23rd Sunday Cycle B

Jeff Bagnall • 27 August 2024

At the end of the creation poem in Genesis chapter 1, we read that “God looked at all He had done and behold (it was) extremely good.” But the rest of the Old Testament is largely about the mess that people are making of this creation. It was probably when Moses led enslaved tribes out of Egypt to freedom, that they adopted Yahweh as their God – or rather he adopted them. It sowed the belief that God would always see them alright. But about 500 years later, after a lot of ups and downs, they lost the land they believed God had given them and almost lost faith too. But a prophet, one of the guardians of the faith, in his role of discerning the original and future plan of God for creation, told the people in dire straits that God would one day restore them to prosperity; we read of this expectation of the restoration of damaged creation in poetic and symbolic form in the first reading from Isaiah 35:4 – 7 – the blind will see, the deaf will hear etc.

About 600 years after Isaiah’s pronouncement, and after many disappointments and disagreements amongst the Jews, Jesus became one of them – one of us. It is probably a cousin of His who wrote the letter of James, where chapter 2, verses 1 – 5 are an example of the many wise things that he points out to those Jews living outwith their homeland and who had become followers of Jesus’ Way (Christians). Although he tells them to treat people fairly, he makes no mention in the whole letter of the non-Jews among whom they were living. Yet we know that Paul had worked widely in the area particularly welcoming Gentile converts. This might be one of the many aspects of this letter that made the early church hesitant about adopting it as part of their scriptures. However James’ suggestions for relationships with others is good and applicable also to us today, and we would even want to develop the idea to cover relationships with people of other faiths and of none, and extend them to cover people with other differences from what we might feel is the norm.

We know that Paul and Peter didn’t always see eye to eye about what attitude to have towards Gentile converts – Peter wanting to hold on to his Jewish customs and regulations. Mark was more in favour of Paul’s liberal attitude, but when writing his Gospel he could find little evidence of Jesus’ attitude to non-Jews. But he does tell the story of a Syro-phœnician woman where she says, even the dogs can eat the scraps under the table; and he improves on that in today’s gospel reading ( Mark 7:31-37 ), where Jesus cures a deaf mute in Gentile territory. In this passage Mark seems to have in mind the words of the prophet that were in the first reading; indeed, Mark uses the same, vary rare word for the speech defect (μογιλαλον) that is in Isaiah. Yet he may not have also knowingly reflected the words of God at the end of the creation poem (quoted above) when he writes about the onlookers of the miracle, saying “He has done all things well.”

see Jeffs Jottings – the good news

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Jeff Bagnall was a lecturer for many years at Craiglockhart College teaching RE to many future Catholic Primary teachers.

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time - 2025 - Year C

17 October 2025

The first reading is from a wisdom book ( Sirach 35:12-18 passim ). The prologue to it was written by someone in Egypt after 132 BC, who was translating into Greek a Hebrew book of his grandfather (whose name was Jesus). The book presented the thrust of the teachings of the Bible about the Law and the wise way to live. Manuscripts of parts of the Hebrew book itself have been found but it is not part of the Hebrew Old Testament. Despite the book’s enthusiasm for the Law, in our passage it speaks of a God who treats all people fairly; it quite poetically depicts God as particularly drawn to the poor, orphans and widows, like a Judge who responds quickly to prayers after judging what is asked for and what is right. The same thoughts are expressed repeatedly in the Psalm that follows this reading. In the second reading we have some words from the second letter to Timothy which seem to genuinely come from Paul himself. He is clearly at the end of his tether and near the end of his life. He speaks of the sacrifice of his life as a libation – a drink poured out as an offering to a deity. He uses his favourite metaphors for life – a race, a competition. Some of his friends seem to have abandoned him at the difficult times of his trial or when he was in prison. He is willing to forgive, and trusts that God will reward him with entry into the heavenly kingdom. It seems from the use of “we” in Luke’s book The Acts of the Apostles that Luke was often a close and loyal friend to Paul.

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time - 2025 - Year C

by Jeff Bagnall • 10 October 2025

The first reading is a story from the Book of Exodus, telling the tale of one of the many incidents from that epic journey of escape from slavery in Egypt, through many ups and downs until the entry into the promised land. The whole book was put together from various collections of stories that had been passed down through at least four or five centuries of retelling. The point of the whole and of each individual story, in general terms, is to say something about God and ‘the people of the Book’ and the relationship between the two; to teach people about their responsibility towards God and about His attitude towards them. The details in this tale about warfare and the rod of Moses, if taken literally, say nothing we would regard as true about the relationship between God and people; it was this rod that seemed to clear the sea for the people to cross when escaping the Pharaoh’s army, and this rod that produced water in the wilderness. But we get closer to the point of the story’s transmission and survival in our sacred Scriptures, if we see its significance for us today; it reminds us that the power of God is in everything, though we usually think of various sacred objects as reminding us of this.