SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

  The title "Lamb of God" (introduced in John 1: 29) carries immense theological weight because it synthesises multiple foundational themes from the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), acting as the culmination of God's redemptive plan. It signifies Jesus as the ultimate, voluntary, and perfect substitute whose death atones for sin and brings liberation. The theological weightage rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures are manifold. The Lamb Provided by God: When Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son; he stated to the curious Isaac, "God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering" (Genesis 22:8). God substituted a ram caught in a thicket for Isaac, establishing the concept of substitutionary atonement. Jesus is seen as the "Lamb of God," the divine provision that replaces the need for human sacrifice, acting as a substitute for humanity.  The Passover Lamb:  The Israelites were saved from the plague on the firstborn by applying the blood of an unblem...

 Here is a story from the margins of the infancy narrative (Luke 2: 36-40). Prophetess Anna appears at the threshold where the Christmas story fades and the chronicle of the adult Jesus begins, positioned after the presentation at the temple and before the boy lost amongst the scholars. From the tribe of Asher—a lineage barely whispered in scripture—she emerges: a woman, a widow, advanced in years. Anna had kept her hopes alive; she looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem. Jesus is brought to the temple for the rite of purification and presentation. Anna recognised him at once and began to speak of him to everyone around; she was perhaps the first proclaimer of the gospel in the temple. This passage acknowledges a great truth: people from the margins of society—the poor, the widowed, and the outsider—are often the first and fastest to recognise and speak aloud the truth. The people at the centre are busy maintaining the status quo, and defend their space, rituals, doctr...

 Freedom and privilege may appear similar on the surface—both grant us the ability to act—but they diverge fundamentally in their nature and consequences. Freedom is progressive. When we exercise true freedom, we take a step forward into possibility. We move beyond our circumstances without requiring someone else to step back. Freedom expands the circle of human dignity; it creates space where there was none before. The formerly oppressed person who gains freedom and uses it to build, create, and flourish exemplifies this principle. Their advancement doesn't demand another's diminishment. Privilege, however, operates through a different logic—one rooted in hierarchy and reciprocity of harm. Privilege isn't simply having advantages; it becomes problematic when it functions as permission to replicate the very dynamics that once hurt us. This is where privilege reveals its manipulative character: it positions someone at the receiving end of actions they cannot refuse or esca...

  Israel , and the Jewish people were proud of their temple, Jerusalem city, and even the city wall. While singing hosanna to Jesus, who was making his meek entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, they must have also sung of the magnificent temple, and expected triumphant victory. Some even asks Jesus to ask them to be silent, lest the Romans get provoked. Their priorities were all over the place. Jesus looks on the city Jerusalem and wept over it ( Luke 19: 41-44 ). Jesus does not see their achievements and success as real victory and success—and that is a painful reality. Our successes are not successes in the sight of God is a subtle reality that we conveniently don't see or acknowledge. His tears fell because of what the city had failed to become. As its name suggests, Jerusalem is ‘the city of peace’—and it was given all the opportunities to be—prophets, the temple, a fortified city etc. But it made a mockery of it all. And gradually it would even kill its Saviour. Some had support...

 There is something unsettling about this parable ( Luke 19: 11-28 ) that we must not rush past. A nobleman goes away to be appointed king, and before leaving, he calls ten servants and gives each of them ten pounds each; and says simply, " Do business with these until I come back." The story unfolds; the man gets appointed as king and returns and calls in the servants to present the account of their business. The first servant has made ten pounds more. The second, five. But the third has wrapped his pound in a cloth and hidden it away, returning it unused, untouched, exactly as it was given. The greatest talent is the talent to use a talent. The master doesn't give these servants his money to keep safe. He doesn't ask them to guard it, protect it, and preserve it unchanged. The biggest gift is not the money or talent given, but the power and authority to use, to put into circulation, to risk, and to engage with it. The name of that talent is trust, courage, generosi...

  Zacchaeus over years has distanced himself: he distanced from his own people through collaboration with the Romans . He broke away from the community that formed him, named him, prayed over him as a child. He distanced from his conscience through the accumulation of wealth extracted from the vulnerable—wealth extracted from the vulnerable creates its own insulation, the more you have, the less you must feel. You are afraid to come in touch with your conscience. Now when the time comes to meet Jesus he again distances himself from that possibility by climbing a tall sycamore tree ( Luke 19: 1-10 ). Short people think of walking to the front to see and be seen, but Zacchaeus ran away on to a sycamore tree. He climbs. He creates distance once more. The sycamore tree is not just a solution to his short stature; it is the culmination of his entire life's distancing. From the safety of the tall tree, he can observe without being observed, see without being seen, and remain a spectato...

 In the crowd at the scene of the blind man of Jericho ( Luke 18: 35-43 ) three kinds of voices surrounded the blind beggar. These same voices perhaps echo in every crowd and groupings. First, there are those who sit beside us in our darkness. They are helpless, just as we are helpless. They know what it means to be stuck, to feel powerless, to wait by the roadside while life passes by. These are our companions in struggle. Second, there are the messengers of hope. These are the people who lean in and whisper: " Jesus is passing by ." They point toward possibilities we cannot yet see. They tell us that change is near, that help has arrived, that this moment—right now—could be different from all the moments before. Third, there are the silencers. "Be quiet!" they shout. "Know your place. Don't make a scene. Accept your situation." These voices try to keep us small, to maintain order, to preserve the way things have always been. The blind man of Jericho...

 Luke 21: 5-19 may be the least consoling words from a man who preached peace, compassion, and love. most popular preachers and writers try to fix a timetable for eschatological times from it. It in fact does not indicate any time, perhaps there is no common time that is applicable to all. It is not about predicting timetable but for forming character, for the passage ends saying, through your endurance you shall save your soul.      Luke penned his gospel around 85 CE, a decade and a half after the Roman legions had reduced Jerusalem and its magnificent Temple to rubble. One can scarcely imagine the trauma that reverberated through the early Christian communities—the very stones that had seemed eternal, the sacred spaces where God's presence had dwelt, now scattered and profaned. Surely, many whispered, this must be the end. The apocalypse had arrived. Yet Luke's response to this existential crisis reveals a pastoral wisdom that transcends his particular histori...

 Once Christopher Coelho OFM, an artist, author, and composer was traveling in a bus in India. At a bus stand, a young man selling combs came to him to sell a comb. The man insisted that Christopher buys a comb. Pointing the combs to Christopher he began the conversation saying, ‘one for you sir.’ Christopher removed his cap and he was completely bald. They both had a smile. The comb seller did not give up, he said, ‘one for your daughter sir.’ Christopher said, ‘I have no daughter.’ ‘Then one for your wife sir’, said the man. Christopher said firmly, ‘I don't have one’. The comb seller still did not give up, ‘then please sir, buy one for me.’ In spite of its uselessness to him, because of the sheer persistence of the man the 'bald priest' finally bought a comb. In Luke's Gospel, Christ presents us with a striking parable: a widow, marginalised and powerless in her society, approaches an unjust judge repeatedly, demanding justice. This judge, by his own admission, neith...

 The passage from Luke 17: 26-37 presents us with one of Scripture's most unsettling paradoxes: the people of Noah's generation perished not because they were committing extraordinary evils, but because they were living extraordinarily ordinary lives. They ate, they drank, they married—all legitimate activities, all necessary for human existence. Yet Jesus uses this very normalcy as a warning of spiritual catastrophe —you are called to be much more than just eating, drinking, and making merry. What made their destruction inevitable was not the activities themselves, but the totalising absorption in them. They had become so enclosed within the immediate that they lost the capacity to perceive the ultimate. The floodwaters rising around them were not merely meteorological but metaphysical —they represented the consequences of a society that had made comfort its compass and self-interest its creed. This is the danger Jesus warns against: not dramatic apostasy, but a kind of sp...

 We live in an age where everything is packaged, marketed, and sold—including salvation itself. The Kingdom of God has been reduced to a commodity, advertised like any other product on the shelf: "Buy now, save later." Religious entrepreneurs peddle the divine in readymade cans and packets, promising delivery of what can never be transported because it has never left. How attractive the drama of a distant future becomes—the Second Coming , the Last Day , the final vindication where we emerge as winners! Business-minded preachers have built empires on this postponement, keeping the Kingdom perpetually out of reach, always just beyond the horizon. Where there are dead bodies, vultures gather. And where there is spiritual hunger, middlemen multiply. But Jesus spoke a sentence that demolishes this entire commercial enterprise: "The kingdom of God is within you" ( Luke 17: 20-25 ). Consider the design of our existence: eyes that look outward, noses that smell outward, ...

 There exists a beautiful paradox in the role of the spiritual teacher: to be a bridge that teaches others they need no bridge. Jesus embodied this contradiction with extraordinary grace—serving as a middleman whose ultimate purpose was to make himself unnecessary. When we approach an enlightened presence , we encounter not comfort, but conflagration. Jesus did not offer easy answers or distant promises; he brought an immediate, transformative fire that consumed everything false within those who truly drew near. This fire is indiscriminate and complete: It burns away negative desires—our hatreds, our resentments, and our fears. It burns away positive desires—even our spiritual ambitions and holy longings . It burns away hope itself—that postponement of life into some imagined tomorrow. What remains when everything burns? Only the eternal present , the naked now, stripped of past regrets and future anxieties. "The kingdom of God is within you" ( Luke 17: 25-30 ), —is perhap...

 At the heart of human existence lies a fundamental choice: do we invest ourselves in what passes away, or in what endures? The Gospel of Luke 16: 9-13 speaks of this plainly. It tells us we cannot serve both wealth and God—we cannot love both the temporary and the eternal. Our lives ultimately reflect what we choose to love most. The temporary includes everything that will not last: our money, our status, our possessions, our physical strength, even our ideologies and religious institutions. All of these will fade. The eternal, by contrast, encompasses what transcends time: compassion, mercy, truth, kindness, and genuine human connection. We naturally become attached to temporary things. Some people, like the Buddha, awaken early and let go, beginning a journey towards what truly matters. Others only turn to the eternal when the temporary fails them—when success eludes them or when what they've built crumbles. Sometimes it takes loss to make us look beyond. St. Francis of Assisi w...

 When Francis of Assisi told the pope that the gospel itself was his Rule, he wasn't being mystical or abstract. He was being ruthlessly practical. Imagine if someone asked you today, "What's your life philosophy?" and you answered, "I just try to do what Jesus actually said to do." It sounds simple, almost naive. But that's exactly the point Francis was making—and exactly why it's so challenging. Richard Rohr in his reflection, Francis and the Gospel , describes how the teachings of Francis of Assisi became the foundation of Franciscan spirituality . Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) began his community with a clear intention: “The Rule and the life of the Friars Minor is to simply live the gospel.” The first Rule (the guide for the community’s way of life) that he started writing around 1209 was little more than a collection of New Testament passages. When Francis sent it off to Rome, the pope looked at it and said, “This is no Rule. This is just th...

  In Richard Rohr 's essay,  Franciscan Alternative Orthodoxy , a striking claim emerges: Francis was not limited to the Catholic Church of his time, which gravitated around sound doctrines and orthodoxy. Francis directed his gaze towards horizons the institutional Church of his era had ceased to contemplate. Through his prophetic witness and unwavering commitment to embodying the gospel, he forged what Rohr terms an "alternative orthodoxy "—a living tradition that would flow through Franciscan spirituality for centuries to come. The Franciscan alternative orthodoxy is a path that leads through suffering into solidarity, and through practice into the profound knowledge that comes only from doing. One of the earliest biographical accounts preserves Francis's instruction to his first friars: "You only know as much as you do." This simple maxim contained a revolution. By elevating action, practice, and lived witness above theological speculation, Francis init...