Healing and Praying :: Two quite different activities are reported in today’s gospel. The first is healing… ..The second is going out by himself to a lonely place to pray…

We can take joy from this basic fact: Jesus counts us as his own brothers and sisters. His life’s work was to gather us together as God’s family, and his intention is clear, “I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters.”

Lifegiving meeting :: Any encounter between two or more people has potential to be a lifegiving moment. The meeting that Peter, Andrew, James and John had with Jesus ..

What Jesus wanted :: Nowhere else–except in his conversation during the Last Supper–does Jesus express his purpose in life so clearly as in his Scripture-based talk to his fellow villagers in the Nazareth synagogue.

From Prayer to Calm :: The gospels often portray Jesus at prayer… But even though Jesus went off alone, his prayer did not remove him from people..

Doing what we can :: Jesus struggles to get his disciples to become giving people. They asked him to send the crowd away because there was not enough food and the people were hungry.

Bringer of Light:: There was something so attractive about Jesus and his message that, according to Matthew, people gathered to him from. . .

Two banquets
This gospel scene is one that has inspired artists and playwrights throughout the centuries. The sumptuous banquet in Herod’s palace for his birthday turns out to be a banquet of death. Mark follows this scene with the feeding by Jesus of the multitude in the wilderness. It is as if the evangelist wants to set Herod banquet of death over against Jesus’ banquet of life…

A man in whom there is no deceit :: It’s hard not to like the person of Nathanael as portrayed by the evangelist in today’s gospel. He clearly wasn’t the kind of man who got carried away by…

Making him known :: The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and made the Father known to us. The last line of our Gospel today says, No one has ever seen God, it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Generous and charismatic :: What is striking about the portrait of John the Baptist is his generosity of spirit. This was a very charismatic person who drew people to himself. As a result, he had his own disciples. Yet, in today’s gospel we find John directing two of his disciples away from himself and towards…

The question put to John the Baptist, “Who are you?” is one of the great questions of life. Going below our job description (what we do) to who we are in inmost our core is much more difficult. ..

Marvelling and Treasuring: Today we see Mary marvelling at what has happened, treasuring the events of Christmas in her memory, and pondering them..

Positive Thinking: Tomorrow we begin the new year 2015. Even though we are in mid winter, we know that each day is now that little bit longer than the previous one….

The widow Anna in today’s gospel is one of those lovely characters that feature in Luke’s stories about Jesus’ childhood. What distinguishes Anna from the others is her age, eighty four years old, and . .