Seeds and vines are two powerful metaphors from the teaching of Jesus Christ. They symbolise for us life and growth, strength and joy. They represent confidence, hope and openness to whatever God wants for us as disciples - people who acknowledge the mystery that is at the heart of our lives and our future with God.

One way 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 Luke is not concerned primarily to be 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 Luke'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 sower of seed in our lives is lavish with gifts, patient and energising for goodness, for fruitfulness, for life in its fullness. Here is a book that takes seriously the promise of Jesus that we are the vine's branches; and encourages us that we can become people fully alive with the sap and energy of the life of the Creator.

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 challenge of the Word and incarnate its message in our daily lives.