Mark Whittall

Jesus’ public ministry begins With a single person. A captive. One human being who is oppressed. A child of God who is set free. What word would you use to describe today’s gospel? A healing? Certainly. Salvation? Yes. Redemption? Absolutely. Transformation? Clearly. All good words, great words to describe what happens in the synagogue when Jesus meets the man with an unclean spirit. But the particular word that jumps out at me today is this one: Liberation. In part th

There are moments that matter. Moments where we no longer think of time as 10am on a Sunday morning, but rather we think of critical moments when the time is right, when it’s time, when the time is fulfilled. Time as kairos, not chronos, for those who know a little Greek. On Wednesday, we heard President Biden say “this is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. This is a time for boldness.” That’s kairos. In our gospel we hear Jesus declare, “The time is fulfilled, and

When I was growing up, back in my school days, there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on memory work. I know that in generations that preceded mine, memorization was a big deal. Children were expected to memorize long sections of poetry, or of scripture. Nowadays, I suppose that we can find anything we want on Google pretty quickly, so maybe the idea of memorizing things seems a bit quaint or even old-fashioned. But there are certain words that we should memorize, words that we want

Sometimes I wish that I could take the dove that appears in today’s gospel and wring its pretty little neck. Because we get fooled by the dove. We imagine a gentle bird, a soft white colour, peacefully fluttering down from the sky. And if that’s our image, then we’ve been misled about the gospel that we just heard. Because this gospel is explosive. This gospel is about a raw power that rips open the skies, a power that is invading our world, and will be opposed, violently o