The Gospel of Mark is generally accepted as the earliest of the four accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus. Central to Mark's portrait of Jesus is an emphasis on his healing presence among the people of God - a sign of the living and active presence of God, offering not only physical healing but completeness and restoration of spirit in the midst of brokenness and pain.

For Mark, this is the God revealed by Jesus in his public ministry: a God driven by an obsessive persistence to reach out to people in healing, sustenance and companionship. One of the ways we learn from the long teaching tradition of our church is by listening and sharing the Scriptures, broken for us each Sunday at Mass, offered to us by faithful preaching of the Word of God or by thoughtful reflection in classroom and other settings.

The task of preachers, teachers and commentators is somehow to bring the selected readings to life so that they connect with our lives as we gather to worship, to listen, to be strengthened and encouraged in our life of faith week by week.

This new series of reflections on the Sunday Gospels in the year of Mark are not concerned primarily to be a commentary on the text but on the message of the text; their purpose is not so much to inform as to inspire. The reflections by a master craftsman are written to unpack the Gospel - not simply Mark's special theological emphases but his teaching about how we are to live with one another in the stuff of the everyday.

Integral to the book is the author's assumption that life and faith belong together; that God, the source of life and wholeness in our lives, is lavish with gifts to us, patient and energising for completion and healing, for life in its fullness. Here is a book that takes seriously the response of Jesus to those who cry out to him in faith for his healing presence and who look for that on going presence in his community that is called the church.

The book is for priests and preachers, parents and teachers, and for all of us who seek the transformation and fullness of life that God offers us in the breaking of the Word and who have the courage and the wisdom to accept the challenges of the Word and incarnate its message in our daily lives.