Reflections on the Sunday Gospels. Year B: October - November 2015

Veronica Lawson rsm is a member of the Circle of Institute of Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea (ISMAPNG) Theologians. She is a biblical scholar who writes from an eco-feminist perspective. Her weekly one-page reflections on the Sunday Gospels are widely reproduced; we are delighted to publish them here.

Each month the next four reflections will be published in reverse chronological order so that the most current reflection is always at the top of the list.

Scroll down to find the one you wish to read.

Messages to: Veronica Lawson rsm

You are welcome to circulate these reflections. Please acknowledge the author, Sr Veronica Lawson rsm.

29 November 2015. First Sunday of Advent Year C (Luke 21:25-28, 34-36)

'Today’s gospel passage, with its vivid description of the end-time signs, may seem a strange choice of reading for Advent and the beginning of the Church year...'

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22 November 2015. Feast of Christ the King Year B (John 18:33-37)
'The liturgical year always ends with the celebration of the Feast of Christ the King...'

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15 November 2015. Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 13:24-32)
'In the opening lines of today’s gospel reading, there are clear echoes of two passages from the prophecy of Isaiah...'

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8 November 2015. Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 12:38-44)
'Whether the longer or shorter gospel reading is selected for today’s liturgy, the literary context deserves attention. Jesus is teaching the crowds in the Jerusalem Temple...'

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1 November 2015. All Saints Day Year B (Matthew 5:1-12)
'This year’s celebration of All Saints Day comes just one week after the Synod on the Family closes in Rome. We await the outcome of the Synod, recognising that there may not emerge the clarity of direction we have come to expect from Synods of Bishops...'

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25 October 2015. Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 10:46-52)
'Today’s gospel reading brings to closure a long section of Mark’s gospel that focuses on the journey of Jesus and his disciples from Caesarea Philippi in the north to Jericho...'

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18 October 2015. Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B ( Mark 10: 35-45)
'In the kin-dom of God movement established by Jesus, there is no place for domination or for any exercise of power over others. In today’s gospel story, this is a lesson that James and John, the sons of Zebedee, clearly need to learn...'

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11 October 2015. Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 10:17-30)
'Not too many of us commit murder or adultery. Not too many kidnap or take hostages or give false testimony in a court of law. Most are ready to honour and care for their parents in their old age...'

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4 October 2015. Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 10:2-16)
'The “test” question about divorce that the Pharisees put to Jesus is very strange in a first century Jewish context, as is the reference to women divorcing their husbands...'

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27 September 2015. Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 9:38-48)
'Sometimes we act and speak as though we have the monopoly on access to the power of God. We do not, and in today’s gospel Jesus seems to be telling his disciples that God works through people of good will, irrespective of whether they are on the edge (“not one of us”) or at the centre of the kin-dom of God movement...'

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20 September 2015. Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 9:30-37)
'Most of us have to admit to being like the disciples whom Jesus was trying to bring from blindness and ignorance to insight and understanding. Like them, we are often afraid to ask for explanations when we fear that we won’t be able to deal with the responses we receive...'

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13 September 2015. Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 8:27-35)
'Today’s gospel reading leads us into a section of Mark’s gospel that explores challenges confronting all disciples on their journey of faith. The first challenge is to clarify the nature of our commitment as disciples of Jesus...'

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6 September 2015. Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 7:31-37)
'Those who are profoundly deaf frequently find themselves on the edge of the human and earth communities. Without access to birdsong, to spoken discourse, to the vast range of media communication, they often struggle to understand and to be understood...'

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30 August 2015. Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)
'After our lengthy detour over the past six weeks into the gospel of John with its focus on Jesus as the Bread of Life and the Bread of Wisdom, we return to Mark’s gospel and a legal dispute about ritual purity...'

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23 August 2015. Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (John 6:60-69)
‘ "To whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life."
If we have trouble understanding and coming to terms with some of the teachings of Jesus in the gospel, then we can take some comfort from the reaction of the disciples in today’s gospel...'

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16 August 2015. TwentiethSunday in Ordinary Time Year B (John 6:51-58)
'In this week’s gospel passage, we continue our reflection on John 6. John’s gospel was written towards the end of the first century. The Bread of Life discourse probably reflects the interpretation of the gospel writer rather than the actual words of Jesus...'

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9 August 2015. Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (John 6:41-51)
'Jesus was a Jew, as was John, the author of the gospel. It may seem strange, therefore, that John has the “Jews” complaining about Jesus. It is indeed strange, and it has caused many a reader to wonder...'

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2 August 2015. Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (John 6:24-35)
'We have become so familiar with the sayings of Jesus that we can easily fail to notice the earth elements in the text or the constructed environment and treat them simply as backdrop for human activity rather than as having value in themselves...'

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26 July 2015. Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (John 6:1-15)
'The gospel readings for the next five weeks are taken from John 6, a section of the gospel that focuses on food and related themes: on hungry people; on the need for food/bread; on food/bread as metaphors for life. Bread has been the staple food for millennia in bible lands...'

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19 July 2015. Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 6:30-34)
'In every life, there is need for a balanced rhythm of work and re-creation. With so much pain and suffering in our world, the demands of the mission can overwhelm us and cause us to act as though everything depends on us...'

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12 July 2015. Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 6:7-13)
'To be a disciple of Jesus is to experience a call. It is also to be sent on a mission in partnership with others, a mission invariably expressed in terms of preaching, teaching, healing, and/or driving out of demons or unclean spirits. In other words, it is to be authorised to do what Jesus did and to proclaim what he proclaimed...'

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5 July 2015. Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 1:1-6)
'Most of us have known the experience of feeling powerless in the face of rejection, especially when it is rejection from those who are closest to us, from those who might normally be expected to understand and affirm us. That seems to have been the experience of the Markan Jesus...'

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28 June 2015. Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 5:21-43)
'In Mark’s gospel, we often find a story within a story. Some scholars refer to this technique as the making of a Markan sandwich, others as a framing device...'

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21 June 2015. Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B ( Mark 4:35-41)
'This Sunday we return to Ordinary Time and to the Gospel of Mark for eighteen of the remaining twenty-five Sundays of Year B. Those who have not yet taken an hour or so to read the Gospel of Mark from beginning to end might consider doing so this week. Too often, we take the Sunday gospel passage out of its context and therefore miss much of its power as sacred story...'

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 14 June 2015. Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 4:26-34)
'The first of the parables in today’s gospel reading has no parallel in the other gospels. It compares God’s kin-dom to a trusting sower who scatters the seed by day, sleeps by night, and simply observes the “earth produce of itself” until it is time to harvest the grain...'

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7 June 2015. The Body and Blood of Christ Year B (Mark 14:12-16, 22-26)
'The Gospel for today reminds us that we are in a “covenant” relationship with our God. We renew that covenant in every celebration of the Eucharist...'

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31 May 2015. Trinity Sunday Year B (Matt 28:16-20)
'Trinity Sunday celebrates the core Christian conviction that God is not just one, but also three-in-one. For the people of Israel, no other god could compare with their God whom they knew as both creator and liberator and whom they experienced as intimately involved in every aspect of their history and of their day-to-day lives...'

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24 May 2015. Pentecost Sunday Year B (John 20:19-23)
'Pentecost Sunday is often called the birthday of the Church. For the ancient Israelites, Pentecost (meaning 'fiftieth') was a harvest festival celebrated 50 days after the beginning of the harvest...'

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17 May 2015. Feast of the Ascension Year B (Mark 16:15-20)
'The feast of the Ascension invites us to face the universal experience of the loss of a loved one, and to face it in a transformative way...'

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10 May 2015. Sixth Sunday of Easter Year B (John 15:9-17)
''The second chapter of our Mercy constitutions opens with the reminder that “the tender mercy of our God has given us one another”...'

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3 May 2015. Fifth Sunday of Easter Year B (John 15:1-8)
'Again and again, life's experiences teach us that, as members of the Earth community, we cannot make it on our own. We need one another, other living beings, the sun, the soil, the water and everything else that formed from exploding stars in the distant past...'

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26 April 2015. Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B (John 10:11-18)
'The gospel reading, like the first reading from Acts 4, is ostensibly about leadership. It has some resonance for me...'

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19 April 2015. Third Sunday of Easter Year B (Luke 24:35-48)
'Extraordinary things can happen if we open ourselves to the presence of a stranger on the road of life. That is one of the elements in today’s gospel which is the conclusion to the Emmaus story...'

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12 April 2015. Second Sunday of Easter Year B. (John 20:19-31)
'Some of us may remember when we spoke of the Sundays ‘after’ Easter. The terminology has changed and we now speak of the Sundays “of” Easter...'

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4 April 2015. Easter Vigil Year B (Mark 16:1-8)
'At the foot of Mt Macedon, where I spent the first sixteen years of my life, stands the lovely Church of the Resurrection, built in the aftermath of the devastating 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires...'

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29 March 2015. Passion (Palm) Sunday B (Mark 11:1-10; Mark 14:1-15:47)
'Mark's account of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is more restrained and less victorious in tone than the other gospel accounts. In keeping with Mark's gospel as a whole, it forms part of the relentless journey of Jesus, the suffering Messiah, towards Jerusalem the place of his death...'

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22 March 2015. Fifth Sunday of Lent Year B (John 12:20-33)
'Among those who go up to Jerusalem to worship at the feast of Passover are some “Greeks”. The reference is probably to a group known in the early church as “God-fearers”, although that designation is found only in Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles...'

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15 March 2015. Fourth Sunday of Lent Year B (John 3:14-21)
'The gospel for today is the concluding section of Jesus’ conversation with a Pharisee called Nicodemus, who comes to him “by night”. It features a number of typically Johannine themes: life, eternal life, believing, seeing, God’s love, salvation, judgment, light, darkness, the world, truth...'

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8 March 2015. Third Sunday of Lent Year B (John 2:13-25)
''Today’s gospel passage foreshadows the death of Jesus. As a devout Jew, Jesus goes up to Jerusalem at Passover. His final going-up will be the occasion of his death and resurrection.'

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1 March 2015. Second Sunday in Lent Year B (Mark 9:1-9)
'The wilderness was the geographical and symbolic setting for last week’s gospel. This week, the setting is a mountain...'

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22 February 2015. First Sunday in Lent Year B (Mark 1:12-15)
'Lent comes around each year and presents us with its usual challenge to take stock of our lives, to see more clearly what is in our hearts, and to discover what might be calling us out of our comfort zones...'

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15 February, 2015. Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 1:40-45)
'We all seek to be part of family and community because we are social beings who need to engage with others and with our environment...'

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8 February 2015. Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 1: 29-39)
'Today’s gospel passage invites us to consider the meaning of service. It continues Mark’s account of a typical day in Jesus’ ministry. The setting is Capernaum. Jesus has just left the synagogue where he has freed a man who had been caught in the power of “an unclean spirit.”...'

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1 February 2015. Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 1: 21-28)
'As schools reopen for another year, we are all invited to consider what it means to teach-not just with words, but with authority, the authority of gospel living...'

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25 January, 2015. Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (Mark 1:14-20)
'Most of the gospel readings this year will be from Mark’s story of Jesus. As with any short story, it is best to read it from beginning to end at one sitting...'

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18 January, 2015. Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B (John 1:35-42)
'A personal call to a particular a way of life is not always easy to explain, even to oneself. At my religious profession, I chose the challenging motto “To give without counting the cost”. I have taken that motto seriously, even if I have often wanted to change it...'

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11 January, 2015. Feast of the Baptism of Jesus Year B (Mark 1:7-11)
'The Baptism of Jesus marks the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of Ordinary Time. Many of us have been fortunate enough to get some time after Christmas to reflect on the past year and to set goals for the year ahead so that we might move into Ordinary Time with renewed life and vigour for the sake of our planet...'
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4 January, 2015. Feast of the Epiphany Year B (Matthew 2:1-12)
'God’s presence is revealed to us in diverse ways: we can read the book of God’s vast creation; we can search out the meaning of our dreams; we can learn from our own and others’ experience; and we can listen to the voice of our sacred scriptures...'

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25 December, 2014. Gospel-Christmas Year B (Luke 2:1-14)
'The readings for the Christmas liturgies vary from celebration to celebration...'
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 21 December, 2014. Fourth Sunday of Advent Year B (Luke 1:26-38)
'We are all familiar with Luke’s story of the annunciation, a story that has inspired artists through the ages...'
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14 December, 2014. Third Sunday of Advent Year B (John 1:6-8, 19-28)
'Today’s gospel reading falls into two sections. The first section comprises a little statement from the prologue of John’s gospel and the second revolves around a question that has already been answered in the prologue...'

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 7 December, 2014. Second Sunday of Advent Year B (Mark 1:1-8)
'The opening verse of Mark’s gospel evokes the opening words of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The whole of Mark’s story of Jesus is presented as the beginning of a faith journey into which the listener/reader is invited...'

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 30 November, 2014. First Sunday of Advent Year B (Mark 13:33-37)
'“Eyes wide open” is the proper stance for gospel people. The little parable that is the gospel reading for this first Sunday of the new liturgical year forms the conclusion to Mark’s so-called apocalyptic discourse...'

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