Author: Simon Sleeman

Fr. William Fennelly: In today’s gospel Jesus says, “Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people unto myself”. In our society, the cross is a ubiquitous symbol. It pops us everywhere. Pious tattooed soccer players repeatedly bless themselves with the cross taking before penalties. It is even a pretty on trend fashion statement whether you are Kim Kardasian or Lady Gaga. One only has to look in the pages of trendy fashion magazines or go to any influencer site to see elaborate “cross inspired jewelry” hanging from the neck, ears, wrists and God knows where else on both male and female models.

The notion that our society is all “crossed up” may or may not be a good thing. Indeed the fact that it is a cross, and not a symbol of another religion that is popping up all over tells us that some Christian memory is still very active in the contemporary subconscious. It certainly doesn’t make us a “Christian nation,” but perhaps it makes us a “Christ haunted” nation. Not sure of what the faith is really about, not sure who Jesus really is, but nonetheless fascinated by some of the concepts of the Christian religion.

In terms of name recognition Jesus is up there with Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce, yet lots know of Jesus but don’t know Jesus. We need to roll up our sleeves and get to know him, to lift high the Holy Cross. The way to lift high the cross is not to rent cranes and to hoist up giant crosses in the public square. The way to lift high the cross to best effect is for each Christian to lift high up the cross in their daily life. As we seek to lift up the cross, we should try to lift it up as Jesus did. The second reading from Philippians makes it clear what lifted up truly means: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death–even death on a cross…” (Philippians 2:5-8)

The whole ministry of Jesus, and thus the whole ministry of the church is in the shape of the cross. “Taking up the cross” is one of the most prevalent images in scripture and the tradition for walking in the way of faith and following Jesus. Jesus said that those who want to be his followers were to take up the cross and follow him. Those who seek to save their lives would lose them, but those willing to lose their lives would find them.

Forty days ago we celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus. That feast is strategically placed forty days distant from today’s feast, the Exaltation of the  Cross. The Transfiguration was a moment in some of the disciple’s lives to help them cope with what was coming, to help them deal with the inevitable, to help them find hope when all would seem lost. The Transfiguration was a taste of God’s glory to help them swallow the bitter pill of God’s suffering. At the end of that Transfiguration experience, where so much was going on, everything gleaming with a dazzling white, a cloud that enfolded him with Moses and Elijah, a heavenly voice  could be heard, it came down to one thing, “Jesus alone with them.” It was not just about the overwhelming experience of glory, but it was mostly about what that experience was trying to create within them, to be with Jesus alone. To cling to him more readily, more trustingly, as if everything depended on it. And everything did.

As the cross drew nearer, Jesus knew this aloneness. In the Garden of Gethsemane he felt the pangs of being alone as Apostles slept. Imprisoned, he knew the separation from family and friends, and he felt alone in the presence of Pilate and the crowds before him as they chanted, “Crucify him.” He carried the cross alone, for the most part until Simon helped for a moment. And on his cross, he hung alone. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels he felt alone or abandoned by his Father, abandoned even, in his last hours. In a tomb he was placed, and as a rock was rolled in front of it, he was left all alone. But was he? Was Jesus all alone? The saints throughout the ages would say, “No, he was not alone.”

For many, the church is a foreign concept. Church buildings are curious and much visited by tourists but they remain foreign territory. The central purpose of the church is to lift up the cross. To let the light of Christ’s life, death and resurrection shine into the world. The light shines as the church and each Christian walks the way of the cross in the world. The light shines as we show others that we are his disciples. The light shines as when we do not hide it under a basket but let it shine forth in lives of love and humble service. On this day dedicated to the Holy Cross, let us recall the cross that was traced upon us in baptism. The sign under which we live and move and have our being. Let us lift up the cross before others by leading Christian lives.

Fr. Luke Macnamara: In today’s Gospel, we hear that Jesus is surrounded by a great crowd—not only from Judea and Jerusalem, but even from the coastal regions of Tyre and Sidon. These were Gentile territories. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus himself never steps outside Israel; that will only happen later in the Acts of the Apostles. But notice this: the nations are already coming to him. Their presence signals something new—something long foretold by the prophets—that the kingdom of God is breaking in, that the end times have begun.

Then Jesus turns, not to the crowd, but to his disciples. He fixes his eyes on them. The beatitudes are not general slogans; they are words spoken to those who already follow him, those who have chosen relationship with him. And what does he tell them? “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Notice the tense: not will be, but is. The kingdom is already here, present in Jesus himself.

The other beatitudes point to transformation: hunger turned to satisfaction, tears turned to joy, rejection turned to honour. But all of this begins with the presence of Christ. He himself is the kingdom among us.

St. Paul, writing to the Colossians, explains how this transformation takes root in us: by sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection. We have stripped off the old self with its ways of sin and death, and we have put on the new self, alive in the image of the Creator. In Christ, barriers of race, class, wealth, or status fall away. He brings unity and freedom wherever he is truly welcomed.

And so the challenge for us today is this: will we allow Christ to work through our poverty, our weakness, and our limitations? If we do, we will find ourselves blessed—not by escaping suffering, but by discovering his kingdom in the midst of it. And once Christ is alive in us, his presence cannot be hidden. It will shine out. It will transform others.

Let us pray, then, that Christ may so transform us that our very lives become a living homily—a proclamation of his resurrection, his kingdom, and his power to make all things new.

Fr. Denis Hooper: There are lots of great stories through the ages of people gate-crashing events. Some people have a lot of neck – and the confidence to convince security officers and others that they are guests at various functions and events – when they are no such thing. They dress impeccably and hold themselves with such confidence that they have you fooled.  There are some well-known stories of people gate-crashing royal weddings, presidential inauguration balls, papal audiences – you name it.

Some years ago our Abbot Brendan was in Rome attending an audience with the late Pope Francis. While they were waiting for the Papal audience they noticed an Abbot that none of them seemed to recognise. Each of the Abbots thought that he must be a new Abbot. Why would he be there unless he was an Abbot?

Well the group of Abbots were taken into the Papal reception rooms to meet the Pope. As quick as lightening the stranger Abbot disappeared. Abbot Brendan out of the corner of his eye spotted a Swiss Army Guard push the impersonator through a hidden panel in a wall which closed behind him immediately. It was as if nothing had happened. Needless to say, they never saw that Abbot again.

Maybe you have seen the video of the Royal Variety Performance where the King and Queen are sitting in the Royal Box at the Royal Albert Theatre. It was just before the performance started and the camera was trained on the Royal Box. 

Then a door opens behind the King and Queen and into the Royal Box enters an overly dressed and glamourous lady. The “lady” is Dame Edna Everidge – need I say anymore! Dame Edna sits down right beside the Royal couple and starts to make herself comfortable.

The King and Queen are amused this time.

Then the door behind the Royal Box opens and a suited man quietly enters and whispers something into Dame Edna’s ear. She seems surprised and the audience assumes – Dame Edna Everidge – has been told to vacate the Royal Box. For once it seems Dame Edna has received her cummupence.

Dame Edna stands up, turns to the Queen and says: “Oh, they’ve found me a better seat”.

Let’s face it, every formal function you attend nowadays has placenames at the tables and maps of where the tables are situated. The names of some table maps can be quite amusing. I was at a wedding where one table was called “The Glen Stallions”; my table was names “Jurassic Park”! 

There is slim to no chance nowadays that you will ever go to the wrong table and embarrass yourself by being told you are not supposed to be there.

In the time of Jesus, there was no paper and so, no placenames or table maps. Although if there was paper it would have been amusing to know what names they might have given to their tables. 

You get the message of today’s Gospel: it is about humility, generosity and the reversal of worldly values.

I don’t know if any of you watched the meteor storm that was clearly visible in our skies a couple of weeks ago. It got me thinking about the incomprehensible vastness of the universe.

Trying to contemplate the universe reminds us of our smallness in it and calls us to live not with arrogance but with reverence, respect and responsibility for the world we live in.

The universe is a vast web of relationships – galaxies, stars, planets, ecosystems and living beings – all interdependent.

Do you know that there are two billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and that there are two trillion galaxies in the universe. Here is a fact that will amaze you: there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on earth.

The Universe gives without expectation.

The banquet Jesus describes can be seen as a metaphor of the universal feast of existence. The invitation is extended not just to the powerful but to all creation – echoing how the universe sustains even the smallest particles of life.

Just as the Universe does not revolve around one individual, we are called to live our lives knowing that we are not at the centre of the universe.

The Creator of the Universe is generous to us – He gives us a life-giving pattern. 

True greatness is measured not by power or status but by our willingness to serve, echoing the humility we need to understand the incredible beauty we see every time we cast our eyes to the sky.

And on that note I think it is time for me to move on and so: “beam me up Scotty”

 

Fr. Henry O’Shea:

My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns; 

my bile is poured out to the ground 

because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, 

because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city. Lamentations 2:11

Even people who are not well versed in Scripture, are aware that the prophet Jeremiah was not a fun person. And, indeed, in Jewish tradition he is called the ‘Weeping Prophet’ – as evidenced by our opening quotation from the book of Lamentations, which some scholars believe was also written by Jeremiah.. 

In today’s first reading we hear of Jeremiah being literally stuck in the mud. Having offended the political and military establishment, he is thrown into a drained cistern to wallow in the slime. But, so-called stick-in-the-muds are not always wrong. 

Interesting how nothing changes under the sun. It seems to be a universal and eternal practice that those who point out uncomfortable truths or prospects or those who dispute currently unfashionable opinions are sidelined, are ‘othered’, sometimes even eliminated. Think of our media with their various agendas and distortions. Think of the varied understandings and uses of the terms ‘facts’, ‘true facts’, ‘alternative facts’. Fake news.  

Jeremiah’s king, Zedekiah, is not the first political, religious or, indeed, family leader to claim helplessness. Claiming helplessness while hanging on until they recognise what is of greater advantage to themselves and seize the opportunity. 

Those who prefer their Jesus to be gentle, meek, mild, amenable, undemanding, may be unsettled by the Jesus of today’s gospel. He makes it very clear that he has not come to bring peace on earth but, rather, fire and division. Does this mean that he favours war? Does this mean that he dismisses peace? The answer is no on both counts – even if many times in the last two millennia, Christians have used this gospel passage to justify war, persecution, exploitation and exclusion.

The sword that Jesus brings is the sword of his living word that, we are told in the Letter to the Hebrews, is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. The warfare Jesus is talking about is a battle for minds and hearts, a battle within minds and hearts. And, as Jesus notes, that battle can even be within families. Within and between one’s own mind and heart.

Jesus has little time for a peace that is the comfortable, or better, the ‘comfy’ peace of material security, well-regulated predictability with the occasional thrill thrown in to reassure ourselves that we have what is often a self-deceiving freedom. Bad things happen, but happen, we pray O Lord, to other people and if possible in other far-away places. We all have our Munichs and Alaskas. We all have our Gazas and our Omaghs.

The author of today’s second reading provides a perspective, that is in and beyond time, but also now and the future, for those singed by the fire of Christ. Uncompromisingly, we are told that our only true horizon exists and consists in Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection. Jesus has gone before us and stays with us on and in this focus on finality. He has gone before us in the battle for minds and hearts by enduing the cross. Enduring the cross for a joy that was still in the future. He stays with us encouraging and supporting us, making everything possible for us, in our battle, sometimes fierce, sometimes half-hearted, our battle with the distractions, the waverings, the false promises of sin. 

In Chapter 4 of his Rule, St Benedict admonishes monks not to make a false peace. Jesus goes before us and stays with us in our efforts not to settle for mindless, self-centered, imagined peace. 

The same book of Lamentations with which we began also tells:    

Because of the loving devotion of the Lord 

       we are not consumed,

for His mercies never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is his faithfulness!

“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,

“therefore I will hope in Him.”

      The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,

to the soul who seeks Him. Lamentations 3:22-26

Fr. John O’Callaghan: “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” 

There are several feasts in the Church’s year where the Blessed Virgin Mary features greatly: like the Annunciation of the Lord (on 25th March); the Nativity of Jesus Christ (nine months later) and today’s feast of Mary’s Assumption into heaven. The foundation of them all, their sine qua non, is what Elizabeth said in today’s gospel: “Blessed is she that believed!” That belief allowed the conception of Christ and the whole sequel.

Belief was her role in what was ultimately the saving work of Christ. Mary was there as ‘the servant of the Lord’, to serve his project. Belief allowed her “to concieve first of all in her heart, before even in her womb,” as St Augustine said. And she continued to believe through the pregnancy, the birth, and Jesus’ youth, during the ups and downs of his mission and, against all the odds, at his crucifixion and into the mystery of his resurrection. She, his perfect disciple, has that to teach us, to believe in God carrying out, fulfilling, his mysterious plan throughout the vicissitudes of life so that, in the end, all may be well. Mary’s assumption into glory, which we celebrate today, is God’s work come full circle for her.

Time and eternity coincide in Mary. Her life, like that of all humanity, is evoked dramatically in our first reading, from the Apocalypse: ‘A woman in labour, crying out in the pangs of birth;….a huge red dragon with seven heads and ten horns – it stopped in front of the woman as she was having the child, so that he could eat it as soon as it was born from its mother’. This scene recalls that scene in the Garden of Eden where Eve, mother of us all, is promised that childbirth would occur in pain. The dragon which evokes Satan, sometimes called the devil, the serpent, represents the more or less explicit presence and power of evil, hostility to God and to his people. And the biblical author may well intend us to also perceive in the woman, Mary, the new Eve, who is giving birth to the Messiah, surrounded by hostile powers, and the imperial power of Rome. 

It is into such an ambiguous world of good and evil that the Messiah was to be born and in which Mary was to make her pilgrim way, and we ours. As her path must have challenged and shaped her faith, so does our experience challenge and, hopefully, mature our faith. Like her, we must rise to the challenge. 

In our own times the sheer monstruous suffering in the world tests our faith. It alone seems to prove there is no God. Alternatively we can take the matter of God’s invisibility. For those able to see with the eyes of faith, that is his very greatness; but for anyone who cannot or will not make the leap, it makes God somehow refutable. Faith is always under threat but it is also our individual struggle with ourselves, and with God. It is not easy, and faith is not a light that scatters all our darkness; it is a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.

We know that personal suffering cannot be eliminated, yet suffering can assume a meaning, can be an act of love, and an entrustment into the hands of God who does not abandon us. To those who suffer God’s response is his accompanying presence; he shares our path. Even death is illumined and can be experienced as the ultimate call to faith. ‘Come!’ is spoken by the Father, to whom we can abandon ourselves in the confidence that he will keep us steadfast even in our final passage. 

Mary’s true greatness is to be found in that enduring trust in God, holding faith through the profound and perplexing challenges of her life. Her belief that the scriptures were being fulfilled called for radical renewal, evolution of her faith, deepening of it and she upheld it right to the end, to the cross itself. She is the perfect icon of faith. She exemplifies the long history of faith of the Old Testament, with its account of so many faithful  women. So Mary is our inspiration throughout the vicissitudes of life, both individually and collectively as the Christian people of God. 

And a life beyond this one, to which she has gone, is part of the Christian way of looking at things. She is one who put her trust in God and now she is gone to God, to glory. May she help us to entrust ourselves fully to Him, believe in his love,  especially in times of difficulty,  until the dawn of the undying day which is Christ himself!

Fr. Simon Sleeman:

Abraham our father in faith. No explanation, no faith definition. But a story, yours and mine, unfolding.

Abraham, called out, leaving,  leaving, leaving self-defined confinement, plunging into the larger reality of grace.

Trusting, trusting, trusting in his God. Aligned to his will, obedient direction, one foot moving, then the other.

Tested, tested, tested…fully. Fantasy and foolishness flushed out. His treasure on a donkey.

Hemingway said that, ‘every generation needs a war or its moral equivalent to test it.’

‘We live by forms and patterns’, Wallace Stegner says,‘if the forms are bad we live badly’.

Faith form untested – falters and folds, a kind of ‘wish upwards’, lukewarm, it buckles, the risk of faith too great.

Abraham’s faith-form holds against the odds of sin and sight. Hard travelling faith, set in muscle and bone, sinews and synapses.

Alert to  the steering power of spirit… freed. Living by faith – living in grace, a strange thing happens…life.

Fr. Jarek Kurek: Good Samaritans. At the end of February this year, we had the joy of welcoming to Glenstal the chief chaplain of the Polish community in Ireland, Fr Stanislaw Hajkowski. Many of the monks still remember him — an energetic, well-built man in his late sixties. At the time of his visit here, he was about to travel to the continent to collect the relics of the Ulma Family — the relics we have with us today. It was Fr Stanislaw’s deep desire to bring the relics to Ireland and to share the tragic, yet uplifting, story of this Polish family with those he had lived among for a long time.

Fr Stanislaw never made it back. He died in the evening on the day he collected the relics. But the relics were brought to Ireland and are briefly here in Glenstal.  As we gather to celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ at Mass, the presence of the relics here today helps us to reflect on how this mystery was also played out in the story of the Ulma Family – their life and death – during the horrible time of World War Two.

But before we look at them more closely, let me tell a story. It may ring some bells, though the ending may strike you as different…There was once a man going about his business, trying to live his life peacefully and without offence to those around him. One day, as he went about his life, a group of men set upon him. They robbed him, stripped him, and left him by the side of the road for dead.

Presently, along came an educated, God-fearing man, known for his generosity and charity. He saw the man who had been beaten and robbed, but he crossed over the road and carried on his way. Shortly after, a priest came along — a well-respected man of wisdom and learning. Seeing his neighbour in distress, he too crossed over to the other side. After all, he would not be seen helping a Jew.

And so the Jew lay in the gutter, waiting for the good Samaritan. But there was no good Samaritan. Not this time.

The Ulma Family, in 1942, were seemingly ordinary people — he in his forties, his wife, pregnant with their seventh child, just turned 30. The times were very challenging — for everyone, it goes without saying — but especially for all the Jews being hunted by the Nazis and their collaborators in every country.

It became crystal clear to Józef Ulma, the head of the family, that he could do nothing other than help the eight Jews who knocked on their door one day. He saw eight people in true distress, beaten and robbed of their right to live. In an instant, he felt that it was his family’s mission to be Good Samaritans — they could not turn their backs on those helpless Jews. For eighteen months, they kept them safe in the attic of their house. But not one of them made it through to the end of the war.

On the 24th of March 1944, the German police came and shot everyone — first all the hiding Jews, then Józef and his pregnant wife Wiktoria, and then, after some deliberation, also their six little children. There was no room for mercy — for anyone.

One could legitimately ask: was it worth trying to help those Jews, if ultimately it ended in utter failure? The answer must be one, and only one: a resounding yes.

As a certain wise man said, there are moments in our lives when we cannot act otherwise. Józef and Wiktoria Ulma didn’t save those eight Jews — but they did save Man. They saved Humanity — also for our sake.

The eight people they saved back then call out to us to respond to any stranger who stands in need of our help today, who, even voicelessly asks for our mercy.

It is for you and me to be — regardless of the outcome — truly humane, following the precepts of the Gospel in our dealings with them.

It is for us to be Good Samaritans, to be people of mercy. In today’s gospel Jesus calls us to become rich towards God. Being the Good Samaritan, like the Ulma family, does precisely that.

Abbot Columba McCann: Ask and it will be given to you.  I asked God for a winning lottery ticket, but I didn’t win.  What went wrong? What went wrong is that God was offering me something far greater, something far more valuable, something beyond what I can actually imagine:  the Holy Spirit.

If we ask God for the Spirit we will receive.  We will begin to think with the mind of Christ himself.  We will have godlike instincts. We will live a divine life in human form, just as Jesus did when he walked the earth.  But since all this is, at first, too big for us to handle, God feeds us this new life, this new relationship, piece by piece.

And so we ask God for our daily bread.  We are asking God to keep feeding us this new life, this new way of being with him, this new way of being in the world.  Like any food, you don’t just get this once and then forget to eat again.  We have to get it continually, and that’s why Jesus says ‘ask, and keep on asking’ – because that’s what the original Greek meaning is.  Ask and keep on asking, knock and keep on knocking, seek and keep on seeking.

As a young child I was quite fussy about food, and sometimes my mother would have to coax me to open my mouth and take just one more mouthful, again and again and again until my dinner was finished.  She must have had the patience of Job!  When we repeatedly ask God for heavenly food, for the Holy Spirit, it’s not because God is mean and has to be pestered; it’s more like continually opening our mouth for more.  God can’t force feed us his nourishment.  We have to open our mouth by asking for it.

Once we stop asking for a live relationship with God, it stops.  Because it takes two to tango.  A dance designed for two comes to an end if one partner stops, even though the other wants to continue.  If we stop looking towards God for life, then he can’t bring our relationship with him any further.  It we keep looking to God in every situation, then we are protected, and furthermore, we have a huge influence on the people around us. It’s like a phone conversation.  We have to stay on the line with God.  If we hang up on God then the line goes dead, and we go dead. If we stay on the line, then we really live.

When I was a teenager I was mad about trains, and used to watch them for hours.  Once I was on a train where the driver’s compartment wasn’t in a separate locomotive but was at the end of a carriage.  The curtain that would normally hang behind the glass partition was drawn back.  It meant that by sitting right at the top of the carriage, I could watch the track ahead as if I were the driver, and I could watch what the driver was doing.  It was train-spotter heaven!

I noticed that every minute or so a bell would ring in the driver’s compartment, and a light would flash on his dashboard.  He would then pull some kind of lever.  I noticed that under the light was a label marked ‘vigilance’.  Later I guessed that this was probably some kind of safety mechanism to ensure that the driver hadn’t fallen asleep.  A few days ago I researched this online.  I discovered that in Ireland in the 1970’s they installed on trains a thing called a ‘Vigilance Control System’.  I read:

The system would typically monitor the driver’s actions, such as applying brakes, changing throttle settings, or operating other controls. If the driver failed to perform any of these actions within a set time (e.g., 60 seconds), the system would activate a warning (e.g., flashing light, buzzer). If the driver did not respond to the warning within a further period (e.g., 17 seconds), the system would automatically apply the brakes to bring the train to a stop.

So I think that, when Jesus tells us to keep on asking, keeping on searching, keep on knocking, it’s a spiritual Vigilance Control System.  It’s a way of ensuring that our connection with God remains live at all times, that we don’t fall asleep on the job.  Otherwise our thoughts, our drives, our talk, our actions get corrupted.  Without this system in place we are like a runaway train, dangerous to ourselves and others. Our conversations will get derailed. Our emails will miss the mark. Our decisions will be poorly judged. What we communicate to others may be true, but if it’s not coming from God, it will be wrong piece of the truth, or for the wrong person, or at the wrong time, or said the wrong way.  If we do look continually to God in each situation, we will arrive at whatever the next station is, safely, on time, not too early not too late.  Ask, and keep on asking; seek and keep on seeking; knock and keep on knocking, for your whole life.

Fr.Mark Patrick Hederman:The first reading we heard this morning is one of the great stories of the Bible. It recounts the first time in our JudeoChristian tradition that the Lord our God chose to meet up with a human being in the form of three persons. The text says specifically: ‘The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre.’ So it was ‘the Lord’ who appeared. But then Holy Scripture goes on to say: ‘Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby.’ In other words, what Abraham saw when he looked up and what had appeared in the theophany were not quite the same; he saw three men but it was actually ‘the Lord’ who was present to him. The text continues: ‘When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed down low to the ground.’

Did you ever have the experience of hearing the doorbell ring, of taking a peek out the window, seeing three people hanging around outside, and then closing the curtain and hiding under the bed in case they might find out that you are there. You wait silently, your heart thumping, hoping against hope that they will just go away. Well, I suppose it’s more difficult to do that if you are living in a tent. Whatever his motivation, Abraham did the opposite. He rushed out to meet them and invited them to dinner. 

What is also difficult to figure out is why such readings are paralleled with the Gospels on Sundays, and why this particular reading was twinned with the story of Jesus visiting Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, another trinity, in their home at Bethany. 

I think we can find a clue, not so much in the text itself but in the bit that was left out at the end of the first reading. You may remember that one of the visitors said he would be back the following year and that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, would give birth to a child. 

Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, and she happened to be 90 years old at the time we are told. So she laughed to herself. Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh?’  Is anything too hard for the Lord? And Sarah was afraid, so she lied and she said, “I did not laugh.” But the visitor said, “Oh Yes, you did laugh.”

The child that Sarah gave birth to a year later was called Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means ‘laughter.’ 

Coming back to the scene that was twinned with this in the Gospel reading. Jesus is at Bethany with Martha and Mary. All my sympathies in this passage are with Mary who is doing the cooking and who sees her sister sitting wide-eyed and star-struck at the feet of their guest. It’s a wonder that Martha didn’t tell them to cut the cackle and get their own food for themselves. 

I think the answer to the whole problem is in the line which Jesus spoke, not just to Martha, but to every one of us: ‘you worry and are preoccupied by many things – few things are needed— indeed only one.’ All that matters is what we are being promised. If you listen to the Lord and do what you are told you will be free. No matter how old or decrepit we are, there is new life in the old creature yet, and nothing is impossible to God. Whatever is preventing you from being fully alive, from being really yourself: whether it be drink or drugs, lethargy or laziness, bingeing or being bullied, you can free yourself and give birth to the laughter in your life. 

For God’s sake stop sniggering at the back of the tent; come out into the open and believe in the power of angels to allow us to live the glory of God. For what is the glory of God? It is each and every one of us fully alive. 

So, let Isaac be a code word for today.