Mad March

March has been a bit mad this year, largely due to the early date of Easter. This month, I’ve had two family birthdays to celebrate (including my own) and have also been involved in four community events, led four additional Lent Bible studies and lunches and baked for my husband’s retirement celebration and Good Friday church meal on top of all the usual things that make up my week! At times it’s been frantic, and I’ve definitely identified more with Martha than Mary as I have cooked chilli con carne for forty people while ferrying grandchildren to choir concerts (to be fair, my husband did the ferrying, but I provided a picnic lunch whilst everything else was going on!) A two-day break in the Lake District for my birthday was an oasis of calm in the flurry of activity that has made up March 2024. As I write, I still have to cook and prepare for a week’s break to celebrate my middle granddaughter’s birthday, but hopefully April will be more ‘normal.’

A blog I read regularly by the Church of England minister Jamie Franklin quotes Marcus Aurelius as saying.

‘When the force of circumstances causes you, in some sense, to lose your equilibrium, return to yourself with all speed, and never lose the rhythm for longer than you must; for you will be more in control of the measure if you return to it again and again.’

Meditations, Book VI.11

This is good advice. Some days and weeks are, indeed, busier than others, but there has to be an equilibrium in our lives, a rhythm that includes rest and prayer on a regular basis. Jamie goes on to comment, ‘I must find my rest, my refreshment, my peace, my restoration in God. If I don’t do this, I can make myself very busy trying to get stuff done, but my heart is frozen and my mind is tense.’ Busyness is not, of itself, proof of much except busyness. It’s certainly no indication of success or achievement that lasts. The churches in Thyatira and Ephesus were hard-working and busy, but Jesus found plenty that was amiss with their hearts (see Revelation 2). We need to get our priorities right and live by God’s principles (which includes Sabbath rest for restoration and worship). Only then can we hold on to the ‘one thing’ which Mary found and which Jesus commended to Martha. (Luke 10:38-42)

The Alarm Clock

Today’s household object is the alarm clock, and the Bible passages are John 13:36-38 and John 16:25-27.

Alarm clocks are useful in waking us each morning; nature’s alarm clock is the cockerel! The cockerel (or rooster) features in the Easter story as a warning to us: Peter, full of confidence, proclaims his ability to follow Jesus even to the point of laying down his life, but Jesus is well aware of what is to come and predicts his denial ‘before the cock crows.’ Sure enough, within hours Jesus is arrested, and Peter denies that he even knows the man. It is the cockerel’s crowing which brings Jesus’s words back to his memory and causes him to realise his sin.

Fortunately for Peter – and us – this is not the end of the story. Peter found forgiveness and further service; his sin did not define the rest of his life. The cockerel’s crowing heralds the start of a new day; the Lord’s compassions are ‘new every morning.’ (Lam 3:23) With God, we are given ‘countless second chances’ (‘Second Chances’, Rend Collective); the cross points to God’s forgiveness and mercy.

The Towel

Today as we approach Maundy Thursday, our household object is the humble towel, and our Bible passage is John 13:2-15.

Towels are found in the bathroom, kitchen and toilets, places where we wash ourselves. They can be relatively small (the hand towel) or luxuriously large (the bath sheet.) In our passage today, we see Jesus taking on the role of the humble servant and washing His disciples’ feet, drying them tenderly with a towel. It is an extraordinarily intimate and humbling gesture, and one which Jesus plainly told us we should emulate.

Servanthood is at the heart of the Easter message. Jesus, being in very nature God, took on human flesh and became a servant. He did not come to be served but to serve. Every time we read this passage, we are given a picture of what this looked like. Secure in His identity and knowing His purpose, He was not afraid to humble himself in this way and do a servant’s job. May we too take up the towel of service and be ready to serve God in every way.

According To The Scriptures

Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, is recorded in different gospels, including John 12:12-16. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians about the gospel, stresses the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus and tells us that these things happened ‘according to the Scriptures.’ (1 Cor 15:3-6) Palm Sunday is just one example of how all aspects of Christ’s death and resurrection were predicted in the Old Testament. Matthew makes it plain that Jesus did and said the things He did and said ‘to fulfil what is written’ (eg Matt 1:22-23), which is why it is vital to study the Bible. We need to hear, understand and obey if we are to live according to God’s ways (see James 1:22-25, Matt 7:13-14).

Palm Sunday makes no sense at all if we do not see it in the context of the fulfilment of Scripture, in the fact that as Jesus did these things, He was aligning Himself with the Old Testament Scriptures about the Messiah and therefore declaring to all around that He was indeed God’s Messiah, God’s Chosen and Anointed One. The Triumphal Entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was part of the fulfilment of Scripture, demonstrating the fact that Christ is king over all but came in humility, demonstrating that God’s kingdom is decidedly alternative, not what we would expect! Just as His birth was in a lowly stable, not a rich palace, and He was born to young and godly but poor parents, so even His triumphal entry shows us the topsy-turvy nature of God’s kingdom, when the first will be last and the greatest will be the servant.

Everything else that happened during that week was also to fulfil Scripture and to demonstrate to us the completeness of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins. From Christ’s prayer (‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’, quoting Psalm 22:1), to the fact that the soldiers cast lots for His clothes (Ps 22:18) to the fact that not one bone was broken during this horrendous execution (Exodus 12:46; Num 9:12; Psalm 34:20) all remind us that this was God’s plan throughout eternity: Jesus is ‘the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.’ (Rev 13:8) Moreover, we see that this was not because Jesus Himself had done anything wrong, but that He was the sinless sacrifice needed to reconcile humanity to God: God ‘reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.’ (2 Cor 5:18-19)

Paul goes on to remind us that the Easter story is incomplete without the resurrection: Christ was buried and ‘was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.’ (1 Cor 15:4) Isaiah prophesied, many years before Jesus was born, that the Lord would make His life an offering for sin and said, ‘He will see His offspring and prolong His days.’ (Is 53:10) The early apostles didn’t have the benefit of the New Testament Scriptures as we do, but they discovered that resurrection was there in the Old Testament too! – Peter, preaching on the Day of Pentecost, spoke from Psalm 16 and said, ‘Seeing what was to come, he [David] spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay.’ (Acts 2:31) The whole plan of salvation is laid out for us in the whole Bible, which is why we need to study what it tells us, and why we need to grasp the fact that Easter was no accident. It was not a monumental mistake; it was not God being vindictive towards His Son. It was God’s wisdom, ‘the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.’ (Rom 1:16)

For most of that Holy Week, it did not look like power. It looked like weakness. We see the fickleness of the crowds. We see the ignorance of the disciples. We see the worst of humanity: Judas choosing to betray His master for thirty pieces of silver; Peter denying He even knew Jesus out of cowardice; disciples fleeing out of fear; craven leadership that saw priests, rulers and kings conspire to allow injustice to be done, even though they knew Jesus was innocent of any crime deserving of death (John 19:6). There are few signs of glory right up to Easter Sunday; mostly what we see are darkness and death. That is also true of our lives in many ways: periods of difficulty, wars and rumours of wars, uncertainty and fear. But the Scriptures teach us that there is so much more to life than what we can see; they remind us that we are called to live by faith and not by sight. (2 Cor 5:7) Easter ends with the glory of the resurrection; Scripture reminds us that this is not the end of the story, but that we are living in anticipation of Christ’s Second Coming: ‘This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’ (Acts 1:11) Because of this, we can have hope and can live with confidence.

Palm Sunday

Dave spoke this morning about Palm Sunday, speaking from Matthew 21:1-11. The journey to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover festival was always a time of excitement and anticipation, with Jews coming from far and wide (Josephus says 250,000 lambs would be sacrificed at this time of year, so clearly the place was more than busy!) Up until this point in His ministry, Jesus had avoided publicity, but now He presents HImself plainly as the Messiah in his choice of entering Jerusalem on a donkey, thus fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy. The donkey gave himself to the task of carrying Jesus; we too can give ourselves to the Lord’s service and He can use us in ways we could not imagine.
Crowds welcomed Him and hailed him as the ‘son of David’. Jesus wept over Jerusalem, showing His longing for the place. We too are called to weep over our cities and to be moved by all we see as He was. We have to learn the way of God is the way of the cross.
Jesus was born to die (as are we all because of sin), but His death was like no other. He came to die so that others would live. His selfless and sacrificial love is the means by which we are saved.

‘Building The Future’

We were at the Big Local Thurnscoe community event yesterday ‘Building the Future‘ at Thurnscoe Plaza, though unfortunately the weather was not conducive to our building crafts and activities! In the space of a few hours we had sunshine, wind (which blew everything away!), rain and even hail!

The inflatable Lumini (a sound and light experience) was a great draw, however, and Turners’ Tiny Parties had their soft play inside for children to explore, plus there was live street theatre and magic shows to keep people entertained.