What does today’s epistle reading make you think of?

It makes me think of a sandwich! The Alpha and the Omega providing the bread - slices of God’s presence that enfold who we are. Separate bits creating a unified whole. 

“I am the beginning and the end” and “I in them and you in me.” 

These verses, the first from Revelation and the second from John do I think say the same thing:

that if God is both our beginning and our end, then God is also in us as much as we are in him. 

What I think this...

Have you even stopped to ponder why there are 40 days between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension into heaven? 

One might have expected Jesus to return to his Father almost immediately after his rising to new life. As a sort of affirmation that he truly was the Son of God, who now after his work on Earth was completed had nothing more to do except rejoin his Father. Jesus, however, as we know never did anything that was ‘expected’ of him. Nothing that we humans might think to be logical. Jesus does things in his ways and in his time...

Acts 11: 1-18        Revelation 21: 1-6      John 13:31-35

Today’s three readings fit together splendidly. Our Gospel tells of Jesus issuing a new commandment:

…that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

Our reading from Acts shows one of the ways in which Peter and the other Apostles came to realize that this the commandment would involve radical changes in their outlook and their relationships with other people and our reading from Revelation looks forward to a future in which Jesus’ new commandment is fully implemented.

“…the...

“I am the Good Shepherd”

Hearing these words exactly as the disciples heard them is impossible for us, not least because they were almost certainly spoken in Aramaic. We all have some sense of what the word shepherd means, but we need to do a bit of digging to understand what Jesus meant when he identified himself as the Good Shepherd.

It turns out that there are three Aramaic words which can be translated as “good”. One of them means pleasurable or beautiful, the second means good in a moral sense and the third is all about having good relationships...

‘Who are you?’

You might be forgiven, reading today’s three Scripture passages, if you at first thought they were all to do about hearing imaginary and unknown voices! In fact you’d not be alone in that thought, for how many of us can actually say we have heard the voice of God or Jesus telling us to do something?

When someone says they have heard God talking to them, your first thought might be that they are ‘off their head’ but as Scripture and other peoples’ experience often tells us this is not necessarily the case and perhaps God did...