Lectionary readings for Sunday 10th May 2020 – Easter 5 (Year A)

• Acts 7:55-60
• Ps 31:1-5, 15-16
• 1 Pt 2:2-10
• Jn 14:1-14

Thank you to Jeff for our reflection today…

How blessed we are!

It may seem a strange thing to say in what, we hope, is at least the middle of the Corona pandemic.

I have come to this conclusion because of this week’s reading Acts 7: 55-60. Earlier Stephen has been trying to convince the Jewish religious leaders that they must change their ways. Stop their historic practice of persecuting & killing God’s prophets. He points out that their latest victim, Jesus, is the son of God.

Then in today’s reading Stephen has a vision of Jesus, in Heaven sitting at the right-hand side of God.

This is heretical in the eyes of the Jewish leaders and Stephen is stoned to death.

Steven became the third Christian martyr after John the Baptist and Jesus. Thousands more have followed over the centuries.

At present I am reading a novel, “A Column of Fire by Ken Follett”, set in the mid to late 1500’s. This was during the European Christian Reformation and the European Inquisition by the Roman Catholic Church. In the novel, true to history, many from both sides were martyred for their Christian beliefs.

One of Spain’s Catholic Kings, Philip 11’s, reasons for the Spanish Armada’s attempt to invade England was to remove the protestant Queen Elisabeth 1 from the English Throne. Success would have enabled him to return England to Catholicism.

A lot of sailors were martyred!

In Australia today where we are unlikely to be martyred for our Christian beliefs.

How blessed we are!

Matt Redmond sums this up perfectly in this wonderful song Blessed be your name