In our gospel this morning, Jesus tells a parable about 10 bridesmaids waiting to light the way to the wedding ceremony for the coming bridegroom. As with all of Jesus’s parables, each element of the story would have been familiar to his hearers from their everyday lives: in this case the preparation for a marriage ceremony. But each element of the story also points to aspects of our lives with God. We call this use of familiar symbols to point to a deeper spiritual meaning,

“They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” John recounts to us. This is the heart of the passage. The Lamb is Jesus Christ, who shed His blood for our salvation. His blood does not merely remind us of suffering; it proclaims the victory of divine lo

So once again in today’s Gospel we hear a challenge, this time from an expert in the law, who asks what commandment is the greatest. Jesus responds by summarizing the 10 commandments, with just two: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and body. And the second is like it: you shall love your neighbour as yourself. In these Commandments we have before us every single thing that the law and the prophets were about and driving us to live in accordance

The last few weeks we’ve been hearing about Jesus’s encounter with various Jewish authorities in the temple during Holy Week. Jesus has pressed them about believing John, about doing the Father’s will and about whether they produce the good fruits of God’s kingdom or rather rotten grapes. In this morning’s Gospel reading we get a new group coming to query Jesus, made up of some disciples of the Pharisees, and some Herodians whose allegiance would have been to Rome. This is a

In our Gospel lesson this morning we hear about one of Jesus’s miraculous healings. He enters this village where there are 10 lepers who cry out to him for mercy. Jesus doesn’t actually act right away. He simply tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. And they respond with the very first steps of faith: they follow what he says without having received any sign of his mercy; they’re only healed ‘on the way’ to see the priests. Nine of the lepers keep going when t

In today’s gospel lesson, we carry on with Jesus taking his people, Jewish leaders, to task for their failure to recognize him as God. He starts telling a parable that should be really familiar to them, since it’s drawn from the prophetic witness in the book of Isaiah: “My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to

It’s one thing to be able to cite Scriptural passages to assert one thing or another. It’s quite another to exercise sufficient humility to truly understand how those passages are calling you to change how you think and act with others. In our Gospel lesson this morning the Chief priests and elders try to expose Jesus as a fraud by asking him by what authority he teaches. Instead of saying, “I’m God, or the Son of God,” he decides to use their question as an example to his fo

This morning we hear Jesus giving us a parable about vineyard workers. Each worker, Jesus says, receives exactly the same pay even though they all start their work at different times throughout the day. How entirely unfair! I can hear every one of us shout. How can those who started at the beginning of the day, receive the same as those who started at the end of the day? This is unjust and unfair. Now if in fact we were talking about our economic system where money is what we

I want you to close down all the thoughts intruding into your mind right now and enter into the story of Joseph with me for a moment. Imagine this: you’re going about your life with your family, doing your thing. You are your father’s favorite child and then you have this dream where for some odd reason, all your family bows down to you. Maybe you’re a little naive about how that sounds because you’re young or you’re extremely earnest and honest because like me, you’re a bit

Last week we heard Jesus harshly rebuke Peter: “get behind me Satan, you’re still seeing things in accordance with the ways of this world, rather than in accordance with God’s ways.” Clearly Jesus knows of what he speaks. We know he will in fact go on to suffer and die at the hands of the elders and chief priests; that his faithfulness to God that results in his death, overcomes human sin and so reconciles us to life with God. We know this part of the story. We often talk ab