Reviewer: Fr Paul Clayton-Lea
Were not Our Hearts Burning With Us?
Reflections on the Weekday Gospel Readings for the Liturgical Year 2025-26
978 1 91786 928 7 • pp 324• €19.99
Make Disciples of All Nations
Reflections on the Sunday Readings for the Year of Matthew
978 1 91786 931 7 • pp 216 • €16.99
Both publications by Fr Martin Hogan and published by ACN Church Resources DAC available from www.acnchurchresources.ie
Regular readers of Intercom will be aware that it is a rare issue which doesn’t include a short homily excerpt or reflection from the pen of Fr Martin Hogan who has for many years generously allowed us to include his treasury of personal resources on a regular basis.
As those who peruse and use them know Fr Martin has a great gift for writing for the ear as well as the mind and so his homily notes and reflections unerringly manage to strike home to both homilist and listener thanks to the combination of the authors pastoral as well as academic experience and expertise.
The finely deployed use of a particular story, anecdote, literary and scholarly or artistic source to help convey the primary and occasionally obscure meaning or message of a scriptural passage allows the reader to select from a rich mine of resources for whatever suits their own particular pastoral situation or context.
Like many others I have frequently dipped into Fr Martin’s myself on those not so rare occasions when I draw a blank despite giving time and praying for inspiration over a particular or ‘difficult’ scriptural text. When doing so there is a great temptation to use them verbatim and not simply as the launching pad for one’s own reflections.
The temptation becomes even greater for this new liturgical year as Fr Martin publishes two volumes of his work which cater for both Sundays and Weekdays respectively.
In his introduction to his reflections on the weekday Gospels and Readings Fr Martin modestly asserts; Everyone who takes up this book could write a different set of reflections based on their own personal listening to the Lord’s word. The word of God that dwells in us richly (Col 3:16) can speak in a multitude of ways to each one of us.
Nevertheless it is often a challenge for some priests to find meaningful reflections even of a few words to offer a weekday congregation and Fr Martin’s contributions continue to prove a stalwart help for many of us in that regard.
The reflections in this book are based predominantly on the gospel readings for the weekdays of the coming liturgical year, 2025/26, but they also draw in the first reading when its message links with the gospel reading.
They follow the sequence of the weekdays of the liturgical year, beginning with the Monday of the first week of Advent on the 1 December 2025, and concluding with the Saturday of the thirty-fourth week of the year on 28 November 2026.
On the weekdays of any liturgical year, we read from a large proportion of all four gospels, with the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke featuring especially in Ordinary Time and the gospel of John featuring more prominently in the seasons of Lent and Easter. In and through these gospel readings, we
encounter the living word of the risen Lord to his Church. These short reflections attempt to listen to the gospel readings on their own terms, while showing how they can continue to speak to our lives today.
Fr Martin has expressed his hope that these reflections will serve as a help to personal prayer. Parish prayer groups may also find them helpful. They may also be of service to priests who seek to offer a short reflection on the readings of the day at the daily Eucharist.
Where there is a weekday Liturgy of the Word in the absence of a priest, they can be read as a reflection on the readings. On most weekdays, the same readings are proclaimed in the Church throughout the world. To read and reflect upon the readings for the weekdays of the liturgical year is to go on a spiritual journey with the universal Church.
In his Sunday resource Make Disciples of All Nations Fr Martin continues to illuminate the Gospel but also alludes to the other two readings. As he offers his efforts of listening to the Lord in his own circumstances as a disciple in a Dublin parish he encourages readers to remember the words of St Ephrem, the 4th century theologian-poet who wrote; ‘God has hidden in his word all kinds of treasures so that each one of us, wherever we meditate, may be enriched by it.
His utterance is a tree of life, which offers you blessed fruit from every side. It is like that rock which burst forth in the desert, becoming spiritual drink to everyone from all places.’
If there was an ‘Editor’s choice’ both of these publications would fit the bill.
Martin Hogan is a priest of the Diocese of Dublin. He is presently ministering in the greater Finglas parish, Dublin. He was a Scripture lecturer in Mater Dei Institute of Education (now incorporated into Dublin City University) for over thirty years. He has previously published books of reflections on the Sunday gospel readings for the liturgical years of Mark, Matthew and Luke