This post deals with the Gospel for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity (a.k.a. the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time), as celebrated on 28 July, 2024 (Year B, week 17). The Bread of Life Discourse Beginning this past Sunday, and lasting I believe through the final Sunday of August, we are back in the Fourth Gospel, reading about the first of the two miraculous feedings and the homily containing one of Jesus’ famous “I am” statements, I am the bread of... Read more
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
Witnesses Not officially, but by informal custom, Trinitytide is divided into five parts. The first corresponds to the “Apostles’ Fast” observed in the East; the second lasts until Assumption (15 Aug.); the third, colloquially called “St. Michael’s Lent,” runs till Michaelmas Eve (28 Sep.); the fourth, “Hallowtide,” runs from Michaelmas until All Saints’ Day (1 Nov.) inclusive; and the fifth, “Doomtide,” runs from 2 Nov. (All Souls’ Day) until the beginning of Advent and the new liturgical year.* This week... 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
Matter Peculiar to St. Mark Folio from a late fifteenth-century copy of the Gospel of Mark, now housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Image used under a CC BY 4.0 license (source). Mark, as we’ve discussed, doesn’t have a lot of unique material. This is part of the reason it is widely regarded as the earliest Gospel. It so happens that, of the two parables related in this past Sunday’s Gospel, the first is peculiar to St. Mark, i.e. he’s... 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
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