Luke 24:35-48 Today’s Gospel invites us to stand with the disciples as Jesus appears among them. They are startled and Jesus reassures them with his greeting of ‘Peace be with you.’ Understandably they think he is a ghost and he reassures them again: ‘Touch me and see for yourselves.’ If I imagine myself among the …
Author Archives: Turvey Nuns
Easter Wednesday
Luke 24:13-35 Luke paints the picture of the disciples at the end of an emotional journey where crucifixion has dashed their hopes. As they walk they talk to each other. There is a sense in which the journey is a time of healing as the disciples verbalise the experiences of the past days. A stranger …
Easter Tuesday
Easter Tuesday John 20:11-18 ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ ‘Oh, it’s okay, don’t cry.’ It’s surprising how often as I primary teacher I was urging children not to cry. It seems to be one of the first things you say to a child to reassure them when something upsetting has happened. First you try to …
Easter Monday
Matthew 28: 8-15 Filled with awe and great joy the women came quickly away from the tomb and ran to tell the disciples. When I read the Gospel text for today it is the word ‘ran’ which leaps out at me. We hear it several times at our Easter Vigil, in John’s account of the …
Easter Sunday
John 20:1-9 I’ve always loved the early morning. I was usually the first up at home and loved to be in school extra early. There is something about the quiet and the dark that prepares me for the day. Often in the morning I find that my heart and my mind have found a solution …
Holy Saturday
Holy Saturday is often spoken about as a day of ‘emptiness and numbness’. On one level this is true, but since entering the monastery I have discovered another dimension. On a day when you could feel out of sorts and not quite know what to do the for best, the framework of the monastic liturgy …
Good Friday
Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9 Every piece of text in the Good Friday liturgy is heavy with meaning. Pieces of scripture that I may have heard throughout the year have a whole new resonance today. I found it hard to pick just one text. I settled on the text from Hebrews. In a series of fairly complicated …
Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-8,11-14John 13:1-15 Each year I am stuck by how much the liturgy invites us to engage our senses during Holy Week. We wave a palm branch, we hear the story of the anointing and can imagine the smell of the perfume filling the house, we picture the silver coins of betrayal and the darkness …
Wednesday In Holy Week
Isaiah 50:4-9 Matthew 26:14-25 Today we have Matthew’s telling of the Last Supper. Once again Judas is in full focus and his actions seem inevitable. Those thirty pieces of silver are lodged in our collective imagination through art, poetry and hymnody. Stories of betrayal are always uncomfortable. Betrayal can happen in a matter of seconds. We …
Tuesday in Holy Week
Isaiah 49:1-6John 13:21-33,36-38 While at supper with his disciples, Jesus was troubled in spirit and declared, ‘I tell you most solemnly, one of you will betray me. In today’s Gospel the mood intensifies. We can easily imagine the scene of Jesus sharing a meal with his disciples. When film producers portray this they build the …