Today we celebrate the great festival of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church when the Holy Spirit inspired the apostles to break out of their locked room and share the good news that Jesus the Christ was risen, with the world. Pentecost was this mega-epiphany moment where all the light switches were turned on for …
Last Thursday we marked Ascension Day, the day when the resurrected Jesus physically left this earth to return to God. The disciples had just been getting used to the fact that Jesus wasn’t dead – he was alive, when once again he was taken from them, and they had to deal with his absence. How …
One of the features of the post Easter stories we’re presented with in this season, is Jesus’ love and care for his friends the disciples, as he prays for them in his last days. He prays that they will know true peace. He prays that they might love one another. In today’s Gospel he prays …
This lectionary year we listen to the words of Jesus through the prism of Mark’s Gospel, and today we celebrate Mark’s feast day, even though we are in the middle of the Easter season. We do this because the more we understand where Mark is coming from, the more we can grasp what he is …
During the Easter season, we reflect on who the risen Christ is to us, and on this particular Sunday in the church calendar each year we reflect on Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the one who cares for the sheep. This is not an image that’s familiar to Canberrans or indeed to most urban Australians, …
Time and again in the Gospels, the resurrected Christ meets his followers around food and drink. He shared food repeatedly with tax collectors and sinners, with the broken and the wounded. For the disciples on the Emmaus Road, Jesus is known to them as bread is broken. Jesus appears to his disciples on the beach, …
Each year on this Sunday after Easter Day we encounter Thomas. Thomas has been held up as the ‘doubting’ saint, who was somehow a second-class disciple because he had not believed Jesus had risen from the dead without his own first-hand proof. For some reason, Thomas had not been with the other disciples when Jesus …
Over the past weeks we have been journeying through the fasting, the deprivation and the starkness of Lent. We have come through the darkness of Holy Week, as we have gone down with Christ into his suffering and death, and as he experienced the very worst the would could offer. And now on this Easter …
Again, on this Passion Sunday, we prepare for the most sombre and holy week in the Christian calendar, as we draw near to Jesus and share in his Paschal mystery. We can get as close to Jesus as we like, or not, as did so many of the fair-weather friends of our Lord, including some …
‘Unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies it remains just a single grain.’ ‘Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’ In these tough sayings, Jesus uses strong statements to show us that everything the world tells …