Palm Sunday - Year C - 2025

Jeff Bagnall • 11 April 2025

In the first reading ( Isaiah 50:4-7 ) the prophet is lyrical about his own experience, He has faithfully heeded and delivered God’s word, but it is met with rejection and physical abuse,. Yet he has faith that all will be well in the end. His words are easily applied to Jesus’ life and are appropriate at this season of the Liturgical year. Because God is ‘a stable character’ people are treated in basically the same way by Him in whatever century, though differently according to their circumstances and response; in this way the suffering but faithful life of a past individual, like Isaiah, can be seen as a foretelling of how God deals especially in His Incarnate Son, Jesus, but also with us in our corporate and individual lives. The responsorial psalm shows the same pattern and personal anguish and hope.

The second reading ( Philippians 2:6-11 ) is part of a hymn expressing Christian belief about the Divinity of Jesus. It is difficult to translate the words used to describe this enormous mystery. So the phrase “being in the form of God” (King James Version) is quite a literal translation of the original Greek, but our understanding of the Incarnation is better expressed as “His state was divine”( Jerusalem Bible); it is interesting to look at various translations of this opening phrase. The hymn that this reading is part of, goes on to say that Christ took on human life and became like us; and this meant he was involved in and effected by all the messiness of human life and all the struggles and temptations it brings. But, as He held firm to his calling by the Father in the face of enormous difficulties, so we could expect to be elevated to be with God in glory if we hold to our call as Christians through the difficulties of our lives.

The Passion narrative in Matthew ( selected from chapters 26f ), generally follows that of Mark. In recent decades the Catholic Church has emphasised the resurrection and the element of joy and glory more than the trials that led up to it. Yet as well as this great message of hope and new life, it is almost reassuring to know that what leads to this is a life dedicated to the good of others and of the world, and this means a life subject to great disappointment and, for many, much suffering both emotional, psychological and physical. With this in mind we follow the story of the completion of Jesus’ life. Passion is not just suffering, Donald Senior points out, that passion is also a great enthusiasm for something you believe in – so each of us can consider, what is my passion?

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

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - 2025 - Year C

4 November 2025

The first reading is from the last section of the book of Malachi. In the Hebrew this is Chapter 3, but in the Greek version it is Chapter 4. Cyrus, the king of Persia who became the ruler of Babylon in the 6th century BC, had high ideals for society and a policy of returning deportees back to their homelands. We know of this from the Cyrus cylinder which was discovered in 1869 in the ruins of the city of Babylon and is in the British Museum. In the Bible, the book of Isaiah the prophet interpreted this return to their own land as brought about by their God through Cyrus. But those who returned were not all as good living as they should be and so, in the book of Malachi, we hear today of God’s punishment upon them, but for those who are good or repent, God will come “with healing in his wings.”

31st in Ordinary Time - 2025 - Year C

22 October 2025

The first reading is from the book Wisdom ( 11:22-12:3 ). This book was written less than a century before the birth of Jesus. It came from someone in the Jewish community in Alexandria in Egypt. Jews at the time were not just in the promised land and were quite aware of the ways of thinking in the wider community about life, gods and associated mysteries. The book of Wisdom is in Greek and its ideas are a development of earlier Jewish ideas, absorbing more contemporary notions from this wider community in which they lived. And so wisdom is very important; it is used by them to refer God Himself and their idea of life now extended to even life after death which was not previously held by Jews. Our reading exemplifies the literary quality of the thoughts poetically expressed in a theology of the relationship of God with the failings of humanity and the development of creation. The second reading is from 2 Thess 1:11-2:2 . The two letters to the Thessalonians are the first surviving documents about Jesus that we have – the oldest writings in the New Testament – prior to the gospels that tell of the life of Jesus. Paul was a learned Rabbi in the Jewish community living away from the Jewish enclave in the Roman empire. The story in Acts of him being quite against Jews becoming followers of Jesus is quite reliable. However, this learned man later became a Christian and worked mostly in Roman communities making converts of Jews but especially of Gentiles. He had established a community in Thessalonica but the Jewish synagogue there was not receptive of his message that God was happy with Gentiles, so a mainly Gentile community of followers of Jesus was established away from the synagogue. However after he moved on from his short stay there, he wants and needs to writes to them from prison. It seems from the text we have that he may have given them a wrong idea of God’s being present to them even now and this being the time of the fulfilment of God’s plan for creation. Some of them had given up their regular work and way of life and were just waiting for the End-time to come. And someone may have encouraged them with this view. So Paul has to tell them to get back to regular life – as good followers of Jesus – the final End has not yet come. We are reminded by this that Christianity is constantly developing an understanding of life and creation, and we should be warned not to be so certain of what are basically mysteries – a danger the church has always suffered from.