Evangelium on Special Feast Days
Here are the homilies given by Father Andrew Pinsent & Father Marcus Holden on special feast days during the year ie the Solemnities of the Most Holy Trinity & Corpus Christi, & the feast days of Christ the King & All Saints.
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by Father Marcus Holden, in Year B
- The Queen's Jubilee & the Family
"The Christian Catholic faith does shed a new light on that created reality, like a bright torch. We come to realise that the family is a natural icon for God. Through Jesus, we have come to know that God is not just a singular person but a communion of persons and that the eternal Father and his Word have so much love between them that this constitutes a third eternal person, the Spirit or Wisdom. This is the Trinity. As we celebrate Trinity Sunday also today it is time to remind ourselves that creation comes forth from God who is eternally a family. The family is an expression of our dignity as beings made in God's image, made with a body and a soul."
Readings: Gospel: Matthew 28: 16-20: Then Jesus approached and said to them, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."
by Father Andrew Pinsent, in Year B
"So why does God give us the Eucharist as a sacrifice as well as a sacrament? One way of answering this question is to recall that God ultimately wants us to bring us to heaven, where, as St John tells us, “We shall be like Him.” Now the attribute that we most naturally associate with God is power, but the attribute that is most central to God's knowledge of Himself is love. “God is love,” as St John tells us. So becoming 'like God' does not simply mean sharing in the power of God, but most essentially sharing in the love of God, of loving as God loves. Now love is intimately connected with sacrifice, the notion of a sacrifice being associated with an outpouring of something that is precious to oneself for the sake of another person. So in the Mass, God gives us not only the opportunity to participate in the strength of God by means of a sacrament, but also in the love of God by means of a sacrifice. More specifically, in the Mass we participate in the perfect sacrifice, that of Christ on the cross in which the Son of God gave His life to save us."
Readings: Gospel: Mark 14: 12-26: While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, "Take it; this is my body." Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many. Amen, I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." "
by Father Andrew Pinsent, in Year C
"How is it that the Cross of Christ does have such power? What is it about Christ on the Cross that even those who reject the kingship of Christ are frightened of its power? I do not think any one explanation could ever give a complete solution to this mystery, but it seems to me that Christ on the Cross is at the centre of all Christian mysteries, making the crucifix the supreme Christian symbol. First, the crucifix witnesses that God was made man, not an inhuman super-hero, not a man of steel, but a man of flesh and blood that bled and suffered as one of us. Second, it is the ultimate sign of our redemption, "for God so loved the world that He gave his only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life". The very contemplation of Christ crucified can enlarge and melt even the most hardened hearts of stone, a power that nothing else on earth can do."
Feast day - last Sunday of the liturgical year
Feast of All Saints
by Father Marcus Holden, in Year C
"Today we celebrate our fellow human beings who have made it .. those who've reached the goal of goals, the only one worth reaching - heaven. We're talking about the entire population of heaven .. What are saints but human beings who have realised that they are not just beasts of burden, pleasure seeking machines, alone in the universe as accidents of creation or merely subjects of a distant creator or cause, but rather that they are children of God, given an eternal destiny. They have realised what John the Divine realised, as he wrote in the 2nd reading today. They have realised that Love that created them, that saved them and which brings them home .. Saints produce other saints; sanctity, holiness, is attractive, it's contagious, because we see how we're supposed to be ..This is the Gospel, the Evangelium today - Dare to become a saint!"
Feast day - 1st November (the month of special prayer for Holy Souls)