Weekly Bible Reflection

riting in The London Times, someone once commented, ‘I’d like to be a Christian, but to do that I need a water-tight argument.’ At times we may feel like that – for ourselves and for the sake of others. But that is not how God has chosen to work....

n October last year, The Wall Street Journal reported an interview with Alan Greenspan about his book, The Map and the Territory. Greenspan commented on a human feature that he had not factored in when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve....

pportunity is an optimistic, motivating word, full of promise and hope. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is: ‘A time or set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something’. It is a word we find in a wide range of contexts. Winston...

rinity Sunday (this Sunday) is a wonderful reminder of the God whom we worship. Article I of ‘The Thirty-Nine Articles’ states in a concluding sentence: And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the...

his Sunday is Pentecost or Whitsunday. Yet for many of us it is an enigma. Within Judaism it was the Greek name ascribed to the Feast of Weeks, celebrating the giving of the law at Mt Sinai. In Christianity it is the festival that comes seven weeks...

esus’ words: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12), can be puzzling. Miracles. No one today is performing...

e live in a world of uncertainty and the unexpected. Where do we look for security and hope? Bewilderment. At the end of John 13 an ominous cloud hung over Jesus’ disciples. For three years they had been with him, increasingly confident he was...

hat is God really like? Who is he and what should we expect from him? We are left with the possibility that there is no way of knowing God. And of course, there are always those who tell us that there is no God – Nietzsche in the 19th century and...

his Sunday is Mother’s Day. Towards the end of the 20th century there were major shifts in the thinking about the role of women and motherhood. Television sitcoms reflected some of these changes – from the nuclear family in ‘Lassie’ with the...

lindness is a dreadful affliction. A blind man begging on the side of the road was a familiar sight in ancient Israel. But the man we read about in John 9 wasn’t blind because of the dusty roads and disease-laden air: he had been born blind. In...

eath is not something we usually bring up in everyday conversation. It’s not polite. Some may recall Woody Allen’s words: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying”. Yet death is the certainty we...

veryone has regrets. We regret words we let fly in haste; the opportunities we missed or messed up; the relationships we let slip and the ones that we should never have begun. There are all those past actions for which ‘redemption’ seems...

o one likes failure. You may never have experienced it, but it happens, even to the smartest and wisest of people – physicians when they see a patient die knowing they might have done better; Wall Street brokers when they give bad advice to their...

elevision news loves to capture the tears of grieving people. News editors are aware that other people’s tragedies capture our attention: we are drawn to tragedy and catastrophe as long as it doesn’t affect us. Jesus’ tears. Considering the way...

arren Aronofsky’s long-planned film, NOAH, is invading movie theatres everywhere this week. A high budget movie, it picks up and develops, with a deal of latitude, the biblical epic of the flood (Genesis 6:9-9:17). One of the big questions that...

Health. Browsing the net on the subject of fitness and health I notice that a sedentary lifestyle is a significant cause of death in the US. The evidence indicates we need to watch our weight and keep fit. There were warnings against eating too much hi-carb food,...

‘You Are What You Eat’ was a popular television program in the United Kingdom from 2004-2007. It was based on the idea that what we eat affects who we are and what we are like. A cyber-search suggests that the phrase originated in the 19th century with Anthelme...

Justice ‘If God cares and is in control why doesn’t he clean up the mess?’ is a question I was often asked after 9/11. ‘Why doesn’t he intervene and bring to justice the perpetrators of wars, injustice and evil?’ These are valid questions, for our hearts cry out for...