Reflections

During Lent we are presented in our Readings with many of the most familiar scripture stories. Maybe it’s a way to focus us back on the clearest summations of what our faith is all about. Today we hear the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:1-3, 11-32), which is certainly up there as one of the best known.  It’s known as the Prodigal Son because of the way the first son throws away the money he gets from his father. It could equally well be called the Jealous Son, if we were…

Continue Reading Fourth Sunday of Lent

We really, really want to believe that bad things happen to bad people and not to good people. We know this isn’t true, the evidence is all around us. Bad things happen to good people, and good things also happen to bad people. There is simply no connection.  The people of Jesus’s time were equally convinced, or trying to convince themselves, that being good came with a payback – despite a whole major book in the Hebrew Scriptures discussing how that wasn’t true and what that meant (the Book of Job). Jesus…

Continue Reading Third Sunday of Lent

The Transfiguration is a strange event. That’s obvious at the superficial level, but it remains strange when we dig a bit further. Jesus takes just a select three of his disciples and they have an experience which is literally out of this world. It’s much more dramatic than the Resurrection, where there were no out of the world experiences at all.  So why doesn’t this feature as one of the most important events of the gospel? In fact, since Jesus’s status was clearly established here, why do we need anything more at…

Continue Reading Second Sunday of Lent

We know that Jesus was “fully human” – in other words he was just like us. When we hear a story like Luke’s account of Jesus being tempted in the desert (Luke 4:1-13) does it help us to feel more like him, or not? I suspect for many of us the answer is “not so much” – the temptations are so far out of our league, and the responses even more so. And the whole episode comes across more like some sort of initiation test that Jesus has to endure, but of…

Continue Reading First Sunday of Lent