Readings:
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

Collect:
Gracious Father,
you gave up your Son
out of love for the world:
lead us to ponder the mysteries of his passion,
that we may know eternal peace
through the shedding of our Saviour’s blood,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Reflection

This weekend includes two significant dates in the church calendar. On Saturday it is the Feast of the Annunciation of Our Lord, the date 9 months before Christmas Day when we remember the An  gel Gabriel appearing to Mary, and Mary offering her “yes” to God. 

This is a celebration of God’s working in and through the life of an ordinary young woman to change the course of history and bring about the salvation of the whole world. And it is also the celebration of a young woman’s freely chosen participation in the work of salvation: “Here am I, the handmaid of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.” It is a celebration which encourages all of us to consider what God is inviting us to say “yes” to, and to give ourselves wholeheartedly to the work to which God is calling us.

And then on Sunday it is Passion Sunday, the 5^th Sunday in Lent, the turning point at which we turn towards the cross and passion of Jesus. This is a very different kind of occasion. It is a solemn moment, an intensification of our Lenten journey. It is an invitation to journey with Jesus into his suffering and passion. 

On Passion Sunday our lectionary readings give us not the passion story, but another story of death and resurrection: that of Jesus’ friend Lazarus. Here we see Jesus at his most fully human, weeping over the death of someone he cared about, and his most fully divine, raising Lazarus from the dead. It is a foreshadowing of his own death and resurrection to come. 

These two days taken together remind us that the divine resides among and within our human lives. God choses to make a home among us in the incarnation and in the person of Jesus. God draws all humanity and all creation to Godself in redemption, through love. 

And these two days – encompassing the joy of conception and new life on the one hand, and the fear and suffering of death on the other – remind us that God is with us in all things. Joy and sorrow, pain and delight, death and life: all are held in God’s hands and embraced in God’s all-encompassing mercy and grace. 

It is a challenge to find God in all the changing circumstances of our lives. We may rejoice in the signs of spring emerging around us, and thank God for them. But can we seek God too in the harder and less beautiful things we encounter? As we turn to look towards the approaching pain and suffering of Jesus’ passion and death, and the joy of his resurrection, we are reminded that nothing and nobody is beyond the scope of God’s love. 

Ruth Harley