Twenty Ninth Sunday of the Year

Jesus’ parables are deeply engaging and frustrating, as well as subversive little stories of an alternate universe made up of ordinary things like coins, yeast, wheat, sons, fathers, and widows. These very ordinary things reveal God in surprising, even shocking, or scandalous, ways.

Twenty Eighth Sunday of the Year

In Luke Jesus is forever crossing borders and seen in liminal places. On his way to Jerusalem to meet his fate, Jesus is at the border ‘between Samaria and Galilee’ where there is nothing, and people with nowhere to go gather. It is here that Jesus meets people. Crossing boundaries suggests that Jesus is changing places with outcasts and victims of fear and prejudice, untouchables, prisoners, and abused people. These outsiders, like the 10^th leper, the Samaritan, recognise what insiders miss. Do we examine our borders, neighbourhoods, social hierarchies, racial and class divisions to realise how much we may limit our encounters with God. Fear of differences deprives us from expanding our margins to meet new neighbours.

Twenty-Seventh Sunday of the Year

The first reading and the gospel provide us a glimpse of the reality of the people at the time living in world of chaos - like our own - with violence, destruction, and strife due to social abuses by the wealthy and corrupt leadership. The first reading speaks of violence, destruction, discord, strife, and misery. SReimilar in ways to our reality, it not a world where we love our neighbour or fullness of life as Jesus promised occurs. The yearning for an end to us and we look to God to intervene. Habakkuk lamented that God didn’t heed their cry and intervene.