It’s now the start of another liturgical year. This year is Year B, meaning that most of the gospel readings for Sundays will come from the Gospel according to Mark and also a good number of Sundays will be coming from the Gospel according to John.

As I write this message, we are about to head into Advent and a new Church year. It’s always a good to time to slow down, reflect, look back on the year that’s been and look ahead to what is to come.

In Advent, we look ahead to the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ and to his second coming. We recount the great story of Salvation History and God’s relationship with humanity, which reached its fulfilment when God became human in the form of the Christ child.

I can remember being very impressed with the celebration of the Feast of Christ the King when I was in the Seminary.

As I walked with my confreres from the parish to our community after Mass, it struck me that we were like the two disciples on their way to Emmaus. Like the two disciples, my confreres and I have had the same experience but whilst their experience was the death of Jesus, ours was growing up in a continent that has been stricken by poverty.

We thank God that we have taken the vow of evangelical poverty. However, we did sincerely ask ourselves: “How poor are our Religious in Africa compared with the local people?”

Imagine you got the windfall of a lifetime. You’ve just won the top prize in lotto, which was worth millions of dollars. What would you do with this windfall?

As we draw closer to the end of the Liturgical Year the readings of the day invite us to be awake and alert for the coming of the end times. 

There is a saying that, “one ceases to be humble if one is boasting of one’s humility.”

The scholars of the Jewish Law at the time of Jesus continued to argue among themselves as to which is the greatest of the 613 commandments of God that they identified in the Jewish writings.

In today’s Gospel we have Jesus being challenged again by some of the Jewish leaders (Pharisees and Herodians are mentioned specifically) who would like to catch him in error or put him in a difficult situation so that people would not listen to and trust him.

The Gospel of this Sunday focuses on the allegory of the owner of the vineyard and his dealings with the tenants, or its other way around, how the tenants treat the vineyard and the owner’s servants.