At Chill & Chat on Wednesdays at St Luke’s in Lent, we have been sharing Godly Play stories together – and hearing the stories of Jesus as he makes his way towards Jerusalem. 

And we have been travelling along with him as it were, over these weeks of Lent – each Sunday getting closer geographically in our Gospel readings to Jerusalem and drawing nearer to Holy Week. 

We make this same journey every year, but somehow this year it has felt more real, more tangible – maybe the situation in the middle East is causing us to be more present to the place where this 2000 year old story is played out, and all set against a backdrop of not dissimilar tensions and complications as in Jesus’ own day. 

As he travels to Jerusalem and the growing inevitability of his death, Jesus meets people and spends time with them. He talks with them – listens to them and responds to their needs. 

In the Godly Play stories we have been hearing about Jesus meeting the children – ‘Let the little children come to me,’ he says, even though the adults try to stop them – ‘Jesus is too busy’ they say – ‘you are not important enough!’

And about Jesus meeting Zacchaeus – ‘Come down from the tree Zacchaeus and walk with me,’ he says, even though the other people there try to stop him – ‘Jesus won’t want to talk to you’ they say – ‘you are a tax collector – no-one likes you!’

On the contrary – Jesus has all the time in the world to talk to the children – for it is us adults who need to become more like them if we are to even begin to understand what the Kingdom of God might be.

And he does want to be with Zacchaeus – for as he tells them all –
‘I have come to find and save the lost.’

Jesus is walking to Jerusalem, he is walking towards his death, and yet he has time and care for those who most especially need him – for those who yearn for him, who understand even a little bit who he is – maybe even before they can make any sense of it – they know him by heart.

And we know that even as the days and the time shorten, spin out towards the end that is rushing to meet him, Jesus will take time to talk to his friends too to offer them comfort and reassurance, to try to prepare them for his approaching death.

Even in extremis – he prays for them – in John’s Gospel, in what are known as The Final Discourses, we hear how he prays to God for his disciples that they may be kept safe after he is gone – and we heard in last week’s poignant reading for Mothering Sunday, how even on the cross, in his dying agony, he makes sure that Mary, his mother will be cared for in the household of his dearest friend, John.

Now, in our Gospel reading for today, we hear how Jesus is at Bethany, the village just across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem  – from here he can see the City walls and its buildings, the Temple and the olive groves. 

And here he rests at the home of his friends, Martha, Mary and Lazarus – Lazarus, who he has very recently raised from the dead!

These three know Jesus perhaps better than anyone – they always seem to have known who he is, and what power he has – Martha tells him ‘I know you are the Messiah’…. And it is clear now, that despite knowing all this, they also know and accept that he is shortly to die. Mary’s anointing is a preparation for his burial, as Jesus states clearly. 

What Mary does for Jesus is a beautiful, extravagant thing – a moment of pure love and blessing – tender and full of compassion for Jesus, an expression of sorrow as she and her brother and sister anticipate his suffering and loss to come – but also an offering of comfort and care for him in this brief respite between the ever increasing hostility we see at the beginning of today’s reading as the Jews prepare to arrest him and the brutality of Judas’s betrayal at the end. 

This moment is described in such a way that we are there too – our hearts are wrenched by Mary’s weeping and by the loveliness of her care for Jesus, we can smell the sweetness of the perfume which fills the whole house, like the smoke of incense used in worship fills the temple. This moment will remain as a reminder of all that Jesus is, a piece of heaven brought down to earth to show us what joys await us, to quieten our fears and to meet us in our lostness.

It is a moment like that meeting between Jesus and the children – I wonder just what those children said to Jesus – and what he said to them! – and like that moment when Jesus looks up at Zacchaeus, and calls him to come down – I wonder how Zacchaeus felt when Jesus called him by name?!

But also in this moment of loveliness in the house at Bethany is the starkness of choice. 

Mary, knowing exactly who Jesus is, chooses love over hate and life over death but understands that in choosing this, in choosing Jesus, there will be suffering before there can be joy. The road to Jerusalem in not an easy one- the path of life must go down through death.

On this Passion Sunday we once again stand on the brink of all this, for ourselves, for Jesus, as we recall and re-live the first Passiontide, maybe also for our world, for so many, like Judas and those others who betrayed Jesus, cannot let go of their own expectations or desire for control, to allow God to lead them.

In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he lists all the things important to the world that he has once been – and its an impressive list! But he has given all that up, seen how utterly worthless all that is in comparison with knowing Christ. For Paul, his calling was to an utter reversal of all that he was, to an utter dependence on Jesus, to striving for nothing for himself – but all for Jesus.

For Paul, and for Mary of Bethany – there is nothing else that matters, nothing else that can compare to Jesus, and they can do no other than give their whole lives, all that they are, all that they have, to him.

The road to Jerusalem on which we are travelling this Passiontide, goes towards the cross and death –  but it does not end there. 

Look around you at the trees now – see how the leaves are already bursting with blossom and with green leaves emerging. ‘See,’ says God – ‘I am doing a new thing – now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?’

On the road to Jerusalem, children and tax collectors have hearts humble enough to recognise this new life and hope even in the man who is on the way to his death – and so God, even in the reality of a very broken world, can bring new things out of his eternal creativeness. 

When will we learn that when it looks like the end of the road – the God who has given us life is instead bringing about a new beginning – and such wonders are already in his hand to turn our darkness into light and our sorrow into dancing.  

Service: Rev Michelle Dalliston, 6th April 2025. (St John’s Church Peterborough UK)

Reading: Isaiah 43.16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3.4b-14; John 12.1-8