Deep despair and triumphant joy

An Orthodox Icon of the Parousia, Christ's 2nd Coming

A reflection in the April 2026 issue of Grapevine, the newsletter for the Nenagh Union of Parishes

I am writing this in the run up to Palm Sunday and Holy Week, with Good Friday and Easter almost upon us. The moods of the season, expressed in liturgy, swing wildly from triumphant joy to deep despair and back again. You may find it a bit unsettling, as I do.

We begin with Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Jesus rides into town on a donkey. Cheering crowds, lay their cloaks and palm branches in front of him. We sing joyful hosannas. Though we also listen to the long Passion Gospel, and hold up crosses made from palm leaves.

The mood darkens as Good Friday approaches. The Gospel readings intimate what is to come. In the Maundy Thursday Gospel, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, setting them an example of servant leadership. And we act out the Last Supper in his memory, through which Jesus offers the bread and wine as his body and his blood.

On Good Friday, we mourn as we reflect on the enormity of Jesus’s death. We hear his anguished cry of desolation, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And we re-enact his last earthly journey to Golgotha and his agonising crucifixion.

Then on Easter Sunday we greet his resurrection with abounding joy and shouts of ‘Christ has risen!’.

It is as if the very weather at this time of year echoes these wild swings between joy and despair, in what the literary critic John Ruskin called ‘pathetic fallacy’. One moment we suffer an arctic blast with freezing rain and frosty nights, and the next we rejoice in balmy sunshine. One moment our spirits are lifted by the spring flowers, and the next they are dashed by the sight of frosted shoots.

And this year, as bystanders, we see and hear the frightful news of wars and destruction in Ukraine, the Middle East, and other places in our broken world. Cruel national leaders stride across the world as if they were Gods, spouting venom and launching brutal attacks, then pivoting to words of peace, as markets gyrate and rich men profit. We dread what is to come, as we hope and pray for peace.

But listen and absorb the Easter message, which is this. The kingdom of God has come near. Jesus’s Good Friday death and Easter resurrection promise us that evil cannot win. Our sins will be forgiven if we only repent, and we shall enter God’s eternal kingdom of peace and justice. Spring’s wild swings will turn to summer’s steady, fruitful days. Wars will end and tyrants will be overthrown. Let us face the future filled with Easter hope.

Resurrection

Address given at Killodiernan Church on Sunday 22nd March 2026, the 5th of Lent 

The vision of the valley of the dry bones. Ezekiel 37:4-5. Illustration by Gustave Doré

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Ezekiel connected dem dry bones.
Oh hear the word of the Lord!

Forgive me for my poor singing, but after hearing the words of Ezekiel’s stirring vision in our OT reading, I couldn’t resist it!

Both readings today are about resurrection: the renewal of life in someone or something that to all appearances is dead. Ezekiel (37:1-14) prophesies the resurrection of the House of Israel, at a time of desolation and exile. And John (11:1-45) tells us the story of the raising of Lazarus.

So today I’m going to examine these readings more closely and ponder the meaning of resurrection. What a fine subject resurrection is for a fine spring day, when all about us seeds and plants and trees and lambs and calves are bounding into new life in our gardens and fields!

So firstly, what about Ezekiel’s dry bones?

Ezekiel is writing in Babylon around 580BC, shortly after Nebuchadnezzar’s armies had laid waste to Jerusalem and the Temple. The Israelite leaders and many of the people had been deported into exile by the banks of the Euphrates, close to Babylon in what is now modern Iraq.

Ezekiel conjures up such a vivid picture, doesn’t he? The unburied corpses of the Israelites killed in the Babylonian invasions have weathered to parched, dislocated and scattered bones. We are told they represent the whole people of Israel, the exiles crushed by despair, and the dislocated and disoriented Israelites left behind, not just the dead. And Ezekiel tells this devastated people that their God YHWH will not let them down; he will open their graves, he will give them life, and he will restore them to their land.

Ezekiel’s prophesy is, of course, a metaphor, a metaphor carefully crafted to give a devastated nation hope, hope that one day they will be restored to their land. His words resonated with the people of Israel, and helped to hold them together, until eventually the exiles were able to return to Jerusalem 50 years later, when Babylon in turn was captured by Cyrus the Persian. The ancient people of Israel did indeed experience a resurrection to new life!

These words resonated once again with the devastated Jewish people of Europe, emerging from the Nazi extermination camps after the Holocaust, the Shoah in Hebrew, as they created their modern state of Israel in Ezekiel’s ancient homeland. A heart-breaking consequence has been the devastation of the Palestinian people they displaced, which they call the Nakba, or Catastrophe in Arabic. As we walk with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem and the cross this Lent, let us pray for an end to the evil cycle of hatred and bloodshed there, for reconciliation with peace and justice, for a resurrection to new life for all in the Holy Land.

The black slaves transported to America were another devastated people. The plight of the Israelites in exile and Ezekiel’s message of hope resonated with them too, inspiring Gospel songs like ‘Dem bones’, which are now part of our common inheritance.

Now let’s turn to John’s Gospel and the raising of Lazarus.

It’s a rather long passage, and it’s a puzzling story, but the Evangelist fills it with so much incidental detail that the scenes really come to life. It is easy to imagine being there,

One lovely thing that shines out is how much Jesus loved Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus.

Luke also tells us about Martha and Mary, but not Lazarus. If you remember, Mary sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him talk, leaving Martha to do all the housework. And when Martha complained, Jesus gently chided her for being so distracted by mundane tasks. How delightful it must have been for Jesus to visit these close friends, to relax, to be himself, and to drink in the warmth and love of their home. As a wandering teacher Jesus had no home of his own. I feel sure that he must have needed that sort of refreshment, just as much as we do.

But this visit was different. Lazarus was dead. Both Martha and Mary separately said to him ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died’. I think Jesus must have felt guilty for arriving late. When he saw Mary weeping, Jesus too broke down and wept. Our translation has it that he was ‘deeply moved’, but this really isn’t strong enough at all. The Greek word used by John is also used of a horse snorting. The meaning must be that Jesus’s heart was so wrung by anguish that he howled.

And then Jesus did what he had come to do: he called Lazarus out from the grave, back from the dead.

There are a number of things that puzzle me about John’s story:

Firstly, some of the words he puts in Jesus’s mouth seem rather out of character to me. Think for a moment about his declaration that Lazarus’s illness ‘is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it’. What a cold way to look at a friend’s suffering! Could Jesus really have said that? John's purpose in writing his Gospel was to convert Greek speaking Jews who were not believers. Did this lead him to put words in Jesus’s mouth?

Secondly, John makes it clear that the raising of Lazarus is the immediate reason why the Jewish authorities decided to do away with Jesus, leading directly to his crucifixion. Yet the other three Gospels say absolutely nothing about it, nothing at all! We know that at least one of the apostles was there, Thomas. So how could the other Gospel writers not have heard of and written about such an important miracle, with such momentous results, if John’s account is correct?

And then there’s the elephant in the room. How can we explain satisfactorily - scientifically - a four day old, stinking corpse rising up and walking? A person who has apparently just died might be woken from a coma. But one that has started to decompose?

There may be problems with John’s story. Some of us will believe that it all happened just as John sets down that it did. Others will be much less certain, or interpret it metaphorically. And we can never know for sure what exactly happened so long ago. But does it really matter whether or not Jesus literally brought a corpse to life in Bethany in AD30?

 

What really matters, I think, is the spiritual message.

That message is that that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Perhaps John has crafted the whole story around that message.

 

Jesus said to Martha ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die’.

 

One thing is clear – Jesus is not speaking of physical life. We all know that Christians experience physical death just like everyone else. We will all die.

 

But if we believe in Jesus Christ, if we accept what he teaches us about his loving Father God as true, if we stake our lives upon it, then we enter into a new relationship with God, and we enter into a new relationship with life. We become certain of God’s love. We become certain that above all he is a redeeming God – if sin is death, forgiveness is resurrection. And the fear of death vanishes, because death means nothing more than a merging with God, the great lover of souls.

 

With faith in Jesus Christ, our life becomes a new thing, a strong thing, such a lovely thing, that we cannot imagine it ending incomplete. ‘Do you believe this?’ said Jesus. ‘Yes, Lord’ said Martha, ‘I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world’.

 

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Life-giving God,

your Son came into the world

to free us all from sin and death:

breathe upon us with the power of your Spirit,

that we may be raised to new life in Christ,

and serve you in holiness and righteousness all our days;

through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit. Amen

How many times must I forgive?

The Unmerciful Servant, John Millais

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 10th March 2026

We have just heard Jesus tell us a story about forgiving debts (Matthew 18:21-35).

The king has lent 10,000 talents to a slave. It is an unimaginably large sum - in today’s money well over €1billion. The slave cannot repay it, so the king threatens to make him bankrupt – to sell him, his family and all his possessions to recover what he can. But when the slave appeals for mercy, the king responds mercifully. He forgives him the debt and lets him go free.

But slave #1 has lent 100 denarii to another slave - a more modest sum, equivalent to roughly 100 days wages, say €10,000. As slave #1 leaves the king’s presence, he sees slave #2, grabs him by the throat and demands to be repaid. He ignores slave #2’s pleas for time to pay and has him thrown into the debtors’ prison.

When the king hears about it, he is furious. He calls slave #1 to him and says, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?’

We can all see slave #1 is a nasty piece of work. How unjust it is for someone who has been forgiven such an unimaginably large debt to force another to pay a modest one!

But of course the story isn’t really about forgiving debts.

The context of is that Peter has come to Jesus to ask, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’  To which Jesus replies, ‘Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times’.

Now, the Rabbis believed that God would only forgive a sinner three times, based on an obscure text from the prophet Amos. So, as nobody could be more merciful than God, no one should be obliged to forgive another more than three times. ‘Three strikes and you’re out’, as it were.

Peter went beyond that to suggest seven. Perhaps he hoped that Jesus would commend his greater mercy. But in his response Jesus teaches Peter and the other disciples – and through them us – that there should be no limit to our mercy toward our neighbour.

Jesus tells the story to explain why this is so. He concludes it saying, ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ God’s mercy, Jesus is saying, is without limit. God forgives each one of us an unimaginably large amount of wrong. Therefore, God expects us to forgive whatever modest wrongs other people have done to us. And if we don’t, we will forfeit God’s forgiveness ourselves. After all, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’.

The story is about the forgiveness of sins, not about the forgiveness of debts. Disciples of Jesus must forgive people who do them wrong. Otherwise they will not receive God’s forgiveness for the wrongs they themselves do.

It can be very difficult to forgive wrongs done to us by another, even if that person says they are sorry, and shows contrition. If we find ourselves in that situation, if we find ourselves unable to forgive someone who has wronged us, we should pray for the grace to be able to forgive from the heart, because followers of Jesus should imitate God’s mercy, which is without limit.

The Samaritan woman and Jesus at Jacob's well

The Water of Life Discourse, Angelika Kauffmann, 17th–18th century

Today’s Gospel reading (John 4:5-42), about the Samaritan woman at the well, is a beautifully vivid story, isn’t it? It could almost be a film script.

To begin to understand it we need to know something about the Samaritans and their relationship to Jews in the NT period, Jews like Jesus and his disciples.

Samaritans and Jews saw each other as outsiders, and they lived apart. These two peoples shared so much: the same land, the same God, and the same Torah – the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. But they saw each other as having different religions. To Jews the Samaritans were ritually unclean – they contaminated anything they touched. Samaritans, on the other hand, believed they had preserved the true Israelite religion, which the Jews who returned from exile in Babylon had perverted. The Jews worshipped God on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but the Samaritans worshipped God on Mount Gerizim. As they still do, for a small Samaritan community has persisted through centuries of persecution in the land of Palestine.

But Jesus consistently tried to break down the barriers between Jews and Samaritans. For example, the Good Samaritan is not a stranger but is the very best example of a good neighbour (Luke 10: 29-37). And among the Ten Lepers who Jesus healed, only the Samaritan returns to give thanks, and Jesus praises this “foreigner” for his faith (Luke 17: 11-19).

In the story, the disciples do something surprising.

They go into the city of Sychar to buy food. But this is no ordinary city – this is a Samaritan city. Any food they might buy from Samaritans is going to be unclean according to Jewish ritual standards.

While the Disciples are in Sychar, Jesus sits down at nearby Jacob’s Well, and begins talking with a Samaritan woman who has come to the well for water. ‘Give me a drink’, he says. She is intrigued, ‘How is it’, she replies, ‘that you a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’. She is surprised Jesus would accept a drink from her, as she knew Jews would consider it unclean.

Their conversation is a model for how we should respond to outsiders in our midst, whether they are foreigners or people of a different religion or culture. It is a real dialogue, involving both speaking and listening – speaking with the expectation of being heard, and listening honestly to what the other is saying, rather than listening to what our prejudices tell us they ought to say. And it is tinged with humour.

They speak about water. Jesus says, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ And the woman replies with wit, ‘Sir, give me this water … so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

And they speak about their different faiths. The woman says, ‘I have no husband’, and Jesus laughingly replies, ‘You are right … for you have had five husbands’ – no doubt a reference to the five books of the Torah. The woman says, ‘Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain’ – Mount Gerizim – ‘but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem’. To which Jesus replies, ‘The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’

For Jesus it does not matter where or how you worship God, so long as you do so in spirit and in truth.

When the Disciples arrive back, they are shocked to find Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman.

They are filled with questions, but they cannot bring themselves to ask them. Their silence reflects their inability to reach out to the stranger.

But their failure and their prejudices are shown in another way: the woman gives Jesus water as she and Christ talk, but they fail to join in the conversation about faith and about life.

They are still unable to articulate their faith, but the woman recognises Christ as a Prophet. They made no contact with the people in Sychar, but she rushes back to tell the people there about Jesus. No one in the city was brought to Jesus by the disciples, but many Samaritans listened to what the woman had to say, and they came to believe that Jesus is truly the Saviour of the world.

Jesus was thirsty, he asked the Samaritan woman for water, and she gave it to him.

But in return she received much more from Jesus: he gave her the ‘living water’ which became in her ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’. She believed in Jesus, and because of her many Samaritans came to believe in him.

‘I am thirsty’, is the fifth of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross on Good Friday, and in response he is given wine with bitter hyssop (John 19:28-30). Many people have compared the thirst of Christ on the Cross with his request to the Samaritan woman, ‘Give me a drink’, and the promise that follows, ‘Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty’.

In expressing his thirst out loud in that cry from the cross, Christ shows his humanity and his humility. In expressing such a basic need, he shows his solidarity with all those people who are in need, living or dying, healthy or sick, great or small, and who in humility are forced to ask for a cup of water.

In his thirst on the Cross, I think the dying Christ seeks something much more than water or vinegar. He thirsts for a new humanity to be formed and shaped through his incarnation, life and passion, death, resurrection and ascension. His thirst is for our salvation.

So, let us give thanks for the openness and trust of the Samaritan woman.

And let us pray that Christ will give us, as he gave her, ‘living water’ which will become in us ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’:

O God, the fountain of life,
to a humanity parched with thirst
you offer the living water that springs from the Rock,
our Saviour Jesus Christ:
stir up within your people the gift of your Spirit,
that we may profess our faith with freshness
and announce with joy the wonder of your love.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen