Come and See. Two invitations. And one is conditional on the other. Those getting ready for the 30 day retreat will probably be sick of this gospel passage already—we’ve used it a couple of times by now—but there’s a lot said those two words. Come and see. You have to hear them from the mouth …
Category Archives: Loyola Hall
Monday Last Week of Year I
I must admit that once we’ve had Christ the King I want Advent to start right away. I need that change of gear, particularly after all the nastiness with the Maccabees last week. But as far as the lectionary is concerned, though we are in the final act, the opera isn’t over yet, the fat …
Wednesday Week 33 Year I (Thanksgiving Eve)
What do we give thanks for and what do we take for granted? I found myself this morning shopping for Thanksgiving Dinner getting caught up with a sense of loss way beyond the simple experience of not finding charcoal or canned pumpkin. It was probably my first real pang of homesickness for the states. Some …
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Sunday Week 30 Year C
This is one of those stories where Jesus turns everything upside down but, unfortunately, two thousand years and a whole life’s listening have turned it back the wrong way up. We know that Pharisees are the baddies and we know that Jesus used to hang around with tax-collectors and all that knowing takes the sting …
Wednesday Week 28 Year I
Here we are listening like the lawyer to Jesus going off at the Pharisees again, calling them the worst things he can lay his tongue to, and we are, as always, faced with a choice: we can get prickly and stand on our dignity the way he seems to do and come to their aid—they …
Friday Week 27 Year I
I’ve been wondering to anyone who will listen for the last couple of days … just what the hell is getting Joel so wound up!? After all these are the last kind of readings we want to hear on retreat—doom and gloom and sackcloth and ashes and a guilt trip to end all guilt trips. …
Sunday Week 25 Year C
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 …
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 …