This year the Fourth Sunday of Advent is also Christmas Eve and so I would like to reflect on two aspects of the Mystery of the Birth of Jesus – Mary’s “yes” and her fidelity, and the Word taking flesh and being born as a baby.

To borrow another story from my friend Fr Bel San Luis, SVD; there was this professor in homiletics teaching a group of future preachers on the basics of a good homily. In one of the lessons he said that when you preach about heaven, you should let your face light up with a heavenly beam and let your eyes shine with glory. When you preach about hell, your everyday face will do.

It’s now the start of another liturgical year. This year is Year B, meaning that most of the gospel readings for Sundays will come from the Gospel according to Mark and also a good number of Sundays will be coming from the Gospel according to John.

I can remember being very impressed with the celebration of the Feast of Christ the King when I was in the Seminary.

Imagine you got the windfall of a lifetime. You’ve just won the top prize in lotto, which was worth millions of dollars. What would you do with this windfall?

As we draw closer to the end of the Liturgical Year the readings of the day invite us to be awake and alert for the coming of the end times. 

There is a saying that, “one ceases to be humble if one is boasting of one’s humility.”

The scholars of the Jewish Law at the time of Jesus continued to argue among themselves as to which is the greatest of the 613 commandments of God that they identified in the Jewish writings.

In today’s Gospel we have Jesus being challenged again by some of the Jewish leaders (Pharisees and Herodians are mentioned specifically) who would like to catch him in error or put him in a difficult situation so that people would not listen to and trust him.

Imagine that you have organised a big feast for your daughter’s wedding and after thinking and debating on who will be on your guest list...

The Gospel of this Sunday focuses on the allegory of the owner of the vineyard and his dealings with the tenants, or its other way around, how the tenants treat the vineyard and the owner’s servants. 

For this Sunday’s reflection upon the Readings for Mass, I would like to make the following suggestion for you in your own time and space.

I often wonder if the people standing around Jesus who heard this parable about the landowner who paid all his workers the same amount of money, whether they had worked the whole day or only just a couple of hours, had the same reaction that so many people have today when they first hear the story: “it’s not fair”.

Just last year we celebrated the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy.

When I was a Seminarian I had no problem with the Gospel text for today. It seemed to me that Jesus was laying out a “simple program” to ensure that the Community stay united.