I hope it will not seem too strange that I begin the homily for Holy Thursday, which is to be about the institution of the Eucharist, by taking you back to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry as narrated by John, to the marriage feast at Cana.

Of course there are connections that...

In what we’ve just heard (Jn 20:1-9), first a woman and then two men make a discovery. They discover, early on a Sunday morning, that a tomb that should have had a stone at its mouth and a body inside was now open and empty. This was a tomb, cut out of limestone, in an abandoned quarry just outside...

‘Dear friends in Christ,’ we heard at the beginning, ‘on this most holy night..our Lord Jesus Christ passed from death to life.’
 He ‘passed’. This is our Christian Passover. Tonight our Lord Jesus passes from death to life, and throughout the world thousands of men, women and children, are being buried with him by baptism into death, and are rising...

‘See, my servant will prosper, he shall be lifted up, exalted, rise to great heights’ (Is 52:13) - the first words of today’s 1st reading. Today, ‘the royal banners forward go; the cross shines forth in mystic glow’. Today, the Cross is lifted up, a crucifix in fact, and therefore the Crucifixus himself, the crucified Christ. As he...

It’s hard for us to bring together everything happening tonight. There is so much.
As a great back-drop, like a tapestry on a wall of the Upper Room, there is the Exodus. It was God’s great act of freeing Israel from Egypt, already 1300 years old by the time of Christ.
There is the commemoration of the...

There is a story of Bl. John Henry Newman preaching on the Passion. He had cited several of the painful things done to Jesus. He paused. Everyone held their breath. Then he said in a low clear voice, ‘Now I bid you recollect that...

The raising of Lazarus is the last and greatest of the seven signs of Jesus reported by St. John. Coming immediately before the account of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, it clearly in some ways foreshadows that. So we read it today to help us prepare for Holy Week and Easter. In the sign of the raising of...

“You are the salt of the earth”. The image of salt is evocative in many ways. In its first and most obvious sense, salt is added to food to give it taste and savour. A very little goes a long way. In that respect we readily recall the parable of the leaven (13:33). There also we have something that seems insignificant in quantity...