Rev elations

Justice (Jeremiah 31:27-34, Luke 18:1-8) Justice is one of the great themes of the Old Testament and remains a key theme in human experience. We all hate, on a personal level, to be dealt with in a way that seems unfair; we are alert to the minor injustices that we suffer: ‘That person got served first at the bar, but I’ve been waiting longer’, for instance. But, justice is concerned with more than minor instances of unfairness. On a communal level we rely and depend upon a criminal justice system that we hope and expect to deliver justice – but we know that it too is a fallible, human system. The long and arduous fight of the people of Liverpool to secure justice for the Hillsborough victims makes us deeply aware of the forces that seek to prevent, or delay justice being done. The Judge in our New Testament reading denied and delayed justice to the widow simply out of laziness. Only when it became more effort to deny justice than to give it, did he change his behaviour. J...

This week one of my congregation members invited me to their place of work. It is not an invitation I get very often, but one that I will certainly be encouraging from others! Most people probably wonder what a Vicar gets up to all week, we are regularly greeted with the familiar: ‘but don’t you only work on Sunday’s’ jest – but I suppose that for most of us the working life of other people is pretty much a mystery. Perhaps you can reflect on your own working life experience for a moment – where has it taken you and what have your learnt? The person I visited happened to work in engineering and he took me around the factory floor, meeting the people who worked there and showing me the things they were making. As someone with a mind completely unsuited to anything practical, I was amazed and awed at the things that other people can do. It got me thinking about the way in which most of us have, in relative terms, quite a small frame of reference: we go to the same shops, the sam...