‘My life is in my hands continually, but I do not forget your law.’ This verse from Psalm 118 expresses a sentiment that on the face of it is odd, from a religious perspective. Surely a religious sentiment would be: my life is in your hands continually. In fact, at least one modern translation of the Bible assumes there is a mistake...

From the beginning, the proclamation of the resurrection of the Lord is inseparable from the memory of his appearances. In Luke we see this process right at its beginning. When the disciples on the road to Emmaus, after seeing the risen Lord, go back to the eleven apostles, they are told: ‘It is true, the Lord has risen, and he has appeared to Simon!’ (Luke 24:34)

St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, gives...

The beginning of the new life, the life of the Risen Lord, is very like the beginning of his earthly life. Before developing this theme, let us pause there a little. The Son of God entered the world in poverty and obscurity. In St Matthew’s Gospel, he is a baby in a refugee family, and spends his earliest years in exile. His life is short, he has no children, he dies a condemned criminal, and his mission ends in failure. That is his...

‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ These words of Jesus have seared themselves on the memory of the Church. Matthew and Mark record them in the precise Aramaic words that Jesus used. They are the opening words of Psalm 22. Taking their cue from these words of Jesus, all the evangelists to a greater or lesser degree interpret the Passion of Jesus in the light of this psalm, including...

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...