Imagine that you have organised a big feast for your daughter’s wedding and after thinking and debating about who will be on your guest list, with one week to go before the wedding, you learn that a lot of the guests you are expecting to be there start begging off and offering cheap excuses and even worse some of them won’t give a word why, they just say that they can’t turn up.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. Today, we celebrate the 25th Sunday in ordinary time year A. Today's gospel is about the generosity of an employer who gives equal pay to workers. All workers were paid one denarius a day, even though they worked in different hours.

The Gospel on this 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time presents us with Jesus’ beautiful teaching on forgiveness and an encouragement for us to forgive one another, as God forgives all our wrongdoings.

One day, I was reading my Facebook page as I always do at certain times of the day and I saw this beautiful quote, “God doesn’t say NO to our prayers. God has three answers, either he says, YES, AT A LATER TIME, or I HAVE A BETTER IDEA.

One of the most frustrating things for a farmer is to have weeds in the fields. They steal whatever nutrition is there for his grain.

Pope Francis in his Apostolic Exhortation, ‘The Joy of the Gospel’, states, “There are Christians whose lives seems like Lent without Easter”. Are we that?

With the arrival of Palm Sunday our Lenten journey is almost over. Christ’s persecution and crucifixion is still ahead of us, but the promise of his resurrection at Easter is within our sight.

This coming Sunday’s Gospel is full of drama. It tells the story of Jesus’ friend, Lazarus, who died, was buried, then raised from the dead. There are dialogues between Jesus & his disciples, and Jesus & Lazarus’ sisters, Mary & Martha, culminating in his instruction to take away the stone which closed the tomb, and then his command to the dead Lazarus to come back to life.

Here in Australia the idiom “turn something on its head” is used quite a lot, especially in sports. When a team is leading by a big score and then the opponent rallies and is now in the lead, you can hear commentators saying, “The game has been turned on its head”.

January, the beginning of a new year, can be a time of regret and reflection, mixed with optimism for the future, a time for new resolutions.