JOHN 10:1-10‘I am the gate. Anyone who enters through me will be safe: he will go freely in and out and be sure of finding pasture.’ Biblical scholars tell us that the shepherds of Jesus’ day took the safety of the sheep so seriously that they would lie themselves across the entrance to the sheepfold …
Monthly Archives: April 2023
St Catherine of Siena
Matthew 11:25-30 Today we celebrate the feast of St Catherine of Siena. You’ll see her depicted wearing the habit of a nun, but she was in fact a Third Order Dominican. She’s of particular note for her fearless resolve and ability to speak truth to power, and especially to Popes. The Church has recognized her …
Friday, Third Week of Easter
John 6:52-59 ‘He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him.’ When we gather together to give thanks to the Father and to share bread and wine we make a statement about who we are as individuals and who we are as community. We receive Christ’s broken …
Thursday, Third Week of Easter
John 6:44-51 ‘Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and they are dead; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that a man may eat it and not die.’ It’s worth reading the whole of the Bread of Life discourse (John 6:22-66) in one sitting to get a sense of …
Wednesday, Third Week of Easter
Acts 8:1-8John 6:35-40 I am the bread of life.He who comes to me will never be hungry;he who believes in me will never thirst. We are so familiar with Jesus’ language when he refers to himself as ‘the Bread of Life’ that it is easy to miss just how bold a claim this was. In …
St Mark
1 Peter 5:5-14Mark 16:15-20 When we celebrate the feast of St Mark the Evangelist we celebrate the gifts of a storyteller. What we read on the printed page had its origins in an oral culture. The early Church preserved in writing the memories and stories which shaped their identity. If you were a well-to-do host …
St George
Romans 5:1-5John 15:18-21 ‘These sufferings bring patience, as we know, and patience brings perseverance, and perseverance brings hope, and this hope is not deceptive, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.‘ In certain circles on Twitter there was discussion as to how far we …
Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14,22-33 1 Peter 1:17-21Luke 24:13-35 Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us? This is the second time that we hear the Emmaus story in the season of Eastertide. We heard it first on Wednesday in the Easter Octave. There is so …
Saturday, Second Week of Easter
John 6:16-21 In just 5 verses the writer of the Fourth Gospel has given us a window into a whole theological world. The story of Jesus walking on the water comes just after he had fed the 5,000. For the hearers of this Gospel the resonances with the Exodus story may well have been clear. …
Friday, Second Week of Easter
John 6:1-15 In his book. Eating Together: Becoming One, Tom O’Loughlin examines the many ways in which meals feature in the Gospels. He lays alongside the Scriptural story our human experience of gathering and sharing food. He suggests that there is a particular grammar at work in meals. When we invite people for a meal …