Readings: Ephesians 2:12-22; Luke 12:35-38 Paul is falling over himself with metaphors today, mixing and matching like crazy, but all to one end: the urgent communication of a distance dwindled to nothing. In Christ, foreign has become familiar. In Christ, two become one. In Christ, distance becomes closeness; hostility, harmony; war, peace. We are now …
Category Archives: Loyola Hall
Sunday Week 29 Year B
Readings: Isaiah 53:10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45 I was watching a rerun of the West Wing the other evening, right back from the first series, and there was President Bartlett delivering an impassioned pep-talk to his daughter Zoë. She was about to leave for College and the passion flowed as the president grappled for words, …
Friday Week 26 Year II
Readings: Job 38:1, 12-21, 40:3-5; Luke 10:13-16 We get a rare glimpse of a family likeness today: Father and Son both letting off steam, both sounding provoked beyond endurance, both ticked off. And both complaining that we continue to be wilfully blind to the plain and glorious truth under our noses. I love Job, the …
Wednesday Week 23 Year II
Readings: 1 Cor 7:25-31; Lk 6:20-26 Setting his misogyny aside, I do love Paul’s urgency and absolute conviction that everything has changed. Everything is different after the death and resurrection of Jesus, with a difference that has diverted human—and even cosmic history—in a new direction. And in that new direction all the old rules cease …
Sunday Week 23 Year B
Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37 It seems likely that that word ephphatha, be opened, was the first thing that man ever heard. That he came to hearing with that as his first word. Wouldn’t it echo in his opened ears for the rest of his life? Wouldn’t that be the word he cherished …
Wednesday Week 22 Year II
Readings: 1 Cor 3:1-9; Luke 4:38-44 What would it take for us to be weaned? For us to be beyond the milk of spirituality—past the rusks and the stewed apple even—and eating the spiritual food of adults? Paul is pretty clear that the first thing to go would have to be the jealousy and wrangling …
Beheading of John the Baptist
Readings: Jeremiah 1:17-19; Mark 6:17-29 You could hardly have two readings more calculated to contradict each other than these. The first is bracing with promise: you will be a pillar of iron, a wall of bronze; they will not overcome you. And it’s quite a ‘they’ arrayed against the prophet: kings, princes, priests, and people. …
Sunday Week 20 Year B
When I was at university some friends of mine signed up for VSO, Voluntary Service Overseas, to head off for Papua New Guinea. With the ghoulish interest of a 21 year old I thought to myself ‘mmm, cannibals! head-hunters!’ and hit the library, intent on scaring the life out of my buddies. I discovered that …
Sunday Week 19 Year B
Bread. Bread for the journey, bread to keep you going in the desert when you are done with doing… We join Elijah in mid story, sulking under a tree. ‘I’ve had enough. I want to die.’ But in truth he’s been eating the bread of death for a long time. He’s been fighting a guerrilla …
Feast of the Transfiguration Year B
Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; 2 Peter 1:16-19; Mark 9:2-10 We’ve reached here the highpoint of Jesus ministry. Literally. In recent weeks he’s raised the dead, he’s made a meal for a multitude out of scraps and gleanings, he’s walked on water … and everywhere the crowds are following him in droves. These are his glory …