Saturday 6.30pm: Kate Jones Rec Dec
Sunday Third Ordinary Time PMB 129
8.30am: John Thompson RIP
10am: In time of Pandemic
11.30am: MaryMcKinney welfare
Monday No Mass
Tuesday No Mass
Wednesday 10am: Requiem Mass Kaysia Adams
Thursday 10am: Maureen Sumner Rec Dec
Friday 10am: Truda Schmiedbauer RIP
Saturday 6.30pm: Ann Hall RIP
Sunday 8.30am: David Scanlon RIP
10am: Parish
11.30am: Charles Barker RIP
First Reading Jonah has to learn some hard lessons. As a prophet he must do as God tells him and not run away. At last, he goes to Nineveh telling them to repent but he was very resistant as he was fiercely nationalistic and looked down on all non-Jews and those he considered were living evil lives. God never gives up on anybody – thank God.
Second Reading Paul thinks the end is nigh and requests that we adjust our lives accordingly. This world should not be the source of our happiness as we are made for the next world. Let’s not be too immersed in the world around us.
The Gospel begins with a call to repentance and to believe the good news that the Kingdom is with us in Jesus Christ. Repentance should be something joyful because of the joyful news of the gospel.
Eucharistic Adoration Let us go to God’s house for it is here that Jesus awaits us in the sacrament of love. We pray for the peace of Jerusalem, the promised peace for all God’s children all over the world. It is here in the presence of the Eucharistic Lord, that more good can be achieved in bringing about peace than all the armies that ever marched, all the speeches ever made, all the meetings ever held, for God alone is the source, the power, the giver of peace. In the presence of the Blessed Sacrament we offer to our heavenly Father the infinite merits that Jesus won for us on Calvary to repair for all the wrongs, to heal all wounds, and to mend all broken hearts.
Reflection I may be poor but no millionaire can be so happy as me, if they haven’t got the love of God in their souls. Think what it is – not to hate anything but evil: to be full of love for every creature; to be frightened of nothing; to be sure that all things will turn out to good; ton know nothing can separate us from the God who loves us, and who fills our souls with peace and joy. This blessedness is offered to everyone; it is the good news that Jesus came to preach to the poor.
The Our Father God sent his son to bring us the good news of salvation. Let us pray to the God of love as Jesus taught us.
Many thanks to the stewards who do so much to keep the church open. Any more volunteers? God will reward you!
Please Help the Sisters’ orphanage in Minsk, Belarus’. There are hundreds of nuns, all very young, praying for our parish!
The Pandemic To come out of this crisis better Perhaps because we have recovered, in lockdown, a little of that fraternity that our hearts had painfully missed, many of us have begun to feel an impatient hope that may be the world could be organised differently, to reflect the truth. We have neglected and mistreated our ties with the creator, with creation, and with our fellow creatures.
Why Read St Mark’s Gospel? Well, it’s the shortest. You can get through it easily in an afternoon. It’s got lots of miracles if you are in to miracles. But, really, it’s an an amazing invitation to enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ, to learn to trust, to discover that God is with us here and now, not just when there’s a bolt from heaven or when somebody gets cured and experiences a healing and compassionate God. Jurgen Moltmann was a great German protestant theologian. As a young man he was in the German army and, it must be said, fought on the side of Hitler. After the end of the war he found himself in a prisoner of war camp in Scotland. The inmates were visited by the chaplain who showed them pictures of the unimaginable horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in places like Belsen and Auschwitz. They were also given a New Testament. Moltmann read the account in Mark’s gospel of the suffering of our Lord “ I read Mark’s Gospel as a whole and came to the story of the passion; when I heard Jesus’s death cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me ? I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God and has felt the same forsakenness you are living now … I summoned up the courage to live again.
A similar story is told by the late Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. He introduced to the West so much of the wonders of Russian orthodox spirituality. As a sceptical young man he was massively against the claims of Christianity. He had heard people speaking about the faith and it filled him with disgust and anger. He went home and decided that in order to combat it and expose its emptiness and stupidity he would have to know a bit more about it. He got hold of a copy of Mark’s gospel knowing that it was the shortest. The feeling I had occurs sometimes when you are walking along a street, and suddenly you turn around because you feel that someone is looking at you. While I was reading, before I reached the beginning of the third chapter, I suddenly became aware that on the other side of my desk there was a Presence … I realised immediately: if Christ is standing alive, that means he is the risen Christ.
He committed himself there and then to the Christian faith and lived it out in a variety of costly ways for the remainder of his life - about seventy years. He brought many people to know God and to acknowledge that same Presence. Your Parish Priest is one of them. When I started to take the Christian faith ever more seriously his books of meditations had a huge influence on me. So, try to find time to read Mark and if you are feeling a bit low and want a little bit of a laugh try the prophet Jonah. You’ll have a whale of a time and learn so much about our life in God.