The poor widow’s offering of two small coins in the Temple is to Jesus the greatest gift of all, because it is offered out of her poverty – it is money she really needed for herself – and with a pure spirit of love and generosity [ … ]

The Sadducees are explicitly held up for criticism in the Gospels less often than the Pharisees, even though they provided the elite which ran the Temple. This is partly because, with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, the Sadducees were wiped out as a force in Jewish religious life and politics. The Judaism which survived, to regroup and forge a new identity, was that of the Pharisees. Consequently, when there were rivalries between Jews and Christians, it was the Pharisees with whom Christians would find themselves in conflict, and this would colour the memory of earlier times [ … ]

Jesus is so very sorry for a city and a people he loves that he must weep at the sight of Jerusalem. Here is the centre of Jewish faith, while the Jews are the people to whom he has directed most of his teaching, and they are the first chosen people of God [ … ]

Jesus is very close to Jerusalem now and a great multitude are processing with him. There is a tremendous sense of triumph in the air, even as Jesus approaches the cross, which indeed will be the sign of his victory [ … ]

Jesus has not confined his journey to Jerusalem to exclusively Jewish territories. He has wandered in Samaria, and indeed Galilee was what we might now call a multicultural environment, known as Galilee of the Gentiles. This would be greatly reassuring to those of Luke’s readership who were of Gentile rather than Jewish provenance. Christ’s physical journey to Jerusalem marks a journey from inward-looking and narrow sectarianism to a redemptive faith which is inclusive of all [ … ]

Jesus asks people to think of the usual relations between masters and servants, in which the master shows no gratitude to the servant for his having fulfilled his duties, offering to serve his needs in turn, but rather requires more, that further duties be performed [ … ]

At the time of Luke’s writing his Gospel, those Christian communities which had largely arisen among the poor were being joined by richer people. This caused some problems, which appear in the advice given in the Letter of James, in the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, and in Luke’s Gospel. Saint Paul describes how, when the Christian community comes together to share the Lord’s supper, the rich have brought their own food and have no intention of sharing it. This was at a time when the Eucharist proper was still celebrated as part of a larger meal, an arrangement which did not last many years. St Paul writes [ … ]

Jesus’ words to us in these verses may seem very strange indeed, even brutal. Are we really to hate our father, our mother, our family? We may recall the time when Jesus rejects his mother and family when they are calling him [ … ]

A ruler of the Pharisees has invited Jesus to his house to share a meal, and here Jesus teaches those present concerning the way of blessedness. Jesus teaches us how to live so as to be as much like Jesus as we can be, and so to be included in the Kingdom of God. This, our heavenly reward, should be the only reward we look for [ … ]

One of the leading Pharisees has invited Jesus to his house to share a meal. There are several occasions in the Gospels when Jesus is invited by Pharisees to share a meal. Perhaps they are curious, as now we are told, ‘they watched him,’ perhaps through malice. We are not told how a man with dropsy could enter the house of a leader of the Pharisees. Here he is, though, waiting to be cured. Once more, the question of healing on the Sabbath is raised, and with it the issue of the Pharisees’ hypocrisy and the absolutely critical fact of the divinity of Jesus, granting him authority to reinterpret the Sabbath and so drawing him ever closer to the cross [ .. ]

It was customary to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath, to read and study Scripture and praise God, and our Lord Jesus is observant, assuming a teaching role in the synagogue. It is in this context that the crippled woman becomes a type of Christ’s teaching. She has been an abject figure, bowed down for eighteen years. She does not come to the synagogue asking to be healed; she seems quite passive [ … ]

Christ the King of Peace – and yet in these verses Jesus tells us, confusingly, that he has come to bring not peace on earth but conflict. These are challenging verses. They demand we ask, what can this mean? The symbolism of fire encompasses a range of meanings. Fire is used in the Bible to signify God’s love for humanity. It is also a response of man to God: ‘My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue.’ (Psalm 39: 3) It is also the fire of Pentecost, when the tongues of fire descended to the apostles and they received their commission to preach the Gospel and establish the Church of Jesus Christ. Christ’s death on the cross must precede this commissioning [ … ]

We can almost feel the crush of people pressing in upon Jesus, treading on each other’s toes and clamouring for a glimpse of him. This great tide of popularity is extraordinary. We are made aware of just how much so many people need something other than what they have – of how many unanswered questions they must have and of the spiritual longing they must experience. They are sheep in want of a shepherd. There is a great vacuum which Jesus comes to fill [ … ]

Today’s Gospel verses again speak of the conflict between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees, and again we sense the verses reflecting the breaking away of Christianity from Judaism, and the tensions in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem. Jesus’ rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees, the lawyers, is stinging. Jesus associates them with the history of murder of the righteous through Scripture, from the first murder of Abel to the murder of Zechariah, a prophet who died by stoning in Jerusalem around the year 800 BC because he accused the Jewish people of being unfaithful to God’s law (cf. 2 Chronicles 24: 20-22) [ … ]

The Gospel verses reflect a time when Christianity has split from Judaism, and also a time after the destruction of Jerusalem. In depictions of Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees, we discover an astonishing claim to transcendence on the part of the burgeoning Christian communities. There is too ambivalence: the Law remains intact in every detail, and yet it is overhauled. The truth of Christ so far surpasses the Pharisaic understanding of the Law, that it may be considered a New Law even as at the same time it is a fulfilment of the Old. We discover through these Gospel verses an astonishing claim on the part of the Christian writers, which is that they are the true recipients of God’s revelation to Moses, and that it is the Pharisees who have got it wrong [ … ]

The letter kills, the spirit gives life. So writes Paul in his Second Letter To The Corinthians. Much of the opposition to Jesus, as depicted in the Gospels, is from a legalistic standpoint, in which the scribes and Pharisees challenge Jesus concerning the ways in with he and his disciples do not seem to adhere to the letter of the Old Law [ … ]

The woman raises her voice to praise Mary, for Jesus’ sake. Through Jesus, the woman is moved to acclaim the holiness of Mary. It can be true to say also that very many Christians are moved to contemplate Mary through knowledge of Jesus. For many Christians, Mary is our spiritual mother. Through Jesus, we discover our relationship with Mary, and so reciprocally through Mary we discover and seek to imitate the Son [ … ]

Jesus teaches us to know the effectiveness of prayer through what might seem an unusual comparison, or parable. The suggestion is that a person asking his friend for bread will be given that bread not because of friendship, but because of his insistence and persistency in knocking and asking for the bread. This might seem to us an unusual way of considering God’s response to our prayers [ … ]