Daily reflections

The Lord's Supper, or Communion, Eucharist or Mass, is meant to be the point at which the whole Church comes together. The number of names for it indicate that it's often the point at which we're most divided, as different...

Sometimes Paul writes very dense theology that we puzzle over and decide is too hard for us. At other times, like this, he is luminously clear. The Spirit gives us all different gifts, he says. Underlying his teaching to the...

Paul could be crabby and rude, and comes across in his letters as a flawed – and therefore very human – individual. But being human means that as well as being prone to fall very low, we're also capable of rising high...

This chapter deals with orderliness in worship, including the issue of 'speaking in strange tongues'. This probably refers to the spiritual prayer language, unintelligible to its speakers or hearers, held to be one of the...

This chapter is Paul's great exposition of the resurrection. He defends it to the hilt: Christ was really raised from the dead, he says, and without it Christians are all wasting their time: 'And if Christ has not been raised...

1 Corinthians is a real letter to real people, rather than an abstract piece of theological writing. This closing chapter makes this clear – Paul has people's names and faces in mind as he writes, as he often does. That...

The Exodus from Egypt – the word means 'going out' in Greek – was one of the foundations of Israel's identity. The people had been slaves, and God rescued them. It's an extraordinarily powerful story.

The crossing of the Red Sea is an event of tremendous drama. Older generations might remember Charlton Heston in the famous scene in The Ten Commandments (1956), in which the water literally forms walls in the sea on either...

The Song of Miriam is an outpouring of praise to God for his great act of salvation in bringing the people out of Egypt. After this high, however, there comes another low – three days of wandering through a waterless wilderness...