Pentecost Sunday - Year C

Jeff Bagnall • 27 May 2025

The first reading is Luke’s account of the first Christian Pentecost ( Acts 2:1-11 ). The Jewish feast (called the feast of Weeks) started as a harvest festival, thanking God for the fruits of the earth, but its meaning changed gradually into a celebration of the reception of the Law as part of their covenant with Him. The Greek word Pentecost which we use refers to the fiftieth day after the celebration of the Passover. The reading is the basis for this Christian feast that celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit. Luke writes of the disciples, the women and all the brethren – 120 people – gathering together. In the references to wind and fire there are echoes of accounts in the Old Testament of God’s contact with His covenant people, especially through Moses on Mount Sinai ( Exodus 19f ) for the giving of the Ten Commandments. Luke writes that it celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit which enabled them to speak out, he says, “in different tongues.” According to the first letter to the Corinthians it seems some of them had been ‘speaking in tongues’ (called glossolalia) during worship gatherings (as some charismatics do to this day) but Luke has different languages in mind because he wants to make the point that the Good News is for the whole known world, hence his long (traditional) list of different places and peoples; this might be a sign of the reversal of the communal pride and godless aspirations in the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis Chapter 11.

The second reading is from 1 Corinthians ( 12:3-7,12f ) which opens with the basic fact that what makes a person a Christian and able to have Jesus as his Lord, is the gift of the Spirit. This Spirit can effect different people in different ways (many omitted in the reading). But variety does not cause the church to be broken up, rather it enables harmony to come from the different gifts people have. This is said because there were different views and different ways of expressing prayer and of following Jesus. Paul wants them to see themselves as a body that needs different parts to make it what it is. We know from the beginning of this letter that there were groups in the church that differed in their understanding of what it was to be a follower of Christ. We should be guided by the Spirit, but be careful to be in harmony with the body of believers.

The gospel is the same as that for the 2nd Sunday of Easter:
The gospel passage ( John 20:19-31 is the conclusion of this great gospel of John (chapter 21 reads as a later addition). Jesus comes to the weak and scared humans; He comes with renewed life, physical but also transcending the physical – the resurrected Christ. John always emphasised that Jesus is sent by God, is obedient to God’s will and empowered by God’s Spirit. Now Jesus passes to His followers this same commission; to bring deliverance to all who can accept it. This moment is like a new creation, with a renewed infusion of the Holy Spirit, as at the first creation. Then the gospel brings in the story of doubting Thomas – the sceptic who wants evidence but who makes a baptismal confession “My Lord and my God” when he sees Jesus; and the masterful conclusion which speaks to us all “Blessed are those who have not seen, but have believed".

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

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.

24th Sunday In Ordinary Time - 2025 - Year C

5 September 2025

The first reading is one of the significant incidents in the tale of the exodus – the going out from slavery in Egypt towards the promised land. At this point in the story (Exodus 32:7-17) Moses has gone up the nearby mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments from God; but he had been away forty days and during this time the people had forgotten this unknown God of Moses and remembered the golden calf worshipped in Egypt: an abandonment of the true god who brought them out of slavery. The account describes this depravity in terms of the wrath of God. But most interestingly, Moses intercedes with God on their behalf and reminds Him of the promises made to Abraham and his descendants, and that these are the people due for this promise. This story was kept alive in the people’s tradition because it was a pattern of betrayal and return that was repeated in their lives as a race and as individuals, and the Psalm chosen to follow this reading indicates this.