This post deals with the epistle and Gospel for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity (a.k.a. the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time), as celebrated on 21 July, 2024 (Year B, week 16). This past Sunday’s Gospel called for very few notes. By contrast, commentary on the epistle turned out to be a doozy! Not in itself, but its background. That also gave me one of my favorite things—namely, a pretext to talk about ecclesiastical architecture—so I went HAM (hence its lateness).... Read more

Ambassadors An ikon of the Twelve I’ve laid things out a little unusually in this post. Instead of just addressing the Gospel reading, I’m analyzing it together with its parallels in other Gospels. These are all about the mission of the Twelve Apostles. This is not the Great Commission; that comes later, after the Resurrection. This is when the Twelve were sent on their first “solo project” (solo in the sense that Jesus wasn’t physically present there). It was a... Read more

Saint Paul Needs a Prequel Miniseries I wound up with about twice as much “front matter” in this post as I expected! Counting the heading right above this paragraph as the first, the passage proper begins after the fifth heading. Skip to there if you want to jump right in. We all “know about” St. Paul, to the point that none of us know about him. I am in no position to offer an adequate primer on him here and... Read more

A Good Thing Came Thence A mosaic depicting Nazareth in the former Chora Church (now the Kariye Mosque) in Istanbul, Turkey. This gospel is both shorter and simpler than average. Accordingly, if I get the chance to, I’m hoping to translate this week’s epistle as well (II Corinthians 12.7-10, a fascinating passage)—no promises! Mark 6.1-6, RSV-CE He went away from there and came to his own country;a and his disciples followed him. And on the sabbath he began to teach... Read more

“Skip a Bit, Brother” Brother Maynard (right), accompanied by his brother, Brother Maynard’s Brother. Image from the Monty Python Wiki, used under a CC BY-SA license (edition unspecified—source). I was honestly quite miffed to discover that the Gospel for this Sunday was not Mark 5.1-20, the next pericope1 in sequence. That passage (especially in combination with this week’s actual text!) builds beautifully on the question last week’s Gospel concluded with: “What kind of man is this, then, that even the... Read more

A Thimbleful of Fire There’s a band out of Philly that I like, mewithoutYou [sic], that just wrapped up their farewell tour a couple years ago. Their musical style was a weird blend of lo-fi folk with punk that sometimes approaches screamo (which of course means they’re generally described as “rock”). But what’s stranger than that was their lyrics. The band’s core members and lyricists, Aaron and Michael Weiss, are brothers: their father was Jewish, and their mother had grown... Read more

“Before I Was So Strangely Interrupted” Now that the paschal cycle, and even its little train of post-Pentecostal solemnities, has wrapped up, we’re jumping back into Mark. Thanks to how early Easter was, we’re only in chapter three. Considering how long it’s been since I posted anything—and especially, anything up-to-liturgical-date; my last post was the end of a three-parter on Pentecost!—I’m going to try and be a little less elaborate with my next few posts, stick to the highlights. We’ll... Read more

Go to these links for Part I and Part II. A Caution These three posts deal with Judaism and its relation to Christianity quite a bit. I’ve done my best to research, and learnt some interesting things in doing so, but I am not an expert. I don’t even have a basic degree in this, like I do in Classics. I’m an amateur with Google and a copy of the Mishnah1; in other words, I’m an amateur. I’ve done my... Read more