Fr Peter Wood joins us for this week’s reflections and today reads from Luke’s Gospel (13: 18-21) in which Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed or the yeast that makes bread rise.

Fr Peter says this Gospel helps us ponder the mystery of the kingdom of God. He says when we think of the beautiful place in which we live there is something that attracts us to a place that truly fulfills us and when we sit back and look back at the surroundings and take in what is beautiful it helps us grasp this mystery.

As we know, human words cannot truly describe this particular place. We know that our language is very limited in being able to decipher ‘what is it like?’. Questions that help us to think about the kingdom of God will hopefully make us truly desire the place that our Lord Jesus had come to open this kingdom to us.

Fr Peter says, we heard two questions at the beginning of this Gospel, “What is the Kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it with? The first question may not be easy to understand but maybe the second one is… what shall I compare it with? He says, we began this reflection thinking of our own life and the places we’ve been, whether it be here on the coast or inland. There is something beautiful about the country in which we live.  There are beautiful aspects to those places which truly capture our imagination. At times, it is very limiting and restrictive trying to come up with such an explanation, but we can imagine what it is like by thinking think of those memories or experiences wherever we have been to. This, in some way, may help us to come to know and understand what the kingdom of God is for us.

As we know, we have no right to enter such a kingdom but, Fr Peter says, it is an invitation to us to  accept the will of God for our lives and to be able to place ourselves in his presence and to be truly aware that by doing so, if we truly desire to do his will, we will, hopefully, experience a kingdom that is beautiful; a kingdom that is good; a kingdom that is true; a kingdom that our Lord Jesus came to open up for us.