The Gospel for this Sunday, the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the last half end of Chapter 5 of St Mark’s Gospel and contains the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter and the healing of the woman with the haemorrhage.

Both Jairus and the woman are in desperate situations, and both of them know that they are exposing Jesus to the risk of becoming ritually unclean, and of Jesus having to go through the various processes to become ritually clean again. To be ritually clean was a pre-requisite for public worship of God.

Anything or anything touching a woman with a haemorrhage would be unclean until evening; and anyone who touched a dead body would be unclean for 7 days and have to go through two ritual washings with lustral water.

But they are both desperate.

We are told Jairus begged Jesus earnestly, and the word used is ‘parakalei’, which is very close to ‘paraclete’; (giving us a visual image of the work of the Holy Spirit), and he begged Jesus many times. Like the widow in the parable of the unjust judge, Jairus does not stop pleading until Jesus agrees to visit his daughter. So in this desperate situation Jairus wasn’t concerned about making a pest of himself, nor about what his public expressions of desperation would do to his reputation.

This poor woman had suffered greatly with this haemorrhage, and despite treatment by many doctors, and the depletion of all her monetary resources, she was no better, and in fact her troubles had become worse, more severe and more aggravated by the various treatments. Apart from the physical pain, the woman would have suffered from ostracism by the community – who would want to become ritually unclean by associating with her? Any husband she may have had would have left her and formally divorced her; any children she may have had would have been kept far from her. The depths of her desperation were greater and had gone on far longer (twelve years) than Jairus’ acute desperation.

However Jairus can approach Jesus publicly and openly, this suffering woman cannot. To even be among the crowd would have necessitated some form of disguise. She can’t even ask in private for help, due to the constant experiences of rejection that are her lot in life. But what she can do, she does; and it takes a similar kind of bravery to Veronica on the way to Calvary for this woman to work her way through the pressing crowds around Jesus to get close enough to touch His outer garment.

Immediately she is healed completely, and immediately Jesus is aware that a healing of magnitude has taken place.

Can you imagine the terror she goes through when Jesus asks ‘Who touched My clothes?’ She isn’t supposed to be out in public, and if she tells the truth…..

But she is still a woman of great courage, so in fear and trembling she tells Jesus the whole horrible truth, (how easy would it have been to hide and say nothing?!) and Jesus doesn’t tell her off. He calls her, ‘My daughter’, when He could easily have called her ‘woman’; publicly acknowledging that her faith and her courage are worthy of membership in His family, and publicly confirming to all that she is healed completely, and that there won’t be any adverse consequences, so she may depart in peace under His protection.

Poor Jairus, these delays must have been agony for him. Then he gets the unwanted news that all hope is gone, his daughter is dead. Healing is no longer possible.

Yet Jesus reassures him, and continues on His way to Jairus’ residence, but with only a chosen few disciples. What is going to happen, is going to happen in private. Was she asleep (in a deep pre-death coma), or was she truly deceased? Jesus still restores her completely and immediately back to health.

What does this teach us?

That no matter how dire, nor how lacking hope our desperate situations are, Jesus can immediately and totally fix them. Even if they are even beyond all earthly hope.

Nothing is beyond the power of Jesus.

But if we are honest, we also ask, why did God permit things to get so very dire before He stepped in?
An easy answer is, ‘to display the divine power of God, when all human help was decisively proven useless’.

But why did they have to suffer so much before God stepped in?
Was it as simple as ‘Jesus hadn’t passed by near to them yet’?
Well then, why didn’t God send Jesus sooner?

And here we meet the same inscrutable wisdom and providence and timing of God that Job, and Tobit, and Naomi, and Jeremiah, and many other holy ones wrestled with.

He is God. We are not.

Therefore everything He does is done perfectly and with perfect timing; even if we can’t see or comprehend the reasons why. (Frustrating, isn’t it?!)

But let us place our trust in Him afresh.

Because He alone can fix everything; fix it totally, fix it perfectly, and fix it immediately.

Nothing, but nothing, is beyond our hope in His almighty power.

May He give us the grace to live this truth, and to never forget it. Amen.

O great God of mercy and compassion
we bring before You the many desperate situations
we feel we have been importuning You about forever.
You have not forgotten us,
even if everything else screams the opposite.
In particular we bring before You our most impossible desperate situations
and entrust the timing, and the complete and perfect fixing of them to You.
We expect from you spectacular and immediate miracles worthy of these Gospel accounts.
You are the same God today, as you were back then,
and as you will be forever.
You can do it again in our time.
You can do it again today, if You so will.
Please remember how human and limited our patience and endurance is.
Please send us Your reassurance,
lest fear cast out whatever little faith we have left.
We entrust all of it to Your capable hands and Your loving Heart.
Take care of everything, especially our most desperate situations, as only You can.
We decide today, to trust in You,
​with a deeper trust than we have ever had before.
Please help us by the power of Your Holy Spirit to live in that level of trust and to grow in it.
Jesus, I trust in You.
Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the end of Chapter 4 of St Mark’s Gospel after Jesus has been teaching a series of parables to the crowds. It narrates the story of Jesus calming the storm.

Following on from Jesus teaching the parables of the wheat and the mustard seed which invited us to trust God’s process and God’s timing, we seem to have a parable in this event of the massive storm that invites us to trust in Him even in the worst of times.

What comes after this passage is the deliverance of the Gerasene demoniac, which seems to be where Jesus was headed to on the other side of the lake of Galilee. Is this massive storm an attempt by the forces of evil to prevent this deliverance? It does seem likely.

We do know that Jesus set out deliberately for this locality on the other side of the lake, and plenty of witnesses joined Him in other boats. We know that it was evening before the lake crossing even began, and that they only set out after the crowds had been dismissed.

Jesus was already in the boat before they set out, and we know that at times He preached from Peter’s boat close to the shoreline. There doesn’t seem to have been any prior preparation or planning for this journey; and in all likelihood the seamen among the disciples would have expected a rather swift crossing – no more than an hour or two, with landfall before it got pitch dark.

But we see this sudden, intense, physical opposition to their journey’s progress; and they feel they are facing it all on their own because Jesus is in the back of the boat asleep.

The usual translations we read, do not do the original Greek justice, and water down the intensity of the crisis the disciples in the boats faced. What we often read as storm or great gale can also be translated violent wind-storm, squall, whirlwind, hurricane. They are hard enough to deal with in daylight, but in fading light and darkness it must have engendered extra terror.

So violent was it, that the waves were breaking over and into the boat, so that it was filled entirely. Any efforts to bail out the water were proving to be futile. The boat was beginning to sink.

At this point, like them, we are asking, where is God in all this?

How acutely they must have felt the absence of His reassuring presence! They could have also asked; Why is God permitting this to happen to us? What did we do wrong? Where did we go wrong?

‘Teacher, teacher, we are perishing. We are at the point of being fully and totally destroyed.’

And Jesus gets up, commands ‘Silence!’, ‘Be still!’, and the immediate calm that happens is as great as the storm was.

'megale’ is used to describe both the storm AND the calm.

This supernatural calm overwhelms the disciples with fear, awe and reverence.

Only God.
Only God Himself is able to transform utter disaster, turmoil and chaos into perfect peace and order in a single moment. No one else and nothing else can.

And what does Jesus say to them (and to us)?
Why are you so frightened?
Have you no faith?
Have you forgotten Who is in control?

Ummm. Errrr.
We’re still terrified, before and after, and it is human to be afraid.
Gulp. Obviously not as much faith as we thought we had. At all.
Yep. Completely forgot. Utterly failed that one….. Sorry.

May God help us to remember that even in the worst of times, that He is still completely in control.

May God help us to remember that especially in the worst of times, we can be expectant for His sudden divine action to happen to fix everything perfectly– and thus not despair nor become despondent.

May God help us to remember that nothing is going to stop us carrying out the mission we have been given by Him, even if it has been delayed by enemy tactics – and to expect far more spectacular results if there have been delays and opposition.

In our darkest moments may God send His holy angels to remind us of this Gospel event, and through it to remind us that He is completely in control, and that the end He has in mind is far more amazing and more glorious and stupendous than anything that currently terrorizes us.

Amen. Amen. Amen.
​
He alone is worthy of our trust.
Let us place our trust in Jesus.
Let us renew our trust in Jesus.
Let us massively increase our trust in Jesus.
Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the next part of Chapter 6 in St Mark’s Gospel, immediately after last week’s passage about the visit to Nazareth. This next part of Chapter 6 has the Twelve move into a new stage of their discipleship with Jesus.

It seems significant that this new phase happens almost directly after the disappointing visit to Nazareth, as though the lessons to be learnt at Nazareth were a necessary pre-requisite – perhaps to prepare them for when the response to their preaching would be far less than enthusiastic.

So Jesus calls the Twelve apostles to Himself, and commences to send them out two by two to preach the necessity of repentance for entering the kingdom of God. In sending them out Jesus imparts to them a share in His own authority over unclean spirits. This indicates that there is a co-dependence of preaching with delivering people and situations from evil (and vice versa) for either to be effective.

They had seen Jesus preach, heal and deliver sufferers from evil spirits, and now they had a test run of doing it themselves.

The passage doesn’t say what Jesus did while the 6 teams went out in different directions on this mission ‘with training wheels’. Probably Jesus spent that time alone in prayer interceding for them and for the people they were to preach to; waiting for them to return to a previously agreed rendezvous place and time.

But the thing that strikes all of us is how little Jesus permitted them to take on the missionary journey. They don’t have to go bare-foot; but may wear sandals. Perhaps that is because heavier shoes may slow them down and increase fatigue. Apart from that, all they can take with them is their missionary companion, the authority Jesus has given them, and a staff.

The word used in Greek for ‘staff’ is ‘rhabdon’ and is does mean rod or staff, but it can also mean sceptre or staff of authority.

Any kind of walking stick is useful when traversing rough terrain, and for keeping up the endurance on long distances. I’ve followed the journeys via social media of some friends walking the Camino, and they all start out without walking sticks, and they all have walking sticks before the end of the first week.

A good solid rod or stave is also useful for protection against brigands and wild animals.

Maybe the aspect of a staff also representing the authority Jesus has given them now seems more plausible, especially remembering how God used Aaron’s staff and Elisha’s staff.

However we cannot forget that travelling light permits a person to travel much faster than if they have anything on them to weigh them down. This has something to say about the urgency we should feel for spreading the good news of Jesus, and the urgency Jesus must have felt to issue such instructions – that anything that slows us down has to be jettisoned.

To our surprise, and definitely to the Apostles’ surprise, they were very successful on this training mission; they preached, they evicted devils and brought God’s healing to others.

That’s the difference going out with the authority of Jesus makes.

We shouldn’t even consider going on mission without it; without some kind of commissioning by those in leadership in the Body of Christ.

Our other surprise should be that these three things are considered by Jesus and by the communities who were the seed ground for this Gospel of Mark as Normal on a missionary journey to proclaim the Gospel.

Please God, may our New Normal when this time of pandemic is over be this kind of Normal – Your kind of Normal. Amen.

Holy Apostles of God, please pray for us, and especially for all bishops, since they are particularly authorised by Jesus for mission, and to lead mission in His name. Amen.

Holy Apostles of God, please pray for us too, that preaching repentance, healing and deliverance from evil may return to being Normal for all believers in Jesus. Amen.

Holy Apostles of God, please pray for all whom Jesus is calling to Himself at this time, that they be given the grace of a whole-hearted Yes when He sends them on mission, thoroughly dependent upon His providence and authority. Amen.
​
Holy Apostles of God, please pray for those who have been given a missionary mandate by Jesus, but who have not yet gone where He has told them to go, or who have become disheartened and discouraged along the way. May they be given fresh hope, and fresh anointing from Your Holy Spirit to completely fulfill the mission You, Lord God, have given them. Amen.
……………………………………………………………………….
P.S. I came across this excellent blog-post on the ministry of the prophet Elijah, it is well worth a read: https://www.awmi.net/reading/teaching-articles/lessons_elijah/

.... above is a print-friendly version, 4 x A4 pages, of that blog-post - since it deserves to be shared more widely.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the beginning of Chapter 6 in St Mark’s Gospel. It tells us what happened when Jesus took His disciples to visit Nazareth, His home-town.

This was a very deliberate move by Jesus for several reasons:
He understood that His disciples needed to see where He had grown up, so that they could witness to this later on.
He also needed them to understand this uncomfortable lesson about the likelihood of rejection by those close to us when God calls us in to His ‘more’.
He would have had a natural hankering for home, and would have ardently desired to give to those He loved so deeply as much of what God had been filling Him with as possible.

We see in this passage of scripture that the inhabitants of Nazareth who knew Jesus in His hidden life, were very comfortable with that experience of Him.

They experienced levels of panic, shock and astonishment as this very different Jesus who came to them bearing divine wisdom and divine teaching, and miraculous 'dynamite' power.

In this coming of His to Nazareth, Jesus wanted to give them access to this side, to this experience of Him, as He had done for so many other villages in the surrounding area, but the beloved people of Nazareth were happy to settle for the lesser experience, and didn't want a bar, not one iota, of the greater experience of Him.

In fact it actually scandalised them; the word used in the Greek is ‘eskandalizonto’.

So they sadly missed out on all that Jesus wanted to give them through this coming, and they didn't have a clue just how humongously much they missed out on – because they were not open to the possibility of more.

Recently others have written and spoken about how often when we invite God in to our lives and into times of corporate prayer and worship that we tend to expect something like a tame kitten when as God He has full right to come in as a roaring wild lion and everything in between.

It is the difference between expecting the ‘O good and gentle Jesus’ and receiving the Almighty universal Emperor and majestic Conqueror of sin and death.

He is certainly both, but we definitely have a preference for the former and often too little experience of the latter – much like the inhabitants of Nazareth.

The thing is, if God is going to step in and change our world from the cesspit of malevolent evil to the garden of goodness where His will is done on earth as it is in heaven, then He is going to come as mighty Judge and Ruler.

Are we ready for this?
Are we open to the kind of coming of Jesus that the money changers in the Temple experienced?
Are we open to receive and accept the more that this Mighty All-powerful Jesus wants to give us?

It is possible that this coming of Jesus could be the one foretold in Revelation 20:1-6 that leads to a thousand years of peace, or a precursor to it.

May God grant us the grace to be ready and willing to welcome Him however He chooses to come, especially if that coming of Jesus doesn't match our expectations at all. Amen.
​
Obviously Mary, His mother, was ready and waiting for Jesus on His homecoming visit. May she help us prepare for His coming, and help us to welcome Him properly when that great moment comes. Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from a section of parables of Jesus given in Chapter 4 of St Mark’s Gospel. These two parables about the wheat and the mustard seed are about the growth of the kingdom of God.

To understand these parables we need to have a better grasp of the development of wheat plants and mustard seed plants.

I found these websites helpful for wheat
https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains/zadoks-growth-scale
http://wheatdoctor.org/wheat-growth-stages-and-zadok-s-scale

The most striking thing is how much the wheat plant changes during its growth from seed to maturity and harvest. From seed a seedling springs, then something that looks like green leafy grass, then a stem forms and grows, eventually the flag leaf grows and the ear of wheat begins to emerge, and grow, and then to dry out, brown and harden.

Like the mustard seed, the beginning is small and insignificant.

At the end is a swift, sharp sickle when the grains of wheat are ripe, and farmers watch over their crops like mother hens until the perfect time for harvesting to maximize yield comes.

From our vantage point of history we can see how the Church has grown and changed significantly many times since that first Pentecost in the upper room. The Church under early persecution looked very different to the Church after Constantine and the age of the Desert Fathers; that was followed by the age of the monasteries eg Benedictines; and the age of the mendicant preaching orders eg Franciscans and Dominicans, the age of the crusades, the age of the missionary orders eg Jesuits; the age of the teaching orders eg Josephites, and the age of the laity/charismatic renewal. It is still the same Church fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit, even though it might look and feel different to anyone who lived through Vatican II.

This perspective should help us yield more responsively to how the Holy Spirit wants us to grow and change into the next era.

He is in control.

The most likely candidate for the kind of mustard plant Jesus referred to is the black mustard. Of the seeds planted in the ground, it is the smallest. What gave me a surprise is that it is an annual not a perennial plant. It would have been common in kitchen gardens. Apart from being a plant with a small seed, it has explosive growth, and it looks a lot more like a big weed than a tree.

When the Holy Spirit is active, kingdom growth is exponential not linear. That kind of rapid growth is one of the ways that alerts us that the Holy Spirit is moving upon something. The praise & worship band, Praise Nation, from Pittsburgh USA, didn’t know how many would come to an initial adoration and praise night in their parish, but 120 showed up the first week, 250 showed up the next week, 500 showed up the 3rd week, and 5000 showed up when it was transferred to the cathedral. That kind of growth doesn’t happen naturally.

With both plants the good stuff (wheat, mustard seeds) has to be separated from the useless chaff at harvest time. With both plants, threshing and winnowing is used to do that process. This reminds me of other parables where Jesus promises the separation of the good and the bad at the end of time.

With both plants there is an insignificant beginning, rapid growth, lots of change, and a definite end at the perfect time for harvest, and a separation of good stuff from useless stuff, and the whole process takes time to unfold.

What can we conclude?

God is in control.
God is in control of His kingdom.
God causes the growth of His kingdom.
His kingdom is characterized by small, insignificant beginnings, explosive growth, significant periodic change, and a swift fruitful harvest which happens at maximum ripeness separating the good from the not good.
​
Let us be intentionally co-operative with this kingdom plan of His, trust Him, trust Him more than we ever have before, and do whatever is our necessary part to be numbered among the fruit and not the chaff when harvest time comes. Amen.

​The Gospel for this Sunday, Corpus Christi Sunday, Year B, comes from the events of Holy Week leading up to the Last Supper, and during the Last Supper. The missing verses are about Jesus arriving with the Twelve to the upper room and about who will betray Him.

It is the way the circumstances of the Last Supper were arranged that have caught my attention. Compare it to the circumstances of the birth of Jesus.

In Bethlehem Joseph and Mary were among the last of the descendants of David to arrive for the census. They had trouble finding anywhere to stay, and ended up in a stable of sorts.

Just outside Jerusalem, it is the day the Passover lambs are sacrificed, and there’s just enough time to get the lamb back from the Temple, and then roast it in time for the Passover meal.

By then, you would think all the best Passover meal locations would have been taken, most of them booked every year in advance by the same families. Yet Jesus is completely unconcerned. He knows His Heavenly Father has this covered.

Jesus is facing His final hours on earth and this momentous meal with the kind of trust a child has that if he falls backwards his daddy will immediately catch him. These moments are so precious and have been foretold in the scriptures, that Jesus has confidence that every detail will be utterly perfect.

The two disciples are shown a large upper room. What we translate as large is written as ‘mega’ in the Greek. We know from Pentecost that 120 people fitted comfortably inside it.
The whole place is prepared, it is clean, the tables, couches, lamps, crockery, condiments etc are all ready – which would have taken many, many hours of preparation. And it would be palace quality, not stable quality. Amongst it all would be fine details to surprise and delight the participants, calling forth memories from past Passovers that they hadn’t shared with each other before, and also referencing many aspects of the salvific history of the family of Abraham.

Reading between the lines, the only thing missing is the lamb (and The Lamb).

All of which means that the disciples can get back to Jesus rather quickly - and miss as few of these precious moments with Jesus as possible; and that Jesus has them close to Him for as long as possible.

That’s the stunning kind of provident care the Father worked behind the scenes for Jesus.

It is an important place. It is the location of the Last Supper. It is where the disciples will gradually return to after they have been scattered by the events of the Passion. It is where many appearances of the risen Jesus will take place. It is where Pentecost begins. We shouldn’t be surprised that the Father chose it with great care, and caused it to be available and ready for all of these sublime purposes.

This is how the heart of the Father operates.
His standard operating procedure.
If only we have eyes to see, and hearts to notice and appreciate.

We can be assured that our heavenly Father has the details of our last meals and last conversations with our loved ones already taken care of. He is the absolute best at preparing perfect endings.

We can choose to trust in Him, and to let Him take care of all the details of our lives far better than we could ever do ourselves.

He’s waiting for us to let Him do this.

May His tender care inspire us to have that same level of utter confidence that Jesus had. Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, Trinity Sunday, Year B, comes from the final verses of St Matthew’s Gospel, and contains what many refer to as ‘The Great Commission’.

I recall pondering this Gospel segment in times past, but I haven’t gone back to find what was written back then. However I do remember that no one knows where this mountain location is in Galilee and that it is the same location that Jesus and the Apostles withdrew to when He wanted to teach them privately.

It seems fitting that Jesus wanted them to re-gather in this place of special shared memories to give them the sending forth that constitutes them as Apostles. They are the ones sent out by Jesus with the primacy to continue His ministry.

Wikipedia says this: An apostle, in its most literal sense, is an emissary, from Greek ἀπόστολος, literally "one who is sent off", from the verb ἀποστέλλειν, "to send off". The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation; other common translations include "ambassador" and "envoy".

From that angle, the privacy of this world changing event makes sense.

All of us who through their response to God have become disciples of the Lord Jesus, and who have been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirt, share in their ongoing mission.

Have you wondered ‘But why did some hesitate?’

The answer could lie in the profound change in their relationship with Jesus. Before the Passion, Jesus was teacher, companion, confidant, friend, preacher, miracle worker and they had gradually come to accept that He was indeed Son of God. But it was the kind of acceptance based on faith. When He showed Himself to them glorified and risen, this was an experience of His power and majesty as Son of God – a whole new ballgame, as we might say.

It is one thing to accept a truth, and quite another to be confronted with the reality of that truth.

In this meeting between Jesus and His Apostles on the hidden mountain, it is quite likely that Jesus displayed a level of authority, kingship, majesty, power and victory that was well beyond anything they had previously experienced when He had shown Himself risen to them.

Most of them had the usual response to a manifest presence of God: flat, face down on the ground in worship.

But the rest were in ‘stunned mullet’ mode, or frozen because they no longer knew how they should relate to Jesus, or how He wanted them to relate to Him.

He is Lord of the universe, and yet He invites a relationship that is closer than a spouse. 
One of those both/and things that are so paradoxical.

And what does Jesus do? He makes the first move, He comes up to them, He doesn’t berate them, and He speaks to them. He meets them where they are at.

Then He speaks those words that have resounded through the centuries:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.”

Here is the purpose of their sending forth as Apostles, to bring everyone into the profoundly personal ongoing relationship that God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, wishes to have with everyone, and through that relationship profound unity and love with each other.
​
In His goodness, may the Lord Jesus enable us to come to deeper understanding of His total authority over everything, grounded not only in faith, but in the experience of His divine presence, so that we may come to that unlimited trust in Him which dispels all fear and sets us confidently on this mission to go, disciple, baptize and teach. Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, Year B, comes from the two segments of St John’s Gospel, Chapter 16, containing promises about the coming of the Holy Spirit.

These promises go some way to helping us understand why Jesus ascended to the Father, and sent the Holy Spirit.

If Jesus was still present on earth in His glorified body, we would all be pre-occupied with everything He said and did, and would never get around to doing what God wants us to do. Think of the biggest celebrity you know, and multiply that pulling power by at least 100. Yet on earth, Jesus continually refused anything to do with celebrity in favour of building long-term personal committed relationships. Superstar celebrity is not the modus-operandi of Jesus.

What He did is very different, and far more effective. He sent each and every one of us who have committed our lives to Him the gift of a Master Tutor, a.k.a. the Holy Spirit.

At the time these promises were given at the Last Supper, the disciples had not been through the crucible of the death and resurrection of Jesus. So there were plenty of things at that level that they had no hope of understanding until after they had experienced His risen presence.

But the ‘I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you to bear now’ went even deeper than that.

A young child is incapable of understanding anything at an adult level. A lot of growth, maturity and learning about the world we live in is necessary before anyone attains an adult understanding of anything.

Similarly if you started to explain the finer points of performing a Beethoven symphony to someone who has only just learned to play ‘chopsticks’, it is going to be completely lost on them. To get them from playing ‘chopsticks’ to giving a credible performance of a Beethoven symphony is going to require many lessons that build on each other, and lots of homework, practice, tests, and time.

The same is true for the difference between someone learning the first 10 nouns and the first verb declension of a new language, and someone reading and writing literature in that language; or the difference between someone who has just begun to learn how to do a plie and a tendu and someone who dances as prima ballerina in Swan Lake.

Everyone begins at the beginning.

When we hear ‘Advocate’ or ‘Paraclete’ to describe the Holy Spirit, it may be useful to translate that into Master Tutor.

Because that is exactly what the Holy Spirit is, and what He graciously does. He takes us step by step, lesson by lesson, from baby steps in our relationship with God and our ability to administer His love to others, on a perfectly designed individual learning plan, to heights of relationship with God and ability to administer His love to others that we can’t even start to imagine. And there’s always more that He wants to teach us, and far more that He is capable of teaching us.

But He is a perfect gentleman, and He adjusts everything to our pace, and to the degree of co-operation and trust we give Him, and to our diligence (or lack thereof) in doing the necessary practice and homework to get to the next level/lesson.

Is it not absolutely amazing that God gives us this Master of Master Tutors in the Holy Spirit?

That promise, ‘He will lead you to the complete truth’ is both personal and corporate. If you look carefully at Christian history, you will notice that each era was learning something extraordinary which built on the lived response and understanding of previous eras and generations in the Church. eg. The monastic orders grew out of the desert fathers, the mendicant orders grew out of the monastic orders; devotion to the Divine Mercy was not possible before devotion to the Sacred Heart had permeated the Church.

There are things the Holy Spirit is leading the Church into in our times, that could not have been done in any earlier era. Over the past 120 years some of that has been a rediscovery of the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit, which is an ongoing process. We can also see a greater openness to ecumenism led by the same Holy Spirit over the last 50-60 years.

There is always more He wants to lead us into, point the way to, and teach us about.

Are we willing to diligently co-operate with Him?

Let’s pray….

Dear Holy Spirit, I am so sorry for how much I have been underestimating Your work in my life and in the life of the Church, and the superabundantly enormous gift You are from Jesus and the Father. I am so sorry for grieving you, and for being an unwilling, unappreciative, lazy and un-co-operative student. Please forgive me. I want this to change from today onwards, and forever. I want to learn and co-operate with anything and everything You want to teach me. In particular I ask your special help to attain competency in those areas where I have been resisting You the most. I don’t want to do that any more. Please forgive and help me. Amen.    

​The Gospel for this Sunday, the Ascension of the Lord, Year B, comes from the concluding verses of St Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 16, a direct continuation of verses from last week, and contains the instructions Jesus gives to His disciples before His ascension, and what happens afterwards.

Although they aren’t so much instructions, as regal commands. This is Jesus functioning as King of the universe and conqueror of death.

Our task is to proclaim the good news of Jesus everywhere.

How people respond to that proclamation will determine whether they enter His eternal kingdom or not.

Jesus tells us the signs that will distinguish believers from un-believers. These signs are certainly not associated with the timid; but are associated with those who dramatically extend the kingdom of God.

Only those who have complete confidence in the kingly reign of Jesus can cast out devils in His name, and can expect the sick to get well when they invoke the healing power of God.

This is warrior stuff, and not for the faint of heart, nor for wimps.

It is quite a challenge, isn’t it? Most of us fall a long way shot.
But this is what was considered normal in Gospel times.

Jesus then ascends to His place of kingly power and authority, seated at the right hand of the Father on the throne of heaven.

When the disciples do their part and preach, the Lord Jesus provides the evidence that their preaching is true through the signs and wonders that accompany the preaching; working together to extend the kingdom of God.

There are those for whom this is still happening today, eg Sr Briege McKenna, Damian Stayne, Costandi Bastoli, and those of recent memory, eg Dr John Bonnici Mallia, Fr Emelien Tardiff, and many others.

There are still places on earth where signs and wonders are expected when believers preach, and where if there are no signs and wonders, credibility is lost quickly eg Fiji, Uganda.

This is what the Gospel and the Lord Jesus consider normal.
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May God grant that we, too, will return to considering this as normal. Amen.   

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 6th Sunday of Easter, Year B, comes from the of St John Chapter 15, a direct continuation of verses from last week, where Jesus continues to reveals Himself as the True Vine and what the implications are for us.

When you look at a classic grape vine, it is very hard to tell where the trunk ends and the main branches begin.

The more our lives are in alignment with Jesus, the more fruitful they will be.

God the Father poured all of His love into Jesus, and Jesus poured all of that love into us. In imitating this ‘agape’ love we will be fruitful. That is allowing the love of Jesus to be poured into us; and pouring that love out on to each other.

This is the simplest explanation of His Will for us.
Simple yes;
easy no.

Sometimes we wonder if we could possibly be in the right place at the right time for God’s kind purposes when it seems so arid and dry. But these are the words He says to us:

“You did not choose Me. No, I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last.”

It is no accident. The Divine vine-dresser selected us to be precisely here, and has pruned our lives in such ways that we will be the most fruitful here. He has commissioned us, appointed us, deliberately set us in this place, so that we can be fruitful. And not an ordinary level of fruitfulness either; He wants quality long lasting fruit – the kind that go to make up Penfolds Grange and will still be extraordinary 100 years from now, not the kind that is only suitable for cask wine.

If we let His love fully in (1st challenge)
and pour that love fully out onto others (2nd challenge)
then this highest kind of quality fruitfulness is assured.

It is precisely in this seemingly barren place that any flourishing will be seen as something only God could do.
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May God grant that the obstacles in our lives to receiving His love may be melted away, and that the obstacles in our lives that prevent us from loving more fully, may they be melted away too. May His infinite merciful love melt all those obstacles away and cause us to be more fruitful in Him than we have ever been before. Amen.