The apostles have returned exhausted and energized to Jesus. They have succeeded in their mission and they are full of the glory of what they have accomplished. They long to tell Jesus all that they have done in Jesus’ name. This is a triumph for the disciples. They long to share [ … ]

Herod the tetrarch, Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, was a client ‘king’ of the Romans. He is highly alert to the in/stability of his region and to his own position within the Roman authority. We may imagine that the fear of a popular leader amassing a following and potentially threatening authority contributed to the arrest of John the Baptist, this in addition to the reason we are given in the Gospel, which is that John had told Herod how immoral he was being in marrying his brother’s wife Herodias [ … ]

It is all too common in our time to see a beautiful gift or initiative rejected by those who are set against anything new and good. Imagine a child standing up in the midst of a small community filled with hatred, whatever form that hatred might take, and that child saying that there is an alternative to hatred, called love. That child could possibly be killed for so doing [ … ]

Reading Mark’s Gospel, we have a wonderful sense of just how active and mobile Jesus’ ministry around Galilee was. The words ‘immediately’ and ‘straightway’ recur again and again. There is joy and purpose in these words. There is the sense of astonishment people experienced listening to Jesus. And there is the touch of danger, the revolutionary energy of Jesus, and the plots of his enemies [ … ]

Jesus family and friends have worried in earlier verses about Jesus’ sanity. His friends have tried to seize him, to save him from himself. Now his mother and his brothers come to find him. It seems natural to assume they are still very concerned, and that there has been what they perceive to be a breach in the family, which may be linked in some way to Jesus’ move to Capernaum [ … ]

Jesus chooses his core group of disciples, the Apostles, who will live and travel with him and to whom Jesus will impart his deepest and most extensive teachings. While Jesus speaks mysteriously, in parables, to the majority of his listeners, the Apostles will be privy to the hidden meanings of his words, the parables explained, albeit they will often fail to understand or be able to accept what Jesus tells them [ … ]

By now, and at such an early stage in Jesus’ ministry, the Jewish religious establishment is coming to fear and to hate Jesus. The Pharisees watch him, like malign, predatory spirits, looking to see fault and ready to pounce on any incriminating evidence. They have already closed their hearts against Jesus. To the Pharisees, Jesus represents a threat – to their own prestige – and an affront to their religious dogmas [ … ]

In today’s Gospel verses, Jesus teaches that the Pharisees have got it all wrong in relation to the Sabbath. While God gave the Sabbath to man as an opportunity to rest and to devote himself to divine worship, the Pharisees have choked the meaning of the Sabbath in a mass of legalese, turning it from being a time of joy into a time of anxiety and empty observance [ … ]

In today’s Gospel verses, as yesterday and tomorrow, Jesus finds himself in conflict with some of the Jewish religious leaders. Today, the issue is fasting. It seems Jesus and his disciples are not following received custom [ … ]

The words of Jesus to the paralytic man on his bed might have seemed strange and even, at first, insensitive: the paralytic has been brought to Jesus seeking to be healed, and Jesus says to him: ‘Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.’ This could hardly be what the paralysed man might have been expecting [ … ]

As Jesus died on the cross he would have looked like a leper. He had been scourged. Front and back, his skin would have been a bloody mess of welts, cuts and bruises. Being himself without sin, he died in the image of some of those most abject whom he came to save. Truly the self-sacrifice of our Lord was complete and extreme [ … ]

Through these verses, we see Jesus healing Simon’s mother in her home, immediately restoring her to wellbeing, so that she is able to serve life. Here Jesus heals in an intimate, domestic environment, within the home. The verses ask us to think of our families and our nearest and dearest ones [ … ]

Right at the start of Jesus’ ministry, Mark tells us of the fundamental difference between Jesus and other religious teachers. As we listen to these verses, we are struck by the presence of a Christ who is not, as so many in our modern age like to think, only a fine moral teacher, or a wise man with some fascinating spiritual insights to offer us. When Jesus talks about the Scriptures, when he teaches the people about God, he speaks not as the scribes but with authority, and he has that authority because he knows the Father intimately and he is the Son. As the Son, he doesn’t just explain Scripture; it is his right, he has this authority, to change, to add to, to subtract from, to reinterpret what was already received as the word of God [ … ]

The time is come. Jesus has been baptised by John. He has spent time alone in the wilderness, symbolic of the Exodus wanderings, and is come to Galilee to begin his ministry. His first act is to call the first of the apostles to their new vocation. In Mark’s Gospel, as in Matthew’s, this follows upon the arrest of John the Baptist. This clearly differs from the account of John’s Gospel, while the Gospel of Luke could be seen as presenting a more detailed and less stylised account of the meeting of Christ with the fishermen [ … ]