Passiontide - Day 1

The 5th Sunday of Lent sees a shift in the tone of the season - it grows heavier, darker, deeper, sadder and more focused, almost transfixed to the cross.

Hence the reading, John 12:20-33, which is focused on the cost of the cross. But so many of us miss this...

Holy week is a funny thing you see. We have this dark, contemplative season where in a spirit of introspection and self-examination we seek to walk with Jesus and discern the many and varied ways our walk has become hobbled. Through Lent I realise that my walk is hampered by a limp, by ill-fitting shoes, by a rocky road...and then we hit Palm Sunday, which is all-too-often a joyous celebration. We play act and frankly lose the sheer irony of the day.

Yes - Jesus entered triumphally, but we know how it pans out. Why do we celebrate? Surely the spirit of lenten sadness should move us to weep that so many so quickly deserted Jesus, including his own.

And then we stumble into Easter Day - the high point in our calendar.

Consider this...if you take the four Sundays including Mothering Sunday (4th Sunday in Lent) you can quite easily lose entirely the Lent theme: Mothers' Day, 5th Sunday, Palm Sunday, and Easter Day...the effect is exacerbated if one doesn't go to any church events during Holy Week...one could ignore the agony of the cross entirely!

Therefore - allow me to try and take you on that path of lamentation that Passiontide requires...

In John 12:20-33 we find Jesus in a deeply contemplative mood. "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified". Not quite the response Andrew and Philip expect when informing Jesus he has some guests to entertain. One writer has suggested that the disciples have had to 'find' Jesus as he was withdrawing from public ministry. He is all too aware that his purpose was about to be fulfilled.

But this is not just his purpose - but he teaches us a valuable and essential Christian principle, "unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds"...and He goes on to repeat his thoughts on what discipleship looks like...a choice between life and death.

In our cell group we have been wrestling at length over this issue of following Jesus. In Mark 8 Jesus says you must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow. And we began to think the three things are separate...the first is about submission, which requires us to let go of our own agenda and ambition; the third is about obedience. But taking up your cross is not just a euphemism for 'deny yourself'...it speaks directly to what needs to happen to us - we have to die, not just make a decision to serve or submit.

Like Jesus we too have to die. Paul writes about this in Romans 6: "We died to sin" (v.2)

Death...it's not something I seek, but Jesus seems to be saying, "pursue death, run at it, ensure that you have been killed off - you are useless to me as you are - your sinful self will prevent my greater glory, and oddly - will stop you living. You are worth more to me dead than alive - for when your zombie nature is killed, then you can be really alive, for I shall bring resurrection. This shadowland you currently live in is as nothing compared to the bright gloriousness of you as you are truly meant to be..."

....And still...fear remains.

But trust is essential - and obedience. I follow; he leads.

And even Jesus shrank away from the fact of his death. Even he, my Lord and King. Even he said - I am scared of death, but for God's glory, and his known purpose he set his face toward the cross.

And that is passiontide. The fixing of Jesus' face on the cross. It is where our eyes must also turn. We must look upon the horror and glory of the cross...and in our turn, follow.

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

We've travelled a long way since last blogging...we've moved through the final day of Advent, through Christmas, Epiphany, some Ordinary time, and now we're well ensconced in Lent.

I'll be quite blunt. I'm really quite down at the minute - lots of externals in my life are going well, very well in some cases, but there are some personal problems bubbling along that are really tough to handle.

So I've been quite blessed - and comforted by the following hymn and its story:

The hymn 'O Love that will not let me go' was written by George Matheson.

'O Love That Will Not Let Me Go' was written on the evening of Matheson’s sister’s marriage.

His whole family had gone to the wedding and had left him alone. Quite odd you would suggest? And he writes of something which had happened to him that caused immense mental anguish.

There is a story of how years before, Matheson had been engaged. That was until his fiancé learned that he was going blind, and there was nothing the doctors could do. So she told him that she could not go through life with a blind man; and left him.

He went blind while studying for the ministry, and his sister had been the one who had taken care of him all these years, but now she too is gone.

Matheson had been a brilliant student, some say that if he hadn’t went blind he could have been the leader of the church of Scotland in his day. He had written a learned work on German theology and then wrote “The Growth of The Spirit of Christianity.” Louis Benson says this was a brilliant book but with some major mistakes in it. When some critics pointed out the mistakes and charged him with being an inaccurate student, he was heartbroken. One of his friends wrote, “When he saw that for the purposes of scholarship his blindness was a fatal hindrance, he withdrew from the field – not without pangs, but finally.”

So he turned to the pastoral ministry, and the Lord has richly blessed him, finally bringing him to a church where he regularly preached to over 1500 people each week.

But he was only able to do this because of the care of his sister and now she was married and gone.

Who will care for him, a blind man?

Not only that, but his sister’s marriage brought fresh reminder of his own heartbreak, over his fiancé’s refusal to “go through life with a blind man.”

It is the midst of this circumstance and intense sadness that the Lord gives him this hymn – written he says in 5 minutes! Looking back over his life, he once wrote that his was “an obstructed life, a circumscribed life… but a life of quenchless hopefulness, a life which has beaten persistently against the cage of circumstance, and which even at the time of abandoned work has said not “Good night” but “Good morning.”"

How could he maintain quenchless hopefulness in the midst of such circumstances and trials? His hymn gives us a clue.

“I trace the rainbow in the rain, and feel the promise is not vain” The rainbow image is a picture of the Lord’s commitment! It is a picture of the battle bow that appears when the skies are darkening and threaten to open up and flood the world again in judgment. But then we see that the battle bow is turned not towards us – but toward the Lord Himself!


O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.


- Amen -



There's a beautiful modern version by Jason Sears on Spotify. There's also a great live version on Jason's blog.

I'm also grateful to igracemusic.com for informing me of this story.