Weekly thoughts on the Sunday Gospel, readings or a topic...

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seeing your life through the lens of the gospels – Mark 13:24-32
1. Jesus speaks of the established order falling apart, but the collapse of the old order opened the way for new possibilities. When have you seen something new and hopeful emerge after the collapse of something that you had expected to endure much longer, perhaps even for ever?
2. The parable of the fig tree. Even in winter, it begins to put forth leaves which give a hint of the fruit to come. Where have you found signs of hope in a wintry situation – in your own life, in the life of some group, in the life of the Church?
3. Jesus proposes no clear time-scale for the events being foretold, so the final sentence (v.32) is a call to alertness, to live the present to the full. What difference does it make to you when you are able to live the present moment to the full?  – John Byrne, OSA

The Deep End
This chapter from Mark is part of a farewell speech from Jesus to his followers in the last days of his earthly life. It sounds almost apocalyptic because we are nearing the end of the Church’s liturgical year and so the texts we read take this tone. Jesus is revealing to his disciples something about the new order which is coming. He talks about the ‘end times’ and this can appear frightening at first. However, if we enter into a meditation on this Gospel we might bring to mind something of those moments in our own lives when we felt like our world was ending. Perhaps it was the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one, the end of one stage of your life. Things which seemed so familiar and helped keep us secure suddenly changed. These can be extremely difficult periods of one’s life. It is during those times that someone comes to us offering prophecy of better times to come, of words that ‘will not pass away’.
Jesus is preparing the disciples for what is about to happen to him and with assurance that God’s kingdom is far greater than any evil that is about to occur. The passage is often interpreted as referring to the second coming of Christ or his resurrection. Whenever we experience trauma we keep going with the assurance that resurrection is all around us and a new way of being is on the horizon.  – Jane Mellett

(from Intercom)