There are indications in the Gospels that Jesus’ family were worried about and even hostile towards his ministry. Perhaps they have come to him on this occasion to try to talk him out of his mission. His words about family are quite startling even ...

This is another parable about the Kingdom of Heaven. The world is a very mixed bag: there’s good and evil, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Good people don’t get what they deserve, and neither do bad people – it all sometimes seems a bit random.

Everyone knows about the five loaves and two fish that miraculously became enough to feed a whole crowd. With slight variations, the story appears in all four Gospels. Like many others, it has Old Testament roots: Elisha does the same sort of thing i...

The Pharisees were devoted to serving God through keeping his law. We should be careful about saying they believed they could ‘earn their way to heaven’ – it wasn’t really like that – but keeping the rules could become a mark of someone’s...

Until now in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has been doing well against the opposition he faced. Now, the forces of darkness are beginning to gather against him, and he starts to prepare his disciples for what lies ahead. They don’t like it; they have s...

After having spent some time with Jesus, the disciples must have thought they had a pretty good idea of what he was about, until at the drop of a hat he began to talk about suffering and dying. Peter voiced what everyone else was thinking: the Messia...

Matthew 18 contains some hard Jesus sayings: on pride, temptation and the wages of sin. And yet, read these passages closely and there’s always an underlying vision of deliverance.

In today’s passage Matthew places a brief, seemingly innocuous, scene between the weighty topics of marriage and money. The peaceful image of Jesus’ hands resting on the heads of children seems strangely out of place. Yet, all three passages hang...

Three successive passages in Matthew 20, expose the human desire to be important and respected. Hard-working people moan about the boss’s favouritism towards part-timers. Angry young men’s daydreams of booting out the Roman overlords unravel as t...

The Old Testament prophet Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Messiah would arrive, not on a warhorse but a donkey. The people who cheered for Jesus as he entered Jerusalem had spent their entire lives under Roman rule. They couldn’t wait for th...

Two medieval monks agreed that whoever died and went to heaven first would tell the other if it was how they’d imagined it, by uttering one word: either ‘taliter’ (it’s as we thought) or ‘aliter’ (it’s different from what we thought). A...

In Jesus’ day, different groups of people responded to Roman occupation in different ways. The upper class clergy, the Sadducees, sought appeasement and the Essenes withdrew into monastic life, whereas the Zealots plotted political revolt.

This chapter of Matthew is part of the ‘Little Apocalypse’, a block of teaching that focuses on the ‘end times’. It’s in a style of writing – ‘apocalyptic’ – that’s like Revelation or parts of Daniel. We should be wary of treating...

The ‘parable of the talents’ – a talent can be translated as ‘1,000 gold coins’ – fits here with the idea that Christ will come to judge what we’ve done with what we’ve been given, and it’s an uncomfortable read.

After the ‘Little Apocalypse’ of chapters 24 and 25, Matthew’s story rushes headlong into the final days of Jesus’ life. There’s a succession of incidents and encounters, each of which we could dwell on slowly and prayerfully.

After his betrayal, Jesus is 'tried' by the chief priests and elders, who are determined that he should die. As they don't have the authority to execute him, they need the permission of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

We're very used to reading the last verses of Matthew's gospel – verses 19 and 20 – as the 'Great Commission', Jesus' command to his disciples to go 'to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples'. Most ...

Judges is largely a story of disappointment and defeats, with some acts of terrible wrongdoing. The people have entered the Promised Land under Joshua, but things don't go smoothly.

Othniel was the first of the judges, and his rule sets up the pattern that's to follow: oppression, rescue, apostasy, in a continuing circuit. The people 'forgot the LORD their God' (verse 7) and worshipped idols; consequently they...

The Bible often surprises us. While the right of women to be able to serve as leaders on equal terms with men has been fiercely fought for in our own times, in Judges 4 it is just assumed – and this at a time when we tend to think men were in charge.