My dear friends,
I am delighted to report that, following our collections in the orange buckets at the back of our churches during Lent and Eastertide, I was able to send £1,000 to St John Eye Hospital, Jerusalem.
The original hospital opened on 4 December 1882. It is run by the Order of St John, headed by HM The King. It is a Christian foundation, which seeks to put the Gospel into practice by offering eye care to Christians, Muslims and Jews, irrespective of faith, ethnicity, or ability to pay.
Over the years, the original hospital in Jerusalem has widened the scope of its activities: it now comprises a series of hospitals and clinics across the Holy Land, as well as a mobile outreach and screening service which brings eye care to remote rural areas. Together, all the hospitals and clinics are known as the St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group (SJEHG).
So far in 2026, over 60,000 patients have been seen across the SJEHG hospitals and clinics, including examinations of over 12,500 children through outreach and vision screening programmes.
Despite the extremely challenging conditions, SJEHG’s work in Gaza has continued. Around 1,000 patients a week are being treated in Gaza, and they have renovated the outpatient unit and two operating theatres at their Gaza City Hospital.
Thank you for your generosity, which has given a lovely boost to the SJEHG doctors and nurses in the Holy Land. It has also helped make a big difference to the lives of the patients and their families and is greatly appreciated. It is a wonderful, practical way of celebrating the Lord’s Resurrection: the triumph of light over darkness.
With my love and prayers,
Father Robert.
Trinity Sunday – 31st May 2026
One of the things we have to take on board as Christians is revelation. Now, I don’t mean the last book of the New Testament, which is called Revelation. Rather, I mean the idea that God has chosen to reveal Himself to mankind.
Today, Trinity Sunday, we celebrate the fact that God has freely revealed to us that He is the Holy Trinity: One God, comprised of the Three persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
We see the Holy Trinity throughout the Gospels: think for example of the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel brought a message to the Blessed Virgin Mary from God the Father, and when she answered ‘Be it unto me according to your word’, God the Son was conceived in her womb by the work (‘overshadowing’) of God the Holy Spirit. Think, too, of Christ’s Baptism, when the crowds on the river bank heard the voice of God the Father and saw God the Holy Spirit hovering, in the form of a dove, over God the Son, Jesus Christ.
The early Church had to work and pray over many years in order to formulate the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. We need to remember that the Jews in ancient Israel were fiercely monotheistic – they believed in a single God – and in this way were quite unlike the nations around them, who worshipped a great range of deities.
All the Jews knew that the Messiah would come one day. The difficulty was that they had the wrong expectations of him. They expected the Messiah to be a sort of charismatic warrior-prince, who would boot out the hated Roman overlords, sort out all their problems, and inaugurate a period of greatness for the Jewish kingdom. A carpenter from Nazareth was the last person they expected the Messiah to be. More than this, the Lord’s disciples were flummoxed when it began to dawn on them that Jesus was in fact the Incarnate Son of God, someone who referred to God as ‘my Father’ and taught his followers to call God Abba, which means something like Daddy or Papa. Then, there was their experience of Pentecost – as we heard last Sunday – and the strange and dramatic outpouring of God the Holy Spirit upon the disciples.
The first Christians had to work out what all this meant. They had to adapt already existing words and ideas, and sometimes they had to invent new ones. They came to see that there is after all only one God, not three Gods – the Jews got that right – but that God is made up of three ‘Persons’. Firstly, there is the Person of God the Father, who is the Creator and source of everything that exists. Secondly, there is the Person of God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Redeemer of the world. Thirdly, there is the Person of God the Holy Spirit, who guides us, makes us holy, and conveys the love of God to us.
For the sake of convenience I have listed the three Persons as ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’, but in truth they are all equal. The three Persons are also each quite distinct, and are not to be confused; and yet whoever partakes of one partakes of all three. Together, the three Persons make up the one ‘Godhead’: the Three in One, and One in Three.
Through the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, we catch a glimpse what God thinks of us, His children. He shows each of us that He is our Creator: He loves us so very much he has caused each of us to come into being. God the Son came to earth, died upon the cross in sacrifice for our sins and rose again on the third day, thinking of each of us, wanting and willing us to be saved and to enjoy eternal life in the kingdom of Heaven. God the Holy Spirit is with us, day by day, surrounding us with God’s care, whatever may happen to us in a fallen and sinful world.
Trinity Sunday, rightly understood, is a celebration – a celebration of the love of God for each and all of us, His children. One Divine love, if you like, expressed in three ways.