Reflections for Christmas

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. Which is a little confusing since you might remember there are supposed to be twelve days of Christmas, the last being the Epiphany on January 6. But in some parts of the world, including the US, the feast gets moved to the nearest Sunday. Since many people […]

… his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been worried to death looking for you.” (Lk 2:48)A pretty typical interchange with a teenage son. It continues as you might expect: he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you realize …?”And they

Christmas has arrived, our celebration of the Nativity of the Lord. But this Christmas is disrupted, by illness, by fear, by divisions between people which seem irreconcilable. And yet this is the season of “peace and goodwill to all”. Really? Maybe we ourselves are fortunate to be able to celebrate with family and friends, but

Today, with the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, the final feast of the Christmas season, we transition from our celebration of Christmas and our focus on the childhood of Jesus to his adult life. Appropriately our gospel reading is from the start of Mark’s Gospel. Mark doesn’t include anything before this time –

For Isaiah Jerusalem was the center of the world, God’s world. That was where the camels would bring the gift-bearers with their gold and frankincense. Matthew uses the same image to place the infant Jesus at the center of God’s world. It’s no longer a place that matters, it is a person. The Feast of

We celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family immediately after Christmas. This seems entirely natural to us, but this feast is a very recent innovation! It was only introduced in 1921, and moved to its current position in the calendar in 1969. A recognition of the importance of the family, at least as we understand

The writers of the Gospels faced a unique challenge when they sat down to write their accounts of the life of Jesus. How do you communicate the significance of the event they had experienced, for all of humanity, for all time? However they did also face one challenge which is common to all writers –