The Narrow Path

  Saturday, 25 October, 2025 Psalm 135 2 Kings 8:16-29 Matthew 17:14-27 The Sons Are Free (Matthew 17:26) [Jesus said] “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tax? From their sons or from others?” And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free.” Who is your king? Imagine my surprise when I discovered that our prayer-book collects for the King of England are not universally admired by Australian Anglicans! It would seem that we descendants of convicts still have a bit of a republican streak in us. But one of those prayers for the monarch teach us a lot about how to think about human authority. There is one where the priest prays that the king, remembering whose minister he is, would govern according to the teachings of Jesus. It is a helpful reminder that “there is always a bigger fish”. Even the king rules only at the pleasure of the living God. And so when Jesus asks St Pet...

  Friday, 24 October, 2025 Psalms 130; 131; 133 2 Kings 8:1-15 Matthew 17:1-13 Observance: United Nations, inaugurated 1945 Listen To Him (Matthew 7:5) [Jesus] was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” One of the great aspects of faith is trust. A faithful Christian is one who trusts God. And one of the biggest things God wants us to get through our heads is that we are to escape fear through our trust in him. Consider this story we have read today in our second lesson. The Transfiguration of our Lord is one of those big events in the Bible the Church keeps coming back to. You have probably read it (and had it read to you) many times over the years. But look at the order of things: there is a voice from the cloud that tells the disciples to listen to Jesus. Then look at the first words out of Jesus’ mouth after ...

  Thursday, 23 October, 2025 Psalms 124; 125; 126 2 Kings 7:3-20 Matthew 16:13-28 Observance: James of Jerusalem, brother of our Lord, martyr (d. c. 62) Losing And Finding (Matthew 16:25) [Jesus said] “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” What a whirlwind poor old St Peter goes through in these few short verses! He is on top of the world, the rock against which the gates of hell will nor prevail; then he is a stumbling block, no less than Satan. In various parts of the wider church, these words of Jesus about binding and loosing have come to mean many different things. You may have come across teachings about them yourself. But whatever it means, it relies on the final of today’s three sections of the second lesson. One must never get a big head. One must be willing to lose their head. In fact, one must consider their head (and the rest of them) as nothing – we must deny ourselves i...

  Wednesday, 22 October, 2025 Psalm 118:1-18 2 Kings 6:24-7:2 Matthew 16:1-12 The Sign Of Jonah (Matthew 16:4) [Jesus said] “ An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed. I wonder if we make hearing God just a bit too complicated. If, because we do not have a clear instruction manual like one you would find in a Lego kit, we think God’s communication to us is somehow mysterious, requiring some special religiosity to be able to understand. Jesus replies to those asking him for a sign by pointing out just how obvious God is being to us. He refers to that saying “red sky at night, sailor’s (or shepherd’s) delight; red sky in the morning, sailors (or shepherds) take warning.” If we all know this one, how can we find it so difficult to understand what God is saying? So what is God saying? Well, he has given us a sign: the sign of Jonah. That was a pretty obvious...

  Tuesday, 21 October, 2025 Psalms 121; 122; 123 2 Kings 6:8-23 Matthew 15:21-39 Lifting Up Our Eyes (Psalm 123:1) To you I lift up my eyes,     O you who are enthroned in the heavens! Today we get a chunk of Psalms, one after the other, all with the same superscription: “A Song Of Ascents”. They are most likely lyrics to songs that people would sing in ancient times as they went up to the temple at Jerusalem to worship the Lord. Jerusalem is up on a hill, and the temple up some more stairs after that. And so the idea of physically ascending to the Lord is closely connected to spiritual ascent. In the second of today’s three Psalms we read the line “I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord”. If you haven’t yet heard the anthem “I Was Glad” by Parry, then you’re in for a treat! It is a such a triumphant sentence. This life we lead can get so muddy and messy; our souls suffer more than enough of the scor...

  Monday, 20 October, 2025 Psalms 114; 115 2 Kings 5:15-6:7 Matthew 15:1-20 Tremble, O Earth (Psalm 114:7) Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,     at the presence of the God of Jacob When we think of the miracle of the Exodus, when Moses planted his staff in the sea and the Hebrew slaves escaped on dry land with the waters piled up on either side, I wonder how we relate this wild story with the idea of the presence of God? Something that seems to stick with me is how God told Moses to perform certain miracles in front of Pharaoh so that the Egyptians would know that God is the Lord. From God’s point of view, miracles aren’t magic tricks designed to wow paying audiences. Rather, they are there to make people see something about God. Today’s first Psalm talks about the miracle of the parting of the sea from a different point of view. The Lord, who made the sea, was dwelling with his people, and was approaching that sea...

  Saturday, 18 October, 2025 Psalm 107:1-22 2 Kings 4:38-5:14 Matthew 14:22-36 Observance: Luke, evangelist and martyr That He May Know (2 Kings 5:8) But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent to the king, saying, “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come now to me, that he may know that there is a prophet in Israel.” We see here different ways of being a human who acknowledges the existence of God. First is the military commander Naaman, who had no problem with believing in the supernatural. He had been told there was a God who heals, and went looking. Then there is the king of Israel, who had no clue what he was doing. Merely mentioning God’s name and his existence made him completely flip out; all he was worried about was himself. “Am I God?” Well, no – but that wasn’t the question. Then we have Elisha, the man of God. He was the chosen vessel through whom God would work his miracle...

  Friday, 17 October, 2025 Psalm 106:1-24 2 Kings 4:18-37 Matthew 14:1-21 Observance: Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr (d. c. 115) He Had Compassion On Them (Matthew 14:14) When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. John the Baptist, the one whom Jesus described as the greatest human being who ever lived, his own blood relative, had been murdered in a miserable prison by spiteful, wicked people. Jesus suffered a gut punch like few of us ever do. And so he retreats to a desolate place, somewhere he could sit with his heavenly Father, and pray about the great evil of this world he came to save. But we humans just can’t help ourselves. The crowds followed Jesus even to this desolate place, desolate in his misery. All of us know what this is like: we have had terrible news told to us, and we just want to hide in a dark room and cry it out. But the world keeps on spinning and people keep cal...

  Thursday, 16 October, 2025 Psalm 105:1-22 2 Kings 4:1-17 Matthew 13:44-58 Observance: Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, bishops and martyrs (d. 1553) Hearts Who Seek The Lord (Psalm 105:3) Glory in his holy name;     let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice! We hold this Psalm alongside today’s Gospel reading, happily allowing the coincidence of the two readings together on the same day to warm our hearts. The Psalmist sings of the joy of the hearts of those who seek the Lord. Meanwhile the Lord himself describes it as someone who found that great treasure, sold everything he had, and went and bought the field holding the treasure, doing so with great joy. Joy is a precious commodity at the moment. Everything around us seems to have two faces: one side presents the wonder of the generosity of God, while the other presents an easy opportunity to complain about how things could be better. This great commodi...

  Wednesday, 15 October, 2025 Psalm 104:1-25 2 Kings 3:4-27 Matthew 13:31-43 Observance: Teresa of Avila, teacher (d. 1592) Leaven, Hidden In Flour (Matthew 13:33) He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” There is so much to learn about the kingdom of heaven! Jesus just keeps throwing out these parables, describing all the different aspects about it. Today we learn another blessed truth: that it is not ostentatious. Worldly glory is not for those who want to enter the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom is spread abroad, like seeds scattered by a sower, or microscopic bits of yeast mixed through flour. Faithful Christians the world over, all doing their little bit, and all those little bits being gathered together by the Lord to make one big beautiful thing. We also see how the kingdom of heaven itself is not necessarily something we can see ...

  Tuesday, 14 October, 2025 Psalms 108; 109:20-30 2 Kings 2:15-3:3 Matthew 13:18-30 Let Both Grow Together (Matthew 13:30) “ Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” Walking along the path of Christian discipleship as one living in the real world, we often find ourselves coming into moral conflict. Smarter people than I describe it as the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy; that is, the conflict we find when the truth we know in our head seems to butt up against the truth we know by deed. We are very good at creating these conflicts: we always need to find a way to live with the fact that we have been given eternal, divine truths on human behaviour, yet none of us manage to live up to that standard perfectly. Jesus gave us a parable about weeds growing up with wheat, to describe the fact that in the ...

  Monday, 13 October, 2025 Psalms 101; 102:1-11 2 Kings 2:1-14 Matthew 13:1-17 Dwelling And Ministering (Psalm 101:6) I will look with favour on the faithful in the land,     that they may dwell with me; he who walks in the way that is blameless     shall minister to me. So often we are confronted with the problem of the question of evil. Why; from where; and for what purpose is there evil in the world and in our lives? I have heard it described as either the problem or the question. What we get in the written revelation of God is not really a solution or an answer. Rather, what we find instead is a response to evil. In this Psalm we hear, quite clearly, echoes of the pre-incarnate Christ. The One who would come to earth, live perfectly, and gather God’s people together and up into ineffable bliss through his passion, death and resurrection. God’s response to evil is gather his people to himself, and cut ...

  Saturday, 11 October, 2025 Psalms 95; 96 2 Kings 1 Matthew 12:38-50 My Brother, Sister, Mother (Matthew 12:50) [Jesus said] “ For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” There is a very good reason as to why, out of all the mobster movies ever made, The Godfather still holds up as the best. In my humble opinion, it is because, out of every other contender, that movie emphasises the importance of the family bond more than the rest. There is something about a family relationship that is weightier, more durable, more assumed than any other type of relationship. Jesus refers to people as his family: those who do the will of his Father in heaven. Those people are his family; the relationship is assumed, maybe too much at times, maybe not enough at others. It is deeper, it is a relationship with very deep roots. According to our Articles of Religion, Anglicans believe that it is those who are saved by faith in...

  Friday, 10 October, 2025 Psalms 92; 93 1 Kings 22:29-53 Matthew 12:22-37 Good To Sing Praise (Psalm 92:1) It is good to give thanks to the Lord ,     to sing praises to your name, O Most High; Singing is good for you. Don’t take science’s word for it; the Bible tells us! One of my favourite types of pastoral service to hold is when I visit aged care homes. It is good for the workers, because they wheel in as many residents as they can, since it gives them about an hours’ break they normally wouldn’t. And it is good for the residents, because it is the type of service where we usually just hear some comforting words of Jesus, say some prayers for our loved ones, and sing a whole bunch. And singing is good for you! The church music debate rages on and will probably never be settled this side of eternity. But we all have our favourite sacred songs, favourites because we like singing them. And so sing them, often, and loudly...

  Thursday, 9 October, 2025 Psalm 89:39-53 1 Kings 22:1-28 Matthew 12:9-21 Hope In His Name (Matthew 12:21) ...and in his name the Gentiles will hope. I hope for a lot of things. And I’m sure you do too – hope that that sore tooth holds out just a bit longer; hope that our children will manage to do alright in life; hope that interest rates don’t rise too much; hope that we might have KFC for dinner. Hope is about something that is yet to come that we look forward to. There is always more to hope, but that is where I am for the time being, at least. All those things I listed earlier, things for which we might hope, are what the Bible would call a “dead” hope. That is, they have an end point. The thing will happen, and then we move on with life. But in Jesus we have what the Bible calls a “living” hope: that is, as Jesus lives, so too does our hope. When we get what we hope for – to see Jesus face to face – then life won’t just go on as usual. T...

  Wednesday, 8 October, 2025 Psalm 89:1-18 1 Kings 21 Matthew 11:25-12:8 Among The Heavenly Beings (Psalm 89:6) For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord ?     Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord? Just last week we celebrated the observance of Michael and All Angels. Well, I hope you did – one of the great advantages of being a lower-case-c catholic is that we have so many excuses for a party. You may have noticed that almost all artistic depictions of St Michael the Archangel involves him holding a sword and sticking it into the Devil. Of course these are fantastical artistic imaginings of invisible spiritual matters, but I do like it for one reason: it reminds us of just how much higher God is than everything else. Even the slaying of Satan is left to a solider; God is above all who are around him, greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones. Elevating God in our understanding is not only accep...

  Tuesday, 7 October, 2025 Psalm 90 1 Kings 20:26-43 Matthew 11:12-24 Mighty Works (Matthew 11:21) [Jesus said] “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.” I find myself going back and forth between cold and warm when it comes to the idea that certain cultures valorise the holding back of emotional expression. Sometimes we ought to feel comfortable letting out our emotions. Other times it is more appropriate to keep them in check. Perhaps we are just yet to find the right balance. Whether we express our emotions or not, being honest to them and living with integrity is probably more important. As physical pain draws our attention to issues that require medical attention, emotions can draw our attention to things in our spirit that need reflecting upon. When Jesus pronounces his woes on certain cities, you have to wonder ...

  Monday, 6 October, 2025 Psalm 86 1 Kings 20:1-25 Matthew 11:1-11 Observance: William Tyndale, biblical scholar (d. 1536) Not Offended (Matthew 11:6) [Jesus said] “ And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” How could anyone be offended by Jesus? He makes the blind receive their sight; he makes the lame to walk; he cleanses lepers; he makes the deaf hear; he raises the dead to life; and he preaches the good news to the poor. He does all things well. Even the sound of his name is pleasing. The only name given to earth by which we may be saved; the name at which every knee bows. Through his resurrection we have been born again to a living hope, to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for us. Though we have not seen him, we love him. Though we do not see him now, we believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. (1 Peter 1:3-9) Blessed is the one who is not offended by Jesus...

  Saturday, 4 October, 2025 Psalm 80 1 Kings 19:9-21 Matthew 10:28-42 Observance: Francis of Assisi, friar and preacher (d. 1226) The Shining Face Of God (Psalm 80:19) Restore us, O Lord God of hosts!     Let your face shine, that we may be saved! The Bible is filled with blessings, and it is a good practise for the Christian to try and remember as many of them as possible, and pull them out often to bless others. One of our favourites has to be the Aaronic blessing: The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-26) This idea of the shining face of God is repeated in today’s Psalm, and repeated often; if the Psalm is a song, then this is it’s chorus. A shining face is such suggestive language. Is it shining because of the light that pours out of God? Is the shine pointing towa...

  Friday, 3 October, 2025 Psalm 78:16-38 1 Kings 18:41-19:8 Matthew 10:16-27 Yet In His Compassion (Psalm 78:38) Yet he, being compassionate,     atoned for their iniquity     and did not destroy them; he restrained his anger often     and did not stir up all his wrath. Dealing with toddlers really makes one appreciate the patience of our heavenly Father. It is so easy to want to rant and rave, and it is not as if the parent is without good reason. Yet if they exercise patience, long-suffering, and dwell on their love for their child instead of the anger at disobedience, the relationship binds together in such a way that it can never be broken. Such is God with us. He restrains his anger, and does not stir up all his wrath. Rather he, being compassionate, was born of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit and became truly human. Being found in human form he humbled himself, even to deat...

  Thursday, 2 October, 2025 Psalm 77 1 Kings 18:20-40 Matthew 10:1-15 A Diligent Search (Psalm 77:6) I said, “Let me remember my song in the night;     let me meditate in my heart.”     Then my spirit made a diligent search. A recurrent theme across the Psalms is the honest appraisal of human misery. It happens, and can happen pretty badly for us. Does the Lord’s steadfast love ever cease? Do his promises ever come to an end? The pathway out of this state is laid out for us in this Psalm. It requires intent and effort; a meditation of the heart, and a diligent search of the spirit. We must keep in mind all that the Lord has done for us. When we do so, we discover that no matter how awful things get for us, God can and will overcome. He has proved it time and time again, and will prove it again for us. It is not a simple thing to return to a place of spiritual life; but it is guaranteed, if we follow the...