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.

Twenty-Sixth Sunday of the Year

Luke is relentless and provocative in dealing with wealth and our proper relationship with wealth. Prosperity or abundance theology, that continues today, points to material wealth as a sign of God’s blessing and a negative judgment on poverty as was the case in biblical times. There is also the view that suffering in the present will later be compensated. Each view gives all power to God who decides the material wellbeing of people and thus exonerates us from responsibility for others. Jesus makes clear that God clearly sides with the poor, unimportant, broken and of no economic or social importance.