In these parables the Lord is teaching us about how to approach a situation of non-success. This isn’t the same as failure: the Church has not failed, but she has not yet succeeded in every way, especially in the face of evil opposition. Isn't God's Kingdom meant to be unstoppable, unopposable? Shouldn't it be revealed suddenly and gloriously? How does evil persist in the face of divine rule? These parables teach us the same lesson that Holy Saturday does. Christ was sow

The parable of the sower accounts for people falling away from Christ. The wisdom here is attributing, rightly, the cause of that fall away to external factors. None of the causes of falling away is Christ himself; neither is the cause of falling away the person themselves. Other things have been introduced and have worked on them. So, Christ is still credible. He is worthy of our faith. Christ hasn’t set us up for a fall. His Gospel isn’t defective. He didn’t cause tho

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