The Lord's feeling for the crowds and the action he takes speak to what health and holiness is. We believe health and holiness are when everything works as it is designed to do. Sickness and sin are inhibitors of the Creator’s design. We should just recognise that sickness and sin are used by God to make himself known to us: a sudden cure or a quick turn reveal the hand of God. But apart from that, there remain those times when we must contend with sickness and sin. Then

Doesn't eating his flesh mean he’ll die? How could we stomach eating it anyway? And in any case, what would eating it achieve? These are the doubts which are behind the Jews’ question: how can this man give us his flesh to eat? And until Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, they are fair questions. Normally, we would expect that no individual can bring the kind of benefits the Lord says comes from eating his flesh. But Jesus’ flesh is no ordinary flesh. We kno

Believing in God is a risky affair. Pick the wrong God, and it's over. Israel alone enjoys the certainty of revelation: the true God made himself known to them. We know that many of our Old Testament heroes and heroines spoke with God. Moses, for example, saw the Burning Bush and was given the tablets of God’s perfect law. This revelation by God gives us far superior knowledge of him than we can arrive at by ourselves. When it comes to believing in God, we take up what

If we said this is “Red Easter”, we’d get a good sense of how the Church regards Pentecost. The ancient liturgy for this feast was patterned on that of Easter itself. The feast of the Holy Spirit had its own solemn vigil of readings, an exsultet, sequence, and baptismal liturgy. Although there was no fire out the front, the Pentecost Vigil had the relighting of the Paschal Candle, after it had been extinguished on Ascension day. In every reasonable way, Pentecost was obser

That’s the last anyone sees of Jesus until the end of time. The New Testament tells us that interactions between Christ and his Church are spiritual from this point: that is to say, real but not face-to-face. For example, the next time the Lord appears will be on the road to Damascus. He says to Paul: “I am Jesus and you are persecuting me.” And though Paul knows Christ from then on, all he sees of him is light. There is no human form to lay our eyes on yet. Certainly,

Living with Jesus those years so changed the disciples, that any thought of his departure gave them the feeling of being orphaned. The Lord acknowledges this when he says: “I shall not leave you orphans. I shall come back to you.” With such strong feelings in the disciples on Holy Thursday night, it can sound to us like the Twelve became dependent on Jesus. The disciples were grown men when Jesus called them. Some of them had families; a number were modestly successful. O

The Lord tells us not to let our hearts be troubled because it's in our power to do so. He only ever commands what is possible; Jesus doesn't ask the impossible of us. So, because life's troubles are inevitable and because Jesus trusts us to deal with them, we're going to find a way forward with him. It's in our power to keep our hearts untroubled; it's in our power to untrouble our hearts. The kind of trouble the Lord sees in the disciples' hearts is of the highest order.

We need a God who doesn’t need us. Our needs are big and simple: from God we need life and we need our mortality to be dealt with. If we have a God who needs us, he will be too weak to satisfy those needs. How could we follow someone who is looking to us for his needs, we who live just until our mortality gets the better of us. No, we need a God who doesn’t need us. The Lord warns us that whatever, whoever is not himself will steal, kill, and destroy us. That doesn’t hav