Jesus makes reference to Deuteronomy and the other books of the Pentateuch in todays homily to his disciples. Not one jot, not one iota are to be forgotten. These 'diacritics' in the written form of Hebrew, I am told, make a huge difference to the meaning of words: they were of key importance.

But - Jesus has a marked directness of application of all those laws. For example, we must love our neighbour to the same level as love of God (Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:4 in Mathew 9:13). This keeps all of the meaning of the old law, but makes it clear that it all must be applied. One can not pick and choose what one likes to live by!

Note however that an over-legalistic, harsh application of the law is equally wrong. Todays reading is a good example from Deuteronomy explaining how the Law allows us to Love and to be Loved by God.

The Law of the Lord is Perfect - it revives the soul.(Psalm 19).

Any community built on Love, will find that forgiveness is key to that Love. The parable uses outrageous sums of money - 10,000 Talents would make the UK's GDP look trivial - to show how important it is that we forgive each other.

It does not mean that forgiveness is easy - we know that it is not. But it is essential, otherwise we are going to be judged by the standard of forgiveness that we can muster. We have the opportunity every Mass during the penitential rite. We ask each of our neighbours to pray for our forgiveness, and we depend upon each other to do so.

Jesus is starting his 3 years ministry in Nazareth - the town he grew up in. He begins by reminding them of the facts of life - telling truth to power, as we might say. It is not appreciated! Remember that this is how (in Luke's account) he starts out: he has not yet built up a reputation. Missing from todays' short reading, before this Jesus has read the prophesy from Isiah about himself, and tells them that the prophesy is about him, and about now.

His audience will have known him, and we might given the same circumstances not be able to accept the words he said.

But he is protected from harm, and slips away, leaving his home town and heading off into Galilee and we next hear of him in Capernaum, where he begins to heal people.

When Jesus was complained against for ‘welcoming sinners and eating with them’ he replied by telling three parables.  Of them probably the best known is the last, the story of a father and his two sons.

The younger one is a wastrel, a ne’er-do-well, who is so contemptuous of his father that he actively hopes for his death: he demands the inheritance he was one day meant to receive. [cf Hebrews 9.16-18] When he has worked his way through the packet of money he is given, though, he finds himself in the wretched, degrading (and un-kosher!) work of feeding pigs.

Yet the elder brother, dutiful and hard-working but seething with barely-disguised rage and resentment, reminds us that there is more than one way of showing contempt and disdain for the gifts lavished upon us.  Neither son can ‘win’ his father’s affection: love is a gift, not wage or reward.  The younger son seems to have begun to grasp that truth by the end of the story; as for his brother, we are left to hope and pray.

David (c.500-c.589) was probably born at Henfynyw, the son of St Non and the grandson of Ceredig ap Cunedda, king of Ceredigion.  At the Synod of Brefi, around 550, his vigorous preaching against Pelagianism (the heretical teaching of Pelagius and his followers that stressed the essential goodness of human beings and the freedom of the human will) led to his election by acclamation as Bishop of the region of Mwnyw, now known as St David’s.  He is said to have founded ten monasteries, among them Menevia and Glastonbury, where extremes of asceticism were practiced.   He is said to have travelled as far as Brittany and Cornwall.  Stories of his miracles were well known throughout the Middle Ages.  His motto ‘Do the little things well’ remains apt advice for us.

‘The arm of flesh will fail you; ye dare not trust your own’ a once-popular hymn declared in an apt condensation and paraphrase of this reading from the prophet Jeremiah.  

Alongside his scepticism about human achievement, the prophet reminds us that our hearts need to be educated, to be formed.  ‘The heart is more devious than any other thing’ he writes pessimistically.  But the heart (which of course in Hebrew thought is the centre of thinking and decision-making) can be taught, and when it has learnt devotion to the things of God, the heart can bring peace, refreshment and fruitfulness to human life.

The prophet reminds us of the inescapable judgement of God, who will give every person ‘what his conduct and actions deserve’   In the teaching of all the prophets, doing the will of God is not confined to obedience to ritual prescriptions: to love and serve the Lord entails on us a responsibility to attend to the needs of the least and the lost amongst us.

Christian interpreters usually list four ‘major’ prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.  (Jewish readers don’t usually class Daniel as a prophet.)  Jeremiah’s sustained melancholy makes him particularly apt reading for the season of Lent.

Jeremiah insisted that the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile of the best and brightest to captivity in Babylon were the inexorable will of God himself, a punishment visited on his people for their sins and apostasy.  Interspersed through the book of Jeremiah are autobiographical anecdotes which reveal that Jeremiah wasn’t a popular figure; indeed he only barely escaped the death penalty and only survived being thrown down a disused cistern by a dramatic rescue.  He contended against kings, priests, false prophets and the nation itself to proclaim a divine message which he complained burned within him. [20.7-18]

The book of Jeremiah as we have it is a bit of a jumble, with the various oracles not always in chronological order.   But though his words often seem harsh and bitter there is a fundamental thread of hope that runs through them: the prophet’s conviction that the Lord’s punishment of his people would come to an end, and that out of their travails would emerge a New Covenant (New Testament), ‘since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.’  [31.31-34]

The book of Isaiah as we have it in our Bibles is a pasted-together compilation of the writings of at least two, and probably four or more prophets who lived across two centuries.

The original, 8^th-Century, Isaiah, to whose reputation later prophets evidently attached themselves, was a member of the hereditary Temple priesthood, a man of lofty vision with a surpassing sense of the transcendence of God.  He displayed an acute awareness of the consequence of sin to the relationship between God and human beings.  Despite his connexion to the Temple, though, he concentrates not simply on ritual violations but rather understood sin as pervading the inequalities of social life.  He is fearless in his denunciations: ‘A sinful nation, a people weighed down with guilt, a breed of wrong-doers, perverted son.’ [1.4] is his description of his country.  (A rabbinic tradition has it that Isaiah was put to death by King Manasseh by being sawn in half as a punishment for Isaiah’s reproofs of the nation.)

Equally, though, Isaiah sees God’s offer of forgiveness: ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.’ The prophet sees a coming age in which a remnant of the people who survive the fall of the nation of Judah will survive to rebuild peace and justice.

Concerning each of us there is an outward self, a face we show to the world, and an inner self, a ‘heart’ as the Scriptures conveniently summarise it, which is hidden from most of those who encounter us, even from those closest to us, sometimes even hidden from ourselves, but which is open and exposed to the gaze of Almighty God.

Sometimes, though, even the most experienced gambler, the most practised liar, the most lauded actor, cannot disguise the thoughts of his heart.  Sometimes you only have to look at a person's face to recognise his mendacity, his cowardice, his duplicity.  ‘Integrity, Lord, is yours; ours the look of shame we wear today’.  

Coming to a deepened Christian faith sometimes gets expressed in terms that sound much like play-acting; we hear ourselves be encouraged to 'clean up our act', to 'improve our appearance', to 'put a better face on'.  But the right outcome of the searching moral inventory that Lent demands of us is not that we wash, repair, and rejuvenate.  What is called for is the harrowing of our very hearts.  And what we find when we permit a wise and uncompromising God to dig amongst the hidden contours of our hearts is that he is fundamentally a father, keen above all else to see us returned home, that he is fundamentally compassionate, keen above all else to pour into our laps riches beyond our wildest imaginings. 

"Let us offer each other a sign of peace" are words I am now asked to say at Mass, just before we receive communion together. They stem from todays Gospel in which Jesus urges us to make peace with one another, over even the trivial things like name calling. Way more difficult and demanding than ancient jewish law such as 'thy shall not kill', Christ is concerned if we are even feeling angry with another.

Hopefully, and in practical terms, we come to church having made peace with our neighbours on the way in.. but that moment before we come to the altar together to share in the healing gifts of the Eucharist, we say publicly 'Peace be with you' and shake hands (or any other suitable, and reverent greeting to each other). Far from being a moment of bustle and distracting noise just before the high point of the Mass, the sign of peace has the power to bring us all to a calm, long peace and finally, ready to receive Jesus who can and does heal the hurts that lie within us.