When I first moved to ‘The North’ a few things took me by surprise! One was how, in a short visit to a local shop the shopkeeper could, by the time I left, know my life history, and probably my hat size too! Another was how true the statement is that people hereabouts call a spade a spade if not a blinkin’ shovel! We get a sense of this kind of directness in our Gospel passage. We get the sense that Jesus is running out of patience with the carping of the Chief Priests & Elders. As is so often the case though, as we read the Gospel we gradually realise that the questions apply to us! Two Questions then, from the Gospel with which we need to grapple today. A question about auth
Matthew 21: 23-32 Looking now at me, built as I am, in Terry Wogan’s words, like a racing snake, it will surprise you I know, that I was never sporty at school. One abiding memory that still sends shivers down my spine, is ‘picking teams.’ Captains would pick us – or not – one after the other. Inevitably I would be one of the last. Standing there unpicked, the humiliation has surely left me with permanent scars – you tell me! This I think, is the untold story of our well-known parable today. We tend to concentrate on the actions of the Landowner and the first to be hired, with their dispute at the end of the day. Now, many people will find the parable difficult to handle, difficult to acce
As I opened my copy of the Christian journal The Tablet, (Vol 274 No. 9367) I was struck by two sub headlines. The first by Melanie McDonah, “I’m not sure how St Paul would have coped with a Bishop who wears lipstick.” Well, the question and the answer are certainly different now than 10 years ago – but that is a subject for another time!! The second, by Richard Leonard states: “Christians aren’t salespeople for the Gospel – we are called to be free samples of it.” His point is that we are more called to live out the Gospel, to exemplify it, than we are called to teach it like some academic subject. As St Francis really didn’t say, but which is nevertheless true, “Preach the Gospel, and if y