Collect and Readings for Palm Sunday – Isaiah 50.4-9a, Psalm 31.9-18, Psalm 118.1-2, 19-end, Philemon 2.5-11, Matthew 21.1-11, Matthew 26.14-27.end
The Prayer for today
Almighty and everlasting God, who in your tender love towards the human race sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh and to suffer death upon the cross: grant that we may follow the example of his patience and humility, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Today we begin the heightened drama of the walk through a week known as holy. Since Christmas we have traced the life of Jesus through his birth, childhood, Baptism and preparation in the wilderness, and touched on the main areas of his ministry; and now we come to that final week of his earthly life. All the Gospel writers move into noticeably greater detailing their narratives, with these events taking up a sizeable proportion of each Gospel. The words and events are carefully and thoroughly recorded, in keeping with the intense significance of these days which focus all of life before them and all that has happened since.
Quite deliberately, the readings and liturgy take us on a roller- coaster of spiritual experience. We stand with the ecstatic crowds waving palm branches and celebrating the entry into Jerusalem, the holy city, by Jesus the Messiah. There is great hope and expectation that final things are drawing to accomplishment. We are poignantly aware that Jesus is both acknowledging the crowd’s excitement at his kingship and also trying to show them something of the true nature of kingship which has nothing to do with temporal power and wealth or narrow nationalism.
And then we are gripped by the detailed seriousness of all that led up to the crucifixion, like a profound family memory indelibly written on hearts and handed down with great care and reverence from generation to generation. We both cry out against what is happening and also know it to be necessary and inevitable. We both balk at the way people could treat Jesus, the Lord of life, and also know that we do it ourselves every day. We recognise the utter failure and futility of it all and also know it to be the strangest and most complete victory for the entire world.
Some things to reflect on:
• What particular details did you notice in this reading of the crucifixion?
• Why did Jesus choose not to call on all the angels to be at his disposal? (Matthew 26:53-54)
God bless
Rev’d Fiona Robinson
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Collect and Readings for The Fifth Sunday of Lent – Ezekiel 37.1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8.6-11, John 11.1- 45
The Prayer for today
Most merciful God, who by the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ delivered and saved the world: grant that by faith in him who suffered on the cross we may triumph in the power of his victory; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Things don’t come much deader than dry scattered bones. It is a powerful image of the totally hopeless, without even whispered memory of life. Ezekiel the prophet speaks God’s unlikely hope to a dislocated and despairing people. In the hands of God there is no abandonment but promise of restoration, bone by bone, sinew by sinew, inbreathed by the Creator’s breath.
Psalm 130 echoes the dazed amazement at the way God proves again and again that with the Lord there is mercy and fulness of redemption. In Romans we find the same realisation worked out in a more cerebral way, celebrating the profound truth, born of real experience, that Spirit-filled life is a completely new and fulfilling life, in comparison with which other life seems like a kind of deadness.
And in this week’s Gospel reading we hear the whole narrative of Lazarus and his sisters, living through his dying and death, while the Lord of life is elsewhere. It is an evocative story, with Jesus portrayed at his most human, and many layers of meaning packed into the event. Why did Jesus delay? What about those conversations, first with Martha and then with Mary?
John is wanting to tell us deep truths about Jesus’ total humanity and divinity; if ever a story revealed the nature of Emmanuel – ‘God-with-us’- then this is it. The practical, less emotional Martha is better able to grasp the logic of what it means for the Lord of life to be present, whereas Mary is simply devastated and feels wounded by Jesus’ absence which doesn’t make sense to her.
We may recognise this terrible sense of loss and distance when in our own lives we feel God ought to be there yet he seems not to be; and Jesus himself knew it on the cross: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ But it is this raw grief in all its honesty and candour which tears Jesus’ heart and shakes him with agonised weeping. With us, too, he is there at such times of raw pain, sharing our searing pain and grief and weeping with us. Jesus, as the Lord of life, is God’s voice speaking right into the darkness of death and drawing out life.
Some things to reflect on:
• How will the image of dry bones help the exiled people Ezekiel was called to speak to?
• Compare the responses of Martha and Mary and Thomas. What do we learn about the strengths and weaknesses of each?
God bless
Rev’d Fiona Robinson
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