Here are the final words of our New Testament reading today, from Romans: ‘The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

In his Epistle to these same people, the Christians of Rome, St Ignatius of Antioch wrote: ‘Though I am alive while I write to you, yet I am eager to die. My love has been crucified, and there is no fire in me desiring to be fed; but there is within me a water that lives and speaks, saying to me inwardly, Come to the Father. I have no delight in corruptible food, nor in the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became afterwards of the seed of David  and Abraham; and I desire the drink of God, namely His blood, which is incorruptible love  and eternal life’.

May these same deep desires fill our own hearts, and may we know that living water within, that ‘lives and speaks’, which is eternal life.

May God bless you this day.