3rd Sunday of Easter - Year C - 2025

Jeff Bagnall • 23 April 2025

In the Acts of the Apostles ( Acts 5:27-41 passim ), Luke tries to present to us his ideal vision of the church. He writes from a time when the number and placement of Christians has grown and spread into the wider world; a time when it has become distinguished from its roots in the Jewish religion and, through the initiative of Paul, opened up to the Gentiles. But he writes from this later standpoint about the beginnings of it all in the early days in such a way as to express and address his contemporary issues. So it seems awkward to us in our different situation and after centuries of developing thinking about the impact of Christ on everything. We now want to distance ourselves from any hint that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ; for we see the way humanity both in the centuries before and after Christ has fallen short of all that it should be and appears to thwart the creative intent of God. Notice that a section of what Luke wrote is left out of the lectionary reading; the missing verses tell of the wise conclusion that the Jews came to about this matter.

The second reading is from the Book of Revelation ( 5:11-14 ) (or as I explained last week, the Apocalypse). We saw in last week’s reading that the writer can produce a visionary description in a style of writing that is as unfamiliar to us as the cartoons and computer games of our days would be to him and his original recipients. Here he tries to picture the glory of heaven where Christ is now present after the success of His earthly life and, especially, death – the completion of His life’s work. From our standpoint it is a vision of the future that we expect to experience but it is a setting which we already key into at times – we become a remote part of this heavenly scene symbolically when we celebrate together in communion with the saints, but also when we live out the life of Christ by applying His attitude of loving care and forgiveness in the ordinary meetingswe havewith people daily. It is in these that we are amongst all the creatures and the thousands that worship in this scene of heavenly praise. However, the people that lived nearer than us to the time of Jesus had no difficulty with his humanity, but him being divine was all the more difficult to comprehend; so in this scene, there is no mention of the Holy Spirit, but rather an emphasis on Jesus being praised and worshipped as God.

The third reading is from chapter 21 of the fourth gospel ( John 21:1-19 ). Chapter 20 ended “All this has been written so that you may believe … and believing may have life;” that ends the original work, but then a final chapter was added. It has an account of Jesus meeting the disciples after a night’s unsuccessful fishing – have they not yet settled down to the task of founding a new community of the followers of Jesus? Yet they do have a large catch and the net isn’t broken, which may symbolize the growing community (and no one really knows the symbolism of the 153 fish for certain). The chapter also has the purpose of confirming the leadership position of Peter; he was the one that in the passion account denied having anything to do with Jesus – three times! Now, in a touching tale, the risen Jesus asks him three times, “Do you love me?” and Peter is able to counter his denials, saying at last, “Lord, you know everything, you know I love you!” In our present time, we notice the role of leadership in the church is meant to be one of feeding the followers.

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

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time - 2025 - Year C

by Jeff Bagnall • 18 September 2025

The first reading is from a section of the book of Amos ( 6:4-10 ); it is introduced with the opening words of the chapter: “alas for those who are at ease in Zion.” Strong words against the city dwellers come from Amos, the country fellow – words and woes against the northern kingdom of Israel. We hear the third and last woe against the excessive luxury in which they are living although their prosperity is declining visibly; they seem to live for the moment and care little of the future, even their own. They are, unusually, referred to as a group under the eponymous name of Joseph; this could be because of the account of Joseph’s interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream (Exodus 41) of seven years of plenty followed by seven of crop failure, and his wise management under the Pharaoh of storing up supplies for the future. The exile that will come will be the disaster that follows this decadence. In the second reading ( 1 Timothy 6:11-16 ) Timothy is addressed as a ‘man of God.’ Unlike the people of the first reading and in contrast to those addressed in this letter just before this section, Timothy is chosen and enabled by God to be a minister in the Christian community. Paul’s athletic imagery appears here also, saying “compete well,” that is, ‘run the race’ or ‘fight the good fight.’ The Christian at baptism made confession that “Jesus is Lord”, and Jesus made a similar confession before Pilate according to John’s gospel (18:37); Timothy was baptised but was also a leader in some way, and that meant not to be a covert Christian but to speak the truth even before accusers, as Jesus did before Pilate; the writer could be referring to either of these situations. The requirement to keep the commandments or ordinances is most likely not to the ten commandments of the Jewish religion but to the requirements of being a Christian or, more likely, the specific orders for acting as a minister. He must act as a servant of the King who will eventually appear, and he must be selfless in his work towards the kingdom of God. In today’s gospel reading from Luke ( 16:19-31 ) we have the parable often call that of Dives and Lazarus; but ‘dives’ is just the Latin word for rich man. In many ways the story is straightforward once we accept the different understanding of the afterlife that it portrays. However, whereas the rich man is anonymous, the beggar at his gate is named Lazarus. Luke is writing about 40 years after the resurrection of Jesus but still there are people who aren’t believers; and John’s gospel, uniquely, has the story of the raising of Lazarus which Luke’s readers may have known; but Luke’s point is not about accepting the truth of the resurrection, of Jesus or of Lazarus, because believing is more a way of living than accepting facts – of loving God and your neighbour as yourself, which the rich man in the parable didn’t do.

25th Sunday In Ordinary Time - 2025 - Year C

by Jeff Bagnall • 11 September 2025

The Sunday readings only use the prophet Amos three times; this and next Sunday are two of those. Amos was a country man used to living a simple life: a herdsman tending sycamore trees. Somehow he came to be a prophet of God in the city of Bethel, though he wouldn’t claim the title of prophet and was different from most of them. Such a man coming from the country to the big and prosperous city just had to speak what he thought in order to deliver a ‘scolding’ from the Lord, for the hiking of prices, lowering of measures and fixing of scales (Amos 8:4-7). His natural reactions to the corruption that he saw is described as visions from God, and they are nearly always expressed with an impressive literary style: matching couplets and triplets. Yet it is the language of wrath and condemnation, though elsewhere Amos does tell of a remnant few who will be spared and at the end of the book there is a very positive prophecy though this ‘epilogue’ may have been added later to end on an upbeat note of hopefulness.