Well what the hell is that all about?! Problems, problems, problems! The crafty steward is a preacher’s nightmare. Some writers reckon that the bunch of sayings tacked on at its end—which all seem to try and interpret it—are themselves leftovers from four or five different homilies given in Luke’s own community. And look how they …
Monthly Archives: September 2001
Thursday Week 24 Year I
These readings leave me somewhere between gasping and all numbed-out by too much good news! Who’d have thought you could have too much good news, too much blessing, too many promises of good fortune?! But that’s the strange economy that gets played out in both Paul and Luke today—a kind of tumbling, over-pouring, gush of …
Wednesday Week 23 Year I
I say this with images of yesterdays horror still sharp and bright-edged in my mind’s eye—and maybe that places me—places us—closer to Paul and his hearers than we might otherwise be. Because it’s a shocking image he’s using here to catch an inkling of what it means to have a new life in Christ—it is …
Monday Week 24 Year I
What gets me here is the way people don’t meet. The centurion doesn’t go to Jesus himself, never speaks for himself—maybe he wants to go through the proper channels, maybe he wants whatever leverage he can get from the Jewish elders—and it must have been enough because Jesus does come to cure his beloved servant …
Friday Week 20 Year I (St Bartholomew)
Call, or vocation, or ministry often gets painted in the most macho terms. Maybe we’ve experienced it that way ourselves. As something heroic, demanding, self-denying. Joseph Campbell, the great student of myth, writes about the hero journey as archetypically involving leaving, leaving home, leaving family, leaving familiarity and setting out on a lone quest to …
Tuesday Week 24 Year I
If yesterday was all theory—all message and no meeting—today is the humble reality of practice. Out on the edge of things, between the gate and the grave, two crowds collide. One follows Jesus and another follows in the footsteps of death. And here it is like a lens clicking into focus: a dead man, the …