This promise is immense. All the food you can eat—and not just to fill you but to fascinate you with flavours; wine to intoxicate and delight and lift the heart; oh, and the utter defeat of death and ruin’s rout; the end of pain and decay; the passing of shame, of fear, of loss. And …
Yearly Archives: 2002
Monday Week 27 Year II
This afternoon the director of this place asked me for a few moments of my time. Now maybe this is just me but my first thought was “what have I done wrong?” Not, as it turned out, “please could you get me out of this double-booking Rob?” But “you’re not keeping up to standards”. Isn’t …
Monday Week 26 Year II
We are going to be hearing a lot from Job in the next week so it might be a good idea to put his story into some context. The Book of Job deals with probably the hardest question in theology—why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a hard question in two ways: first …
Saturday Week 25 Year II
What a miserable first reading! Full of foreboding, ripe with the warning that good times always end and fancies flee away. Yet it is poetic—beautiful in a way—it moves me even though I don’t want to go where it is going. And it’s full of a conflict too. It seems impossible to read that piece …
Thursday Week 20 Year II
With a parable like this one I don’t know who I like least: Jesus who speaks or Matthew who puts the words into his mouth. “For many are called but few are chosen.” Lousy words to start a retreat because they paint God in such a poor light. There are two ways of reading these …
Sunday Week 20 Year A
What’s the point of the Incarnation if God doesn’t learn something? … Jesus is having a bad day—maybe a bad month. He’s in retreat—pulled out of Galilee—and come here to the Canaanite territory near Tyre and Sidon and I see him desperate for a break: for time and space. It has been rough for him, …
St Peter Chrysologos
I wonder if any of us can hear those words of the gospel without at least a tiny tremble or a ripple of questioning. Which are we—the sound tree or the rotten? What’s our fruit like? Overripe, or bitter, or mealy in the mouth? How many of us can hear those words of Jesus and …
Wednesday Week 5 of Lent
What does the gentleman in Rome who combined these two readings today hope to achieve by putting them side by side? The story of the three youths thrown into the fiery furnace seems pretty clear—it is a test of gods. My god’s bigger than your god. King Nebuchadnezzar picks a fight: my gods, ably assisted …
Saturday Week 3 of Lent
There’s a peculiar feeling about that first reading. I wonder about people who think so ill of God and yet want to draw close. I thought, at first, I was disturbed by the way they place their disaster at God’s feet: ‘he has struck us down; he has torn us to pieces’. And that disturbance …
Friday Week 2 of Lent
“It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone.” What does that teach us? What about this: “The Word became flesh and lived among us; He came into his own and his own did not accept him.” Words and stones: what do we build with them but lives? Lives and poems. Words, …