Today we celebrate the feast of Christ the King. Elsewhere this is known as the Reign of Christ: this is thought to sound less grandiose and imperious than Christ the King. I don’t have a problem with Christ the King, because there is no association in my mind between Jesus the King and any kind…
The nature of apocalyptic writing ‘The end of the world is nigh’: you can almost see the man with the sandwich boards, walking silently up and down, maybe in the bus station or in the marketplace. The idea behind such predictions is an old one and we have two examples of it in our readings…
Today’s Gospel reading in context Today’s Gospel reading is, on the surface, rather uninspiring, and also rather odd. Why would Simon and Andrew simply walk away from their nets and follow someone they seem (according to Mark’s Gospel) never to have heard of? If you do a bit of digging though, the Gospel passage is…
Years ago I went to a performance of John’s Gospel. It featured a solitary actor who proclaimed the whole of John’s Gospel from memory: an amazing feat of memory. The audience was seated in the nave of a darkened church and the actor stood at the front under a spotlight – he was all that…
Mark 10:46-52 Blind Bartimaeus: a familiar name to us. We know nothing much about him except that he was blind and that he was a beggar. He must have had some kind of degenerative eye disease, or perhaps he had lost his sight in an accident: his request to Jesus is that he will be…
Hope has wavered over the past two years. Sometimes it felt as if we were never going to come out of the other side of covid. Even now things feel unstable and insecure – once again there are empty shelves at the supermarket and those of us with cars have faced queues at petrol stations…
Mark 10:17-31 Job 23:1-9, 16-17 ‘You lack one thing’, Jesus tells the young man who has come to ask how he might inherit eternal life. For the young man it was his wealth, his possessions. We might breathe a sigh of relief and think, ‘well I’m OK then’ – I’m not wealthy’. But this young…
This year’s Chelsea Flower Show is well underway with a one-off celebration of the bounteous beauty of the autumn season. Replacing springtime blooms it’s pumpkins, fruits and berries that are getting their moment in the spotlight.The timing of the show magnificently illuminates the season of harvest when we celebrate God’s provision and care for us…
Mark 9:30-37 A few years ago, I dealt with a situation in a Vicarage in Burnley, where visitors complained of seeing a shadowy woman in a vintage dress who emitted a feeling of intense sadness. We did a bit of research to find out who this woman might be. We stumbled upon the story of…
I was struck, this week, by an image of an elderly man carrying a cross, following Jesus, also carrying a cross, both followed by a dog, carrying a little cross in its mouth. This week the image of Jesus, the elderly man and the dog popped up on my screen and I knew that was…