prince and Grand Master of the Knights of Malta - bounds into the sitting room of his magnificent Renaissance palazzo sweaty and somewhat disheveled, and asks an aide if he should take off his sweater to be photographed.

Garrulous and self-effacing, Festing embodies some of the paradoxes of a fabled Catholic religious order that dates from the medieval Crusades: Steeped in European nobility and mystique, the order's mission is humility and charity - running hospitals, ambulance services and old folks' homes around the globe. Read more »

There are two miracle stories given to us in this selection from Mark’s Gospel, and both of them carry a message.

First, the story of the little girl, the daughter of Jairus, the president of the synagogue.

The girl has just died. The official pleads with Jesus to come to his house and “lay your hands upon her, and she will live.” Read more »

This Gospel passage from Mark tells of two parables of the ‘Kingdom’.

They are simple stories, metaphors rather, and come from an agricultural setting. But their very simplicity hides a deeper truth.

First: how do we understand the term ‘parable’ as we find it in Jesus’s teaching? Read more »

Mark begins his account of the public life of Jesus with a call to repentance because the kingdom is imminent.

Luke’s keynote address is an invitation to the lowly to the Kingdom of the Spirit. It is of a piece with Luke’s arrangement of the Gospel, which is preached to the meek and humble of heart.

In today’s reading, Jesus is present in Nazareth and makes his appearance in the synagogue, where he is invited to preach and give a blessing. Read more »

The miracle at the wedding feast of Cana is one of the best-known of Jesus’s miracles, familiar to all of us because of the originality of the miraculous action, and for the role that Mary, the mother of Jesus, played in it.

As the details of the story are known to us, let’s try to grasp the meaning of this miracle. Read more »

This Gospel passage is a good example of  the joining of two stories – a healing miracle and a teaching incident. Its purpose is to link the physical cure to the deeper moral reason for the sickness.

Jesus is back in Capernaum, a town which laid claim to being his “home”, for he worked so many of his miraculous cures there. Crowds mobbed him once again, and besieged the house in which he was teaching so that access to him was blocked. Read more »

The beatitudes which Jesus proclaimed are promises.

In the biblical tradition, the beatitude is a literary genre which always involves some good news, a ‘gospel’, which culminates in a promise.

Therefore, the beatitudes are not only moral exhortations whose observance foresees in due time – ordinarily in the next life – a reward or a situation of future happiness. Read more »