The story of the Rich Young Man we heard in today’s Gospel is such a divine word. We receive it as ever alive and active; not to be judged by us, but precisely to judge us; to scrutinise our secret thoughts and intentions (Hb 4:12). This is the passage that prompted the youthful Antony, father of all monks, to abandon all things in order to follow Christ, round about the year 269.
Homily for the Feast of St. Bruno, 6 October 2021, at St. Andrews, Fife (Philippians 3:8-14; Luke 9:57-62)
Homily for the 8 o’clock Mass, 12 September 2021, Sunday 24B: Mark 8:27-35
Today’s Gospel invites us all to make two decisions. Each of these decisions threatens to overturn our whole life and our whole normal way of thinking. Each will demand absolutely everything from us, up to our life itself. We could say that the purpose of St. Mark, in writing his Gospel, is to help us face these decisions, and, by God’s grace, make them our own.
Homily for 5 September 2021, Sunday 23B: Mark 7:31-37; Ps 118/119:137,124
Homily for the 8 o’clock Mass, Sunday 19B, 8 August 2021: John 6:41-51
We’ve just heard the second in our sequence of four Sunday Gospels taken from John Chapter 6: the Bread of Life Discourse. There’s something entirely special about the sixth Chapter of St. John’s Gospel. I’ve heard it said that if you took away all the rest of the New Testament, but left this, you’d have enough.
Homily for Sunday 18B, 1 August 2021: John 6:24-35
Amen Amen I say to you (v. 26). That is: Listen very carefully to what I’m going to say. The words I have for you now are very deliberately chosen, and they bear with them divine authority. They are words of truth, and if you listen you will find life in them. They are words spoken by a man - precisely by “the Son of Man” (v. 27) - but they are words also of divine revelation.
Homily for the 8 o’clock Mass, Sunday 14B, 4 July 2021: Mark 6:1-6
St. Mark tells us in today’s Gospel that in Nazareth, Jesus “could work no miracle”. This certainly cannot mean there was any absolute limitation to Jesus’ power. St. Mark records him elsewhere healing lepers, giving sight to the blind, driving out demons, raising the dead. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus rebukes the storm and it ceases; he walks on water; he twice multiplies loaves. He is put to death, and three days later he rises again, as he said he would.
Homily for the Feast of SS. Peter & Paul, 29 June 2021
In Chapter 57 of the Holy Rule, St. Benedict briefly discusses the skilled craftsmen of the monastery. His concern is that they avoid falling into either pride or avarice because of their work. He rounds off this Chapter by quoting a line from St. Peter’s first Letter, Chapter 4: ...that in all things God may be glorified (1 Pt 4:11). This line has often been taken as summing up not just monastic work, but the whole of monastic life, indeed of the Christian life itself. Let us say today also, this could fittingly sum up the lives of SS. Peter and Paul.