Jim Cogley’s Reflections: 8 Dec – 15 Dec 2025

Coming Events:

Edmund Rice Centre, Callan – Approaching Christmas – What is Christianity?

This seminar will be an exciting journey of uncovering the riches of the Christian Faith that has become obscured beneath layers of historical accretions.

Why not take a soulful day away from the busyness of Xmas to discover CHRISTMAS.

Sat 13^th Dec 10am-4pm.   Booking to Jim Maher on 086-1276649.

Also Three evenings entitled The Advent Journey – To the Heart of Christianity will be held in the Community Centre Lady’s Island next this Thursday at 7.30pm. These presentations will be biblically based and admission is free.

For receiving Wood You Believe books go to jimcogley.com If ordering for Christmas presents please place orders this coming week at latest.

For daily services usually 10am.  Sunday 11am. Webcam: ourladysisland.ie

Tues 9^th Dec – Self-Righteousness or Christ Righteousness?

In this week’s reflections a number of Gospel passages will be explored that reveal a truth that is central to Christianity. This is one that the vast majority of believers have never grasped or more likely never even been taught. Yet it is foundational and what is necessary to open the door of grace and allow the experience of God’s love to become a reality. Many live with the erroneous belief that if they lead good lives that God will love them and this will eventually get them into heaven. The Good News is in fact the opposite, that it is because of God loving us that we can be good and be saved. A key teaching in the Gospels is that the idea of merit in the sight of God is directly opposed to the idea of grace that this is utterly a free gift. We tend to so hear the Gospel stories with the jaded ears of familiarity and cliched interpretations so that what they are really saying no longer surprises or challenges us.

Wed 10^th Dec -Vineyard Workers

This passage is surely one of the best examples of the idea of merit being turned on its head. A man goes out in the early morning to hire workers for his vineyard. They agree the wages to be a denarius a day. Later in the morning and again at noon he hires more workers offering them also a denarius for the day’s work. Again, towards evening he hires yet more workers and surely to their utter surprise he offers them a denarius for their time even though it is quite short. The essential truth in the parable is in the twist where he calls in the last enlisted workers and gives them what he has agreed. This move aggrieves the earlier workers who feel entitled to much more having worked through the heat of the day. This prompts the master to say to them, ‘Why be envious because I am generous?’ It is obvious that the mentality of earning a reward falls far short of trusting in the master’s generosity and receiving the free gift of grace.

Thurs 11^th Dec – The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

This parable is a wonderful example where in very graphic terms merit is contrasted with grace and mercy. Two men go into the Temple to pray. Only one is entitled to be there, that being the pharisee. The tax collector, because of his profession, was officially excluded but he still found his way in. The pharisee goes to the front and basically tells God how good he is, fasting praying, almsgiving. Then he makes the fatal mistake of contrasting his life and virtues with those of the tax collector who, sitting at the back, is simply praying, ‘God I am not good enough, I have nothing to offer, I know that I have messed up, please be merciful to me a sinner’. The first we are told prayed not to God but ‘to himself,’ while the other went home feeling justified. He knew his prayer was heard and it was now just as if he had never sinned.

Fri 12^th Dec – The Wedding Feast

One of Christ’s most common ways of describing what the Kingdom is like was to compare it to a wedding feast. In one such parable the King sends out invitations to all his faithful subjects. With room still left he sends out invites to the highways and byways. As so often happens in his parables there is a twist at the end that is like a story within a story. In this case the master comes into the banquet and finds someone without a wedding garment and with uncharacteristic cruelty he has him unceremoniously thrown out. The man was probably poor and unable to afford proper clothing. Why did the host act that way? In the Jewish wedding feasts garments were provided for all the guests. It helped do away with social or religious status and all guests were to be regarded as equals. This man, by not wearing the garment, was publicly insulting his host by not putting on what was provided. The symbolism here is quite significant. Our own worthiness to be in the banquet is not in question. It is a given that we are unworthy on our own merits; our good works will never make us good enough. The garment is therefore a symbol of the free gift of salvation that is offered to us in Christ. It is by virtue of our relationship with him that we can stand worthy in the sight of God and not by virtue of our own efforts.

Sat 13^th Dec – The Good Samaritan

This well-known parable is usually interpretated in a superficial and moralistic manner as a teaching about how we should treat our neighbour. However, it also contains a profound teaching that contrasts merit and grace. The man is on the road from Jerusalem towards Jericho. It’s a road of life and he is going in the wrong direction, away from the light. He meets the robbers who rob and strip him of everything, leaving him half-dead on the roadside. His lifestyle has been his downfall and now he has lost his dignity and self-respect. He is beaten by conscience and his self-worth is gone. Looking for help he sees a Priest and a Levite enroute to Jerusalem come his way. He thinks surely what they represent, religion and better moral conduct must save him; these have always been pointers towards God. Yet they pass him by. Then, along comes a Samaritan, a despised one who should not be speaking to any self-respecting Jew. He is the one who comes to his aid. He brings him to an inn and pays the price for his recovery. Here we can see Christ as the Samaritan with the core message of the Gospel being that Salvation is found in him alone.

Sun 14^th Dec – 3rd Advent A

Several years ago I visited a castle in Carlisle in Scotland. Open to the public, there’s a little cell where long ago a border chieftain was imprisoned. There he was cruelly left to rot for years on end. In the cell there is one little window placed too high for a man to look out of when standing on the floor. On the ledge there are two depressions worn away in the stone. They are the marks of the prisoner’s hands, the places where day after day he lifted himself up by his hands to look out on the green dales across which he would never ride again. He died eventually and I shuddered at his level of suffering and the mental anguish he must have endured.

John The Baptist was also a man of the wild open spaces. Cooped up in a small prison cell his mind may well have been playing tricks on him. He had invested his life in the message that his ministry was to prepare the way of the Messiah. Not he begins to doubt, ‘Is Jesus the one who is to come or do we have to wait for someone else?’ Jesus pointed to the obvious signs that someone very different was here, the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear and the dead are raised to life. And he gave him the highest possible praise by saying that of all men born no greater than John has been seen.

John needed reassurance and we all do from time to time. Even St Thérèse of Lisieux went through fifteen months of being tortured with doubts about her faith. All she could say was that she knew that behind the dark clouds the sun was still shining.

It’s not just in times of personal darkness when we need reassurance about our faith. At the many times in history when the dark clouds of war and persecution have loomed how difficult it must have been for our ancestors to hold onto the belief that there even was a sun. Those gone before us, to whom we owe our very existence, have lived through wars, persecutions and unbelievable hardships, had every reason to doubt in a loving and all powerful God. In contrast to so many of us today who seem to look for excuses rather than have genuine reasons to lose faith and often over trivial matters; something someone said or did, what a priest said or didn’t say, some issue about church teaching that they  have difficulty with. How paltry will such trivial excuses appear when standing exposed before those who have been through the great persecutions of life with their faith stronger than ever? The essence of faith finds beautiful expression in a few lines scrawled by an unknown prisoner on a cell wall in Auschwitz Concentration Camp:

I believe in the sun, even when it isn’t shining.

I believe in love even when I’m on my own.

I believe in God, even when he is silent.

For whoever wrote that under such conditions faith was like a bird that was singing long before the dawn was ready to break.

The phrase from the Gospel of today that I have often reflected on is the question posed by John the Baptist. ‘Are you the one who is to come or must I look for someone else?’ Whenever I meet someone in need that is precisely the question they are asking and what is my response? In a country that is generous with its welfare payments there is a convenient perception that all are catered for and so we can wipe our hands of all responsibility. The reality is that there are loads who fall through the cracks. On many occasions, I have asked for help with such people and invariably I get the response that I just don’t need: A list of phone numbers for SVP and different social services. At the coalface of human suffering they mean nothing and they do not answer the question; are you the one to help me or will you refer me to someone else?

We all need reassurance. It’s so easy to forget to offer words of appreciation to those closest to us. Encouragement is like water to a plant it makes people grow. Praise makes the talents of others fertile. The power within us for either good or evil can never be underestimated. To withhold help or neglect to praise the goodness of others can diminish them. People can shrivel up and lose heart when their needs or their efforts go unrecognized.

Mon 15^th Dec – The Transfiguration

In the Transfiguration passage Christ takes with him his three closest companions, Peter, James and John and they ascend a high mountain. Once there he becomes transfigured in their sight. His clothes become dazingly white and divinity shines in all its glory through his humanity. His three companions are naturally overcome with emotion and hardly know what to say. What Peter does say is, ‘Lord it is good for us to be here. Let’s build three tents, one for you, another for Moses and one for Elijah’. Then they hear a heavenly voice from a cloud saying, ‘This is my beloved son, listen to him.’ The voice was forbidding them to build their tents in honour of the ancient prophets who in their own time had climbed significant mountains and would have been revered as pointers to the way up the mountain of God. They had just ascended the mountain with Christ alone, and without help from the traditional sources that would have relied on merit rooted in obedience to the Commandments and adherence to the Law. Here they were being shown, in no uncertain terms, that Grace and not Merit is the path to holiness and the only way to ascend the mountain of the Lord.