When I look out my window I can see a perfectly shaped pomelo tree on the slope above the car park. It regularly bears fruit, but, as the soil layer is very thin, the fruit is completely inedible. People who have tried to eat a segment end up choking and spluttering and spitting and laughing helplessly at the bitterness of the tempting morsel. Their cannier friends, looking on, laugh even more uproariously.

Looking out the same window I can see slopes all around us which have been stabilised at great cost to developers, builders and buyers. If the slopes had not been stabilised the heavy summer rains would have sent them sliding down to the waiting waters of the harbour with great loss of life and property. It has happened and will happen again until every potential site is stabilised. It is very unwise to build on an unstabilised slope.

These slight adaptations of today's Gospel parables were made in view of the place of writing. They make the same point and call for the same remedy. St Paul assures us in the first reading that Christ came into the world to save sinners. Humbly he tells us that he himself is the greatest of sinners. We don't have to agree totally with his self-rating but it does seem that he needed Christ to temper the bitterness of his religious zeal and the destructive force of a turbulent character which could have swept away the good with the bad. The same Christ is available to us all.