As we near the close of the liturgical year, this week’s Gospel invites us to look beyond the passing world. Though stars and moons may fade, the light of Christ remains steady, He is the source of life transcending time and space. His enduring presence guides us through life’s uncertainties, drawing our gaze upward like a clear night sky. In the words of the eucharistic hymn, Tantum Ergo written by Thomas Aquinas, “Types and shadows have their ending; for the newer rite is here,” reminding us that, in a world of constant change, Christ offers us assurance. His words, His love, and His truth endure beyond all.I remember one Christmas morning eagerly tearing open a beautifully wrapped box to find a telescope. I was about ten years old, and that gift opened up a whole new world for me. Sitting in my mum and dad’s back garden, I spent countless nights gazing up at the stars, trying to comprehend the vastness of the universe. It stirred a sense of awe and wonder, a feeling that life was bigger and more mysterious than I could fully grasp. Little did I know that years later, this fascination with the heavens would connect with my journey of faith, reminding me of God’s boundless creativity and yet His intimate presence in the vastness of His creation.Today’s Gospel, sometimes known as the ‘Little Apocalypse,’ invites us to that same sense of awe, though through images of cosmic upheaval: the darkening of the sun, the moon losing its light, and stars falling from the sky. For Mark’s early Christian community, facing persecution, this Gospel passage offered hope. These signs spoke of God’s enduring presence amid chaos. This passage is not simply about the end times; it’s a call to trust that even in times of upheaval, God’s hand is at work, guiding His people. The promise was clear, Jesus, as the Son of Man, would ultimately reign victorious.In our time, we see the heavens differently, nowadays through images from satellites or the Hubble and James Webb telescopes that reveal the beauty and vast design of the universe. These glimpses into space evoke awe and wonder too, reminding us that the mystery of creation points to the mystery of God’s presence within it. Just as the universe holds mysteries beyond our comprehension, so too do our lives unfold in ways we cannot fully understand. Yet within this mystery lies a promise: the assurance of God’s faithfulness, even when the path is unclear.Theologians help us understand this tension, describing it as the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’, the reality that Christ’s Kingdom has been inaugurated, yet we await its full realization. They emphasize that God’s Word is not merely spoken, it’s embodied in Christ, who entered our world to live, die, and rise again for us. In Jesus, God’s promise is made visible. Jesus, the Word made flesh, is not just a comforting or philosophical idea, but an unchanging reality, someone in whom we can ground our lives, especially in times of uncertaintyTwo thousand years later, we also live in a world marked by unrest and fragility. We see it in reports of conflict, environmental concerns, and the daily struggles of those around us trying to make ends meet. As a chaplain, I witness firsthand the trials faced by people dealing with illness, bereavement, loss, and uncertainty. In these moments, Christ’s promise resonates, reminding us to hold fast to hope and trust in God’s enduring presence and love.St. Augustine, reflecting on passages like today’s Gospel, invites us to look beyond the temporary to the eternal. He saw in the cosmic signs a call to humility, to trust that even when life feels disrupted, God’s love is still at work. Our reading from Hebrews 10:11-14 reminds us that in His incarnation, Christ took on human suffering. The same God who created the stars and galaxies humbled Himself to walk among us, offering hope through His life, death, and resurrection.In our daily lives, we can see this enduring presence reflected. Just as Christ’s love is steadfast, so too are the people who remain true under pressure, or relationships rooted in selfless love, glimpses of constancy that echo the strength and faithfulness we find in Christ. Imagine a nurse working a night shift in a busy hospital, tired, knowing they won’t have much sleep before the next shift. Yet, in the quiet hours, she carefully tends to each patient, sitting with an elderly man who can't sleep, listening to a young mother’s worries. These aren’t grand gestures; they’re small, consistent acts of care, rooted in a selfless love and devotion to her role. In them, we glimpse a constancy that reflects something deeper. St. Teresa of Ávila expressed this beautifully in her prayer:Christ has no body now on earth but yours,No hands but yours, no feet but yours.Yours are the eyes through which He looks with compassion on this world,Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good,Yours are the hands with which He blesses all the world.Christ has no body now on earth but yours.Her prayer reminds us that we are invited to participate in God’s unchanging love, becoming His hands, feet, and eyes in the here and now. Just as Christ’s words promise to outlast heaven and earth, St. Teresa’s prayer calls us to make those eternal words visible through our actions. She points to the tangible ways we can embody the enduring truths of the Gospel. Christ, though ascended, continues His mission of compassion, healing, and blessing through us.Her prayer is an invitation to live out the stability, hope, and love that Christ offers. By embodying His compassion and care, we become a visible reminder to others that God's love is steadfast.With all this talk of the heavens, recently, some of us were lucky enough to glimpse the Northern Lights. Although I missed seeing them myself, they serve as a reminder of the grandeur of God’s creativity and His intimate care. Psalm 8 echoes this, asking, ‘What is mankind that you are mindful of them?’ Amid the demands of work, family, maybe frailty and other responsibilities, moments of awe in creation can draw us back to the truth of God’s love and attention for each of us.As the nights grow longer, I invite you to look up at the heavens and see in them the handiwork of God. The same God who crafted the stars knows and cares for every detail of our lives.Prayer Loving God, as we stand beneath the vastness of Your creation, fill us with awe and trust in Your presence. May we be Your hands, feet, and heart in the world, reflecting Your compassion and grace in all we do. In Jesus’ name, Amen.Fr Clive
We are approaching Advent and the beginning of the new liturgical year, so there is a deliberate theme of endings to the readings now, and Jesus is clearly marking the end of His teaching ministry as well, here in the temple of Jerusalem, the place built for God the Father and the Old Covenant. As he concludes his teaching in the Temple, Jesus sits down opposite the treasury — the thirteen large trumpet-shaped receptacles in the Court of the Women, nine for the receipt of what was due (payment for wood, incense, pigeons and so on), four for voluntary donations. When he is recorded as sitting down it is usually either to teach or to pass judgment (often the same thing). Watching rich people putting in their contributions, he draws the disciples’ attention to the woman whose mourning dress presumably reveals her status: ‘Truly I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury, for they all contributed out of their abundance but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living’ (12:43-44). Thus far, so much we know. We are familiar with the ‘Widows Mite’ as it has come to be known and we have maybe heard people saying that she is some kind of example of generosity.The question is: Was Jesus commending the widow and recommending his followers to imitate her generosity — or was he passing judgment on the Temple, for its power to exploit her innocence?In his judgment the Temple was certainly doomed. The entire structure of religion had fallen prey to thievery and malice and the physical structure is soon to fall as well. As Jesus leaves for the last time, a disciple cries out: ‘Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!’ — to which he angrily replies: ‘Are you looking at these grand buildings? There will not be left one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down’ (13:1-2). Then, seated again, ‘on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple’, this time clearly in the judgment seat, Jesus delivers the lengthy address to the inner circle of the disciples, telling them about the signs of the coming end of the world, which leads, as St Mark tells us the story, into the Passion and the symbolic destruction of the Holy of Holies (chapters 14-16).In donating her ‘whole living’ to the Temple, the widow is often seen as summing up the story so far and foreshadowing what is to come. Her act of total self-impoverishment is taken as both exemplifying the kind of radical abandonment to God that Jesus calls for, and also anticipating, figuratively, his own coming self-sacrifice. The widow’s mite was equal to about one sixty-fourth of a day’s wage for a poorly paid labourer. She gives her little, which is her all. And, since it is all she has, its value in Jesus’s eyes infinitely exceeds what the affluent worshippers put into the treasury.That’s one way of taking the episode. It focuses on the figure of the widow. What about the Temple and its holy men, however? Remembering the context, is the poor widow to be seen as heroically and even absurdly generous — or is she, rather, the ultimate innocent victim of a predatory system? Jesus concludes his teaching in the Temple by proclaiming that the scribes would ‘receive the greater condemnation’ — not only on account of their jockeying for privileges and faking lengthy devotions, but also because they ‘devour widows’ houses’ (12:40). They are condemned precisely for exploiting widows financially? Are we really to assume that Jesus could go on immediately to praise the poor widow for rendering herself destitute in order to help to fund these corrupt men and this doomed institution? By placing himself opposite the treasury as he leaves for the last time doesn’t Jesus focus on the Temple, not as the holy of holies, the sanctuary for the divine presence, partly indeed dependent on the charity of the worshippers, but solely as the great financial enterprise, which it also was, the principal industry in the city, and as prone to corruption as even great religious institutions have always been? Like Ezekiel or Amos isn’t Jesus raging against an institution that was so corrupt that, instead of protecting the most vulnerable, like the widow, it could deceive the likes of the widow into voluntarily supporting the very system that devoured their living?In short: doesn’t the power of the Temple have to be broken? ‘When he gave a loud cry and breathed his last’, in the end, ‘the curtain of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom’ (15:37-38). Forty years would pass before it was actually razed to the ground but judgment had already been passed on the Temple. One lesson for us, alas, is that there are institutions in our own day which repeat this same pattern of deceiving innocent and generous people into willingly supporting them — long after the pretentions of such organizations should have been torn in two.
Today we are blessed to have Joan Marston preaching at the two morning masses. Joan is a lay Canon of Bloemfontein and Blackburn cathedrals and is a very welcome guest in the Parish for a few days. These are a few thoughts that I also have about the Gospel today.We are reaching the end of the liturgical year, and the end of the narrative of the ministry of Jesus, which this year we have been hearing from the Gospel of Mark. As the Jewish and Roman authorities also realise that the ministry is coming to an end by Jesus’s getting closer to Jerusalem, it is not surprising that they want to know what is the basis of Jesus’s authority. After all, in cleansing the Temple he had challenged the symbol of their authority. Jesus, like Jeremiah before him, had attacked the way God’s law had been carried out by the Jewish priests–with sacrifices and holocausts in the Temple–but ignored in the way that so many of God’s people were treated with disdain and injustice. The temple, instead of being a place of prayer for all nations, had grown inward-looking, excluding the Gentiles. These religious authorities suffered from what we might call today a polarised mind, which the Liberation Theologians in more recent times also tried to call out.In the Gospel today, the latest person in a line of people trying to catch Him out speaks, and it is the turn of a scribe to address Jesus. No doubt we have already pigeon-holed him and expect him to pose an aggressive question to Jesus. But, no, the scribe is fair and open-minded. He has listened to Jesus’ wise replies to the other leaders and seems genuinely interested in wanting to know how Jesus would answer what had become a familiar question among lawyers. With 365 prohibitions and 248 positive commands in the Torah, was there a basic principle behind all this detailed legislation which could interpret it well? So he asks, “Which is the first of all the commandments?’”Jesus answers by quoting the Shema which we read in the first reading from Deuteronomy. “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” Love of God comes first but it is not enough. No doubt aware of our human tendency to polarise, to separate the divine from the human, the earthly from the heavenly, Jesus quickly adds another command taken from Leviticus 19. “You must love your neighbour as yourself.” These two together are the key to true interpretation. These two commandments existed separately in Judaism. It is apt that Jesus, who unites both the human and the divine in himself, should bring the two together.But Jesus (and I hope we also) do not expect theory without practice. Throughout his ministry he has shown what the love of God means, and as he goes to Gethsemane and Calvary he will show what the love God and doing his will means. He will accept the cup which the Father gives him. But that sacrifice is also an expression of his love for neighbour for he gives his life “as a ransom for many.” The Incarnational Son shows in practice what it means to love God and neighbour at the same time.So how is Jesus’ teaching received? The scribe does not immediately debate aggressively with Jesus as so many of the other religious leaders had done. He can acknowledge the truth in what Jesus says and recognise that the one universal God they worship has no place for exclusion and separation. And he also picks up the prophetic criticism Jesus had made of the Temple which did not recognise that loving God with all one’s strength and one’s neighbour as oneself is far more important than holocaust and sacrifice.The detailed legislation of the Torah has been replaced by Jesus’ double command to love. And in the same way the Temple has been rendered ineffective and replaced by the new temple with Jesus as its corner stone. The Church now becomes the place where Christians are called to put into practice Jesus’ double commandment to love.The Church today is always in danger of being riven by polarising tendencies where groups are fixated on one idea and will not give room or listen to others’ views. We need to see how Jesus brings together rather than separates; makes love of neighbour closely linked to love of God. And then, we can admire, too, the scribe of today’s Gospel. He was not imprisoned with his own rigid views but was willing to listen carefully to and approve what Jesus said. Even a scribe could change and enter the Kingdom of heaven. What Jesus said to us of the Good Samaritan could also be said of the sympathetic scribe: “Go and do likewise.”
The Gospel today is pretty shocking, and typical of the grammatical style of Mark. The events and teachings recorded by Mark are meant to frighten us. True, the Gospels are Good News, and comfort; but nothing in them is meant to make us complacent. If there is a danger of that, we should work hard to let them make us uncomfortable, and so discover the ways in which they truly comfort us – remembering that, originally, “to comfort” meant “to strengthen” rather than “to soothe”.Jesus leaves Jericho with his disciples and a crowd. These people have seen his miracles; no doubt some of them have personally benefited from his healing power. They have been delighted by what they have seen, and they want more. After fifteen miles or so, they are going to call out for wonders: “Hoshianna!” – “Please bring salvation!” – “Reveal your victory!” But before they have even gone one mile, they are faced with the possibility of a striking miracle: Bartimaeus wants Jesus to restore his sight. Whereupon a lot of these people who want more miracles, try to prevent a miracle! By some perverse instinct, they tell Bartimaeus to shut up. Do they begrudge Jesus’ generosity? Do they have their own plan for what the day is to bring, so that they are unwilling to let a small miracle delay the uphill journey to Jerusalem where a great victory is imminent?This Gospel reading is about a beggar who was blind being instantly healed and he overturns the expectations of the crowd of king makers following – or maybe attempting to guide - Jesus. It was enough to lift him out of such total destitution as we can hardly imagine today. And Bartimaeus uses his healing to make a decision – to follow Jesus on His way to the cross, standing apart from the crowd around him. Bartimaeus hears the crowd passing by and is told that Jesus is at the centre of it, and his desperation made him bold, demanding, imaginative. He shouts aloud, so rudely that people try to hush him as we heard – although the crowd shouting for miracles are allowed to call out as they wish, but there is often one rule for the righteous is there not. He is also saying something — ‘Son of David!’ This might have been dangerous. It was almost like saying, ‘Your Majesty!’ Jesus was to die at the hands of the Romans for even allowing thinking and talking like this. ‘King of the Jews’ was hung accusingly and contemptuously as his title when he was executed. The fact that the crowd are about to say the same seems of no point to them – they want to be the Kingmakers and maybe sit at each side of the new King when He overthrows the Romans, not this blind man. So they tell him to shut up.What is the significance of blindness, and Christ’s healing of it, in today’s Gospel. Clearly, there would be plenty to say about the particular miracle and its context, but the words of Our Lord spoken as he restores Bartimaeus’ sight suggest that this episode can be understood also as a image of his work of salvation. He does not say, ‘your faith has given you your sight,’ or something like that, but rather, ‘your faith has saved you.’Blindness is not simply the inability to see. We do not say that rocks, or plants, are blind, although clearly they do not have a sense of sight. Rather, it is the lack of a sense of sight in the kind of being that, ordinarily, might be able to see. When Christ gives Bartimaeus his sight, he doesn’t endow him with a unique superpower, but restores to him something which belongs to his life as a human being. Similarly, to speak of our salvation in Christ is to say something about the restoration, not the unnatural enhancement, of our humanity: we were made in God’s image and likeness, made for friendship with him, and in saving us, Christ is restoring to us the possibility of enjoying that friendship.For Bartimaeus, the restoration of his sight is a clear and urgent desire. He is able to come to the healing, the salvation, which Christ tells him his faith has wrought because he had a desire which, through faith, he believed Jesus could fulfil. Likewise, if we do not recognise that there is something we lack, if we do not desire for the wounds of sin to be healed, then we will not be able to recognise in Jesus the saviour in whom to place our trust, for the notion of salvation will be meaningless.Bartimaeus saw the need to follow Jesus to Jerusalem, where Jesus was to bring salvation and reveal – indeed, enact – God’s victory over hatred and cruelty, over Satan and death. As we move from hearing the Gospel reading to celebrating the Holy Eucharist, we are called to “follow Jesus to Jerusalem” and witness his Sacrifice. The Consecration of the Eucharist brings home to us Jesus’ giving of his Body and Blood on the Cross, and charges us to imitate what we celebrate, to live sacrificially. We are asked to see what Bartimaeus saw, the need to enter into Jesus’ Sacrifice. And we who are nourished by his Body and Blood may be filled with the Holy Spirit, who can push, or prompt, or – most often – gently accompany us on The Way, even when people tell us to shut up. Indeed, maybe mostly then.
