If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.
We have this saying of Our Lord in slightly different forms twice in the Gospel of St. Matthew, and also once in the Gospel of St. Mark. According to Matthew, our Lord twice says that faith will be able to move a mountain. We can tell a mountain to move from here to there, and it will move
Daniel 3:29-31; Amos 6:1-7; Luke 16:19-31
Omnia quae fecisti nobis Domine, in vero iudicio fecisti – All that you have done to us, O Lord, you have done with righteous judgement…
As usual we entered Mass today with words from the Old Testament. The text for this week’s Introit Chant is taken from the Prophet Daniel, according to its Greek version, somewhat freely adapted.
I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!
In the plan of St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, travelling with determination towards his Passion, Death and Resurrection. The first incident in that journey recounted by St. Luke is an unhappy attempt to enter a Samaritan village. There James and John ask if they should call down fire from heaven to burn these people up (cf. Gn 19:24). But Jesus rebukes them (Lk 9:54).
First as a deacon and now as a priest, I have always found the various secret prayers prescribed by the rubrics very consoling – the obligatory ones, which should be said during the liturgy, as well as some of those no longer strictly required. For example, as you prepare the chalice on the altar at the Offertory, you are meant to say: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity”.
Coming down the hill on either side of the valley from the West, or turning the corner at the end of the valley from the East, you catch an occasional glimpse, between obstructing trees, of Pluscarden Abbey. There it stands, in the middle of nowhere, in this gentle and fertile valley: a mediaeval monastery. Somehow the sight is always both astonishing and stirring.
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