In my sermons on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, I spoke about those things, the things we remember and celebrate on those days, as being about life. I spoke about them as being about the life we receive and share through our sharing in Holy Communion, about the life of service and self-sacrifice that all Christians are called to live in obedience to Christ, and I spoke about the life we can lead in which our sins can be forgiven, if can only accept ourselves as sinners in need of forgiveness, turn to Christ in faith, and ask for his mercy. I said that if we can only do these things, then the life that Christ offers us through his Passion and Cross is a mortal life that leads to eternal life. And today, on Easter Day, it is that promise that we can have eternal life that we praise and worship God for as we celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

If we look at the Bible as a whole though, we can see it all as being about life. It begins with God’s creation, without which there would be no life at all. But we very quickly move on to what we know as the Fall, the time when the life that God gave us was marred by sin. From then on, the Bible is about God’s calling of people to return to him and the life he created them to live. That’s a story which culminates in the coming of Jesus Christ and his Passion, Cross and Resurrection. The rest of the Bible, is primarily concerned with the way the early Church tried to live out the new life Christ called them to. And if we look at the Bible in that way, we can see this morning’s Gospel reading as the event which brings the story full circle.

In the Book of Genesis, immediately after the sin of Adam and Eve, we find the story of God walking in the garden, looking for his people and calling out to them because they’d hidden themselves from him on account of their sin. Today we heard the story of men and women, again in a garden, but this time they are looking for looking for God, in the person of Jesus, God’s Son. In the story in Genesis, it’s the man and woman who are hidden, but in this morning’s Gospel, it’s God who’s hidden, at least in a sense and for a short time, because Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. But even this of case of mistaken identity has its roots in the Genesis story because God appears as a gardener there too: he planted the very first garden, in Eden.

The image of God as a gardener is a very good one. If we go back to the very beginning of the story of creation we told,

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

So what we read here is not only that God creates, but that he also brings order to chaos. And isn’t that just what a gardener does?

If we think about what a piece of land is like when it’s untended, we could say it’s chaotic; it’s simply an unordered tangle of wild growth. We’ve both had and have areas like that around our churches, so we know what a piece of land looks like when it’s left to grow wild. But if we put a gardener onto that piece of land, it becomes very different; the wild growth is cut back, harmful plants, weeds and so on, are removed and replaced with good, beautiful plants, flowers, shrubs and lawns. In time, a gardener can turn what was once an overgrown mess into something beautiful so, in effect, a gardener, just like God, creates order from chaos.

This idea of God creating order from chaos is one that was very deeply ingrained in the Jews of Jesus’ day. In fact, their whole view of the world and the universe was based on it. Even the Jerusalem temple was built to mirror this idea of God creating order from chaos. It’s a view of the world and the universe that’s sometimes likened to the rings of an onion. For the Jews, God was at the centre of all and then here were various stages of closeness to God and furthest from God, where God’s presence wasn’t known or wasn’t at work, there was chaos. And chaos was closely associated with death.

In the Old Testament, the dwelling place of the dead was known as Sheol. Sheol was described as a place very reminiscent of the world we read about at the beginning of Genesis, a place of darkness and deep waters. We also find in the Old Testament the idea that those who dwell in Sheol, the dead, are cut off from God. So if Sheol, the dwelling place of the dead can be equated with chaos, then chaos can be associated with death, and in that understanding, the life and ministry of Jesus, his teaching and example, and especially his Passion, Cross and Resurrection, which are all about life, must also be about bringing order to chaos.

In the Creeds of the Church we profess our belief that, after his death on the Cross, Jesus descended to the dead, he went into Sheol, that place of chaos, to bring order and life even there by proclaiming the Gospel to the dead.

And if we think about it, isn’t that exactly what Jesus brings to us too; order to the chaos of our earthly, human lives?

If we think about human life as it’s lived without any belief in God, or obedience to Christ, what is it but a chaotic mess? What is it but a chaos of self-centred, competing individuals and nations who all want their own way? To use the gardening analogy, what is life without belief in God and obedience to Christ but a chaos of self-centred individuals and nations who all want the garden to be ordered according to their own idea of how it should be ordered? A chaos of self-centred individuals and nations who aren’t even content with ordering their own garden in the way they want, but who are quite willing and happy to tear up anything that any other gardener plants so that they can order everyone else’s garden in the way they want it to be ordered?  And ultimately, where does all this chaos lead any of us except to the grave? Where does all of the chaos of human life lived without belief in God and obedience to Christ lead any of us except to death?

But with belief in God and obedience to Christ, the chaos is replaced with order and death is replaced with life. Through his life and ministry, through his teaching and example, and through his Passion and Cross, Jesus offers us life. He offers us a life in which we can once again walk with God in his own garden, a world ordered according to his plan. And he offers us that life not only for the brief time of our earthly lives, but he offers us the chance to live that life for eternity. He offers us the chance to live our lives on earth according to God’s plan so that, when our time on earth is done, we can escape the death and chaos of Sheol, and live and walk with him forever in God’s heavenly garden.

For many people, that perhaps seems too good an offer to be true and so it’s an offer they can’t, and don’t, take seriously. But today, Easter Day, the day when we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, not only our Lord and Saviour, but our brother and fellow traveller through the chaos of human life, is the proof that his offer is a true one. So let’s take him up and that offer and walk with him in this life so that we can live and walk with him forever in paradise.

Amen.

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The Propers for Easter Sunday can be viewed here.

If we had to choose one word to describe what tonight, Maundy Thursday, was about, I don’t think we could choose a better word than ‘life’. Because if we think about what we remember and celebrate tonight, the institution of the Eucharist, of Holy Communion, our Lord’s washing of his disciple’s feet, and his agony in Gethsemane, all these things are about the life that Christians are called to live; a life lived in communion with one another, a life of service of one another, and a life of self-sacrificial love for one another.

Our Gospel reading tonight marks the start of a section in St John’s Gospel that’s known as the Farewell Discourse, the final teaching and instruction that Jesus gave to his disciples before his Passion, his arrest, trial and execution. Later in the Farewell Discourse, we find Jesus’ great prayer for unity amongst his disciples as he prays to the Father that his disciples, both those present with him and all those who will come to believe in him through them,

“… may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

It’s a great prayer for Church unity, a prayer offered by our Lord himself on the night of his arrest, that his Church, his disciples, may be one, and a great symbol of that unity is the Eucharist which our Lord instituted on that night.

We call the Eucharist by many names, but Holy Communion is perhaps the one that best expresses what it should signify for us. It’s where we come together in communion, in fellowship, to share the communal meal our Lord gave us, and where, through our sharing in the bread and wine, which is Christ’s Body and Blood, we come to share in his life.

Unfortunately, as we’re all only too well aware of, the Church is not one, and one of the main causes of our disunity is our disagreements about the Eucharist. The fact that the Church has ignored Christ’s prayer for unity is the greatest tragedy, and I would say the greatest sin, of the Church. And perhaps the most tragic thing about it, is that our disagreements about the Eucharist have made the very thing which is supposed to unite us, and should unite us, one of the things which most divides us. 

I’m not going to go into the various understandings and disagreements about the Eucharist, I’m simply going to say this. In the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke, the word we translate as ‘body’ is the equivalent of a personal pronoun, in the case of the speaker, ‘me’. And in the Old Testament, blood is explicitly equated with life. So in the Jewish understanding of Jesus’ day, blood is life. And our word ‘remembrance’ , meaning a mental recollection, doesn’t have the same meaning that a ritual remembrance such as Jesus’ command to “Do this in remembrance of me” had for those he first said those words to. For Jews to this day, for example, the ritual recounting at Passover, of the story of the first Passover, makes that first Passover real, present and active for them in the here and now. So regardless of our disagreements and divisions about exactly how Christ is present in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, in their original language and context, what Jesus’ words mean is that, when we celebrate the Eucharist, when we receive Holy Communion, he is here with us, now, and we are with him at supper on that first Maundy Thursday. And what we receive and share in, when we receive Holy Communion, is nothing other than Jesus himself and his life. But what does it mean to share in Jesus’ life?

Our Gospel reading tonight tells us that sharing in Jesus’ life is sharing in a life of service towards each other, and we see that in his example of washing the feet of his disciples. But, whilst we may be perfectly happy to receive and share in Jesus’ life in and through the sacrament of Holy Communion, how willing are we to share in his life of service?

One of the great traditions of our Maundy Thursday liturgy is the Washing of Feet, that time during the liturgy when people come forward to have their feet washed by a priest. But if we think about Jesus’ words when he did this for his disciples, I think we have to question whether we’ve actually got this right. After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus said,

“If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.”    

Despite what Jesus himself did, he didn’t set an example that one person should wash everyone else’s feet, but that we should all, each and every one of us, wash one another’s feet. And yet when I’ve put this to the test, which I have done on a few occasions in different churches, it seems that this is an example of service that hardly anyone is willing to follow. In the past, in different churches, when I’ve asked for volunteers for the Washing of Feet, hands have shot up all over the church. But when I’ve said that instead of me washing everyone’s feet, I will wash the first person’s feet, who will then wash the second person’s feet, who will then wash the third person’s feet, and so on along the line, the hands have  gone down. And when I’ve asked again for volunteers for the Washing of Feet, very few hands have gone up, and on more than one occasion, no hands have gone up at all. And yet this is surely more in keeping with the example to “wash one another’s feet” that our Lord set for his disciples than the way we usually do the Washing of Feet in our Maundy Thursday liturgy. So it seems that for many people, their willingness to share in the life of Christ is limited by the extent to which they’re willing to serve and by what kind of service they’re willing to give to one another. Washing feet, for example, isn’t a pleasant job, it’s probably seen as a menial job, and it seems that many people, whilst they’re quite happy to let someone else wash their feet, aren’t prepared to serve others in the same way.

This willingness to do the difficult and unpleasant  for the sake of others is, of course, what our Lord’s earthly life was, ultimately, all about because it’s this self-sacrificial love of others that led him to his Passion and Cross. And tonight we remember the start of Jesus’ Passion; his agony in Gethsemane, and his betrayal and arrest.

One thing we always have to remember about Jesus’ Passion and Cross is that it’s something he didn’t have to go through. It’s something he chose to do out of love for others, including for you and for me. Jesus may have been called to drink from this cup, as he put it, but he was just as human as everyone else and so he had a choice. He had a choice to either follow this calling or not to follow it. He had a choice about whether to go to Gethsemane, a place it was his custom to go, as St Luke tells us in his Gospel account of this night, and so a place where he knew he’d be found by those looking to arrest him, or not to go there. He had a choice about whether to stay there and pray, knowing Judas and his cohorts were on their way to arrest him, or to leave and go where he wouldn’t be found. But Jesus chose to go to Gethsemane and wait for what he knew was inevitable in the circumstances he’d chosen to put himself in, to happen, because this was the life he’d been called to live and chose to live.

We know from his agony, his agonising over the choice he had to make, that  it’s something he really didn’t want to do; we see that in his prayer;

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” 

It’s very, very unlikely that any of us will ever have to make such a life and death decision on account of our faith but, nevertheless, we are called to show that same self-sacrificial love in our lives that Jesus showed in his. Jesus showed that love most clearly as he allowed himself to be arrested in Gethsemane, knowing that it would lead to his death. He showed it by being faced with something he really didn’t want to do but doing it, willingly, for the sake and good of others. How we might show that same kind of self-sacrificial love will depend on what we’re faced with in our own lives. Whether we do show that love will depend on whether we can face up to what we’d rather not do, and do it willingly, for the sake and good of others just as Jesus did. And if we can’t do that, then we can’t fully share in Jesus’ life.

Tonight is about life; Jesus’ life and our life. It’s about giving thanks for our Lord’s institution of the Eucharist and of the receiving and sharing in his life that Holy Communion allows us. It’s about giving thanks for the life of service and self-sacrificial love that Jesus led for our sake. And it’s about committing ourselves to following that life after his example. We know that we can receive and share in Jesus’ life through our receiving and sharing in the bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Christ, in Holy Communion. But the extent to which we can truly share in his life will depend on how closely we can follow his example in our own lives. It depends on whether we, when we’re faced with things we’d rather not do, but as disciples of Christ know we should, can say, as he did,     

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

Amen.

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Propers for Maundy Thursday can be viewed here.

Today is Palm Sunday which marks the start of Holy Week in the Church’s calendar. But today is also the second Sunday of the season of Passiontide, a season of the Church’s calendar that runs from the fifth Sunday of Lent until the eve of Easter Day on Holy Saturday. The reason for the season of Passiontide, the reason it’s given that name, is that as we go through these two weeks, and especially as we go through Holy Week, the readings in the Church’s lectionaries describe the last days and hours of our Lord’s earthly life and ministry and so they turn our thoughts towards what we call our Lord’s Passion, his suffering and his death on the Cross.

As I’m sure we all know, the word ‘passion’ refers to intense emotions and feelings and so it’s a very good word with which to entitle the last days of our Lord’s earthly life because, as we go through the Gospel accounts of these days, there’s no doubt whatsoever that Jesus did show some very strong emotions. In doing this, what comes very much to the fore is Jesus’ humanity. But that’s only to be expected. As this morning’s reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians tells us; Jesus,

‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.’

Or, as we read in the Letter to the Hebrews,

‘…he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.’

We acclaim Jesus, and worship him, as our Saviour, our Lord, and our King. But, as these readings make clear, he was also every bit as human as we are. We see Jesus’ humanity very clearly in the Gospel accounts of his last few days and perhaps where we see it most of all is in Jesus’ passion, the deep emotions he showed as he went through his last days and hours of earthly life. And so what I want to do today is to reflect on some of the emotions Jesus showed at this time which show that he was like us in every respect because they’re emotions we all show in our lives. And I want also to offer some reflections on how we, each in our own way, cause Jesus’ Passion to be re-enacted today through the way we might cause others to go through their own passions.

In the three-year cycle of readings we use in the Church, this year is Year C, the year of Luke, and so I’ll begin with Luke’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

We’re not really told much about Jesus’ state of mind as he approached Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday, but it’s hinted at in his refusal to silence his disciples who were acclaiming him as,

“…the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” 

That’s an acclamation with clear Messianic meaning, and Jesus wasn’t about to refute it. For one thing it was true, but it must have pleased Jesus that some people at least did recognise who he was, he wouldn’t have been human if that hadn’t pleased him. So the first passion we see in Jesus is joy, happiness, and isn’t that just like us when we’re praised? We all like to be valued by others and we like to be given recognition and praise for what we’ve done; it makes us happy. But how willing are we to make others happy by praising them? How willing are we to give others the recognition they deserve? Isn’t it often true that we can be more ready to criticise people for their failures than to praise them for their successes? How often are we like those crowds on that first Palm Sunday, ready to praise someone one day, only to criticise and denigrate them the next?

The next passion we see in Luke’s account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is great sadness. Luke tells us that Jesus wept for Jerusalem because the people didn’t recognise him for who he was. As this was just before Passover, Jerusalem would have been filling up with pilgrims, so Jesus was crying for Israel as a whole, not just for Jerusalem. He was crying for the people he came to save but whom he couldn’t, because they wouldn’t listen to him. And aren’t we the same when people we love don’t listen to us when we’re trying to help them? Don’t we feel sadness when we can’t make people see sense and see the error of their ways? Don’t we sometimes feel like crying for them, and perhaps do cry for them? But how often have we made people cry for us because we wouldn’t listen to them? How often do  we make Jesus cry today because we still won’t listen to him?

The first thing St Luke tells us Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem was to go to the temple and there we see another great passion of Jesus – anger. This anger of Jesus’ was a righteous anger, a justifiable anger. He was angry because the temple traders had turned God’s house into a “den of robbers”. And it was an anger directed not just at the traders but at the temple authorities too. They allowed this crooked business to go on, perhaps even taking their ’cut’ from the profits. And we can get angry at this kind of thing too, can’t we? Angry at being ‘ripped off’, to use the modern term, because that’s undoubtedly what the temple traders were doing to people. We can be angry when we see corruption in high places, the corruption of those in authority. And how many of us have been and are angry when we see the Church being turned into a business with money making and money saving as its overriding goal? We can be angry at all these things and with good reason. But how often do we make people angry, and rightly angry, by our own corruption? We might not think we’re corrupt but we are all selfish in so many ways and what is selfishness other than another word for corruption? How many times have we been in a position, for example, to take more than we should, and have done, without thinking, perhaps not even caring, that our taking what we want has been at someone else’s expense? At those times, couldn’t Jesus’ righteous anger be directed at us?

The next great passion we see in Jesus is his ‘agony’ in Gethsemane. Luke tells us that Jesus’ was in such anguish that

‘…his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’

This may be taken as a literary device to show the extreme torment Jesus was in but there is a medically recorded condition in which extreme anguish or physical strain can cause small blood vessels to burst and for blood to then mix with sweat, so whichever way we want to take this, Jesus was experiencing great passion at this time. We may not have gone through such extreme passion in our own lives, but we will all have gone through times when we’ve been in mental and emotional turmoil, times perhaps when we’ve been faced with decisions we didn’t want to make or times when we’ve known that we’ve had to do things that we didn’t want to do, so we do know something about the passion that St Luke calls Jesus’ agony. We know how terrible a passion it is. But how many times have we put others through this kind of passion? How many times have we asked or expected others to do something difficult or unpleasant simply because we didn’t want to have to do it ourselves? How many times do we put Jesus through this agony again because of our sinful ways?

Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane ends with his arrest. But then we see another kind of passion in Jesus, a very important passion, but one that’s often not recognised, and that’s the passion of inactivity. Throughout his ministry Jesus had been a man of action. He went here and there preaching and teaching, healing the sick and proclaiming the kingdom. But from Gethsemane onwards Jesus isn’t active, he’s passive.

He changes from the one who does to one who is done to. He changes from a man of action to a man of passion. We all know what this kind of passion’s like because we experience it every time we have to wait on others. We experience it when we’re on hospital waiting lists, when we’re waiting for someone to come and repair our washing machine, or whatever else it might be. We even experience it standing in a queue at a supermarket checkout. And on the whole, this is a passion we don’t like because we all want to be in charge of our own lives and run our lives to our own schedule, don’t we? But how often do we force this passion on to others by making them wait on us? We do it every time someone is relying on us to do something for them, and we delay in doing it. We don’t like it ourselves, but we can do it so often to others. And we turn Jesus into a man of passion again too because whenever we don’t do in our lives what he asks us to do, we make him wait on us. 

In Luke’s account of Jesus’ death on the Cross, there is no cry of, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, but I’m sure we all know the passion of feeling that we’re alone and have no one to turn to for help. The passion Jesus felt at that moment the sins of the world that he was carrying for us on the Cross, separated him from his Father. This is a terrible passion, perhaps the worst that we can ever experience because included in it is the pain we feel when death separates us from our loved ones. It’s a passion I hope we wouldn’t wish on anyone but isn’t it a passion we do visit on others when we don’t do what we can to help them? If someone asks us for help and we don’t help, don’t we make them feel abandoned as Jesus felt abandoned on the Cross? And if we do that to others, don’t we put Jesus through this passion again?

In these Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Passion, we see just how human Jesus was because in them, we can see the same passions we experience. And just as Jesus had to battle through these passions, we have to battle through them too. Jesus had to go through his Passion to experience the glory of the Resurrection and that’s true for us too. But if we can go through our own passions in the way that he did, without losing faith and without losing sight of the glory beyond the passion, and perhaps in particular, if we can go through our passions without inflicting such terrible passion on others, like Jesus, we can look forward to the glory that lies in wait for us, beyond our own passions.

Amen. 

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The Propers for Palm Sunday can be viewed here.