The phrase “walking on water” is often used, understandably, to indicate an impossible task; so, when we are told to do something we think too hard, we might respond that “you might as well tell me to walk on water”.

Thank you for those kind words of introduction. Five years ago Nicholas Tonti-Filippini reviewed my book, Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium, for which I was very grateful. It is a pleasure, therefore, to return the favour by launching his final work, the fifth in his About Bioethics series published by Connor Court, regrettably without Nick’s physical presence with us tonight.

Jesus’ life was often hard and He mostly eschewed the limelight, preferring to preach and heal through small gestures that encouraged and persuaded rather than big ones that wowed and overwhelmed.

Our three parables this morning (Mt 13:44-52) compare the joy of finding the kingdom of heaven with the excitement people in Jesus’ world experienced on finding natural resources (like gold in a field), human inventions (like pearls set and retailed by merchants), or spiritual goods (like the ‘good fish’ sorted from the bad ones by the angels).

Taylor Swift is a household name. She’s famed for her honest, almost ‘confessional’ songs, and for an instrumental prowess that has influenced a surge in girls wanting to learn guitar.

In the Star Wars film Attack of the Clones, the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi is confronted with a rather unusual problem: he’s lost an entire planet! He knows on reliable authority that the planet exists, but it does not show up in the Jedi Archives which are supposed to be a complete record of the whole galaxy. Perplexed, Obi-Wan takes the problem to Master Yoda, the wisest of the Jedi knights.

More often than not, we are left to work out the meaning of Christ’s parables for ourselves, but this morning we have a rare occurrence:

John Donne is remembered today as a metaphysical poet, and especially for phrases such as “for whom the bell tolls” and one-liners like “Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies” and “When a man dies, [his] chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language”.