I’d like to take a little time this morning to reflect on the first verses of our Gospel reading, the passage describing the feeding of the five thousand. That scene is described in all four Gospels, but John gives it a special significance by designating it as one of the seven signs in which Jesus is revealed as having power over material things. It is also a first sign of Him as the Bread of Life.

Initially, Jesus has wanted to take his disciples away by boat from the towns of Galilee, to have some time alone with them to...

A recent Prime Minister – and we’ve had quite a few of them in the past five years – used regularly to criticise “Doomsters and Gloomsters”. He might well have had the author of today’s first lesson  in mind, for the Prophet Jeremiah’s name has long been proverbial for pessimism, and a Jeremiah is a speech or a piece of writing in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and predicts its imminent downfall. 

There is a great deal of doom and gloom in the Book of Jeremiah but today’s short passage suggests that there was much more...

There are two things going on in this morning’s Gospel reading. Firstly, we have the leaders of the synagogue hardly believing their ears and eyes at the teaching given by the ‘carpenter’. You can almost hear their indignation that someone (supposedly uneducated) could actually be teaching them something about their faith. Secondly, we have Jesus sending his disciples out into the towns and cities to carry his message of love and repentance into the world. Did Jesus, think that his disciples would have more luck in being listened to and accepted than he did? I doubt it, but what he...

“Look into the eyes of another human being and you glimpse God.”

Sometimes it is the most unlikely of people that God chooses to use as a messenger or prophet; people that many of us might rather ignore or write off. Take John-the-Baptist for a start, a woolly, hairy man, half-undressed and living in the wild on locusts and honey – not the first person you might expect Jesus to ask to baptise him! Or Richard Holloway, who has said and continues to say things that are profound and help many understand what we mean by God. Many of the...