Doesn’t it do your heart good to know the clocks have gone forward; we’re officially in to Spring, after the equinox, and the evenings are going to get longer and longer and it may even get a bit warmer? In many ways, it’s the best time of year. A wedding yesterday and a baptism this morning; things are looking up! And while the goings good, keep an eye on the leaves on the trees as they start to come out, because even by June, they will begin to lose their colour. (Or, as my Groomsman once said very profoundly (he’s now Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity), ‘It’s amazing how the leaves come on and the clothes come off’)

It’s no coincidence, I think, that Easter comes in the smack middle of Spring – the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the 21^st March. The word ‘Lent’ is an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning Springtime! Yet in almost contrast to all this, we’re in a very serious time of the Church’s year as we lead up to Easter: purple for penitence and preparation, and today, the fifth Sunday of Lent is the beginning of Passiontide.

In all our liturgy, as we approach, particularly Holy Week with Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and this year we are having a short Easter Vigil on the Saturday evening at 7.30pm; at each stage, we are attempting to identify ourselves with the suffering and agony of Christ our Lord.

You couldn’t get more serious than that! We do it because, we know that this week, of all weeks, helps us to make sense of the craziness of the world we live in. Yes, there is so much good, and yet your heart breaks at the sadness and tragedy of injury and loss of life and poverty that our news bulletins are full of.

We’re not sure when Christians began to make an annual (as opposed to a weekly) memorial of the death and resurrection of Christ. Because, remember, every Sunday is a mini-Easter. But through participation in the whole sequence of services through Holy Week, the Christian shares in Christ’s own journey, from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the empty tomb on Easter morning.

Inadequate it may be, but it is a profound and sincere attempt. I hope you can join us for a part of that journey. You can never appreciate the brightness and joy of Easter if you have no concept of all that went before. As Jesus himself asks, ‘Could you not watch with me one hour?’

An integral part of Passiontide is Maundy Thursday; it comes from the word ‘mandatum’ which means ‘commandment’ because of the use of John 13:34, ‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also must love one another.’ Maundy Thursday contains a rich complex of themes: humble Christian service expressed through Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet, the institution of the Eucharist, the perfection of Christ’s loving obedience through the agony of Gethsemane. At the end of that Eucharist here on Maundy Thursday, we are going to strip the church of all decoration.

It continues bare and empty through the Good Friday and the Saturday, which is a day without a liturgy: there can be no adequate way of recalling the being dead of the Son of God, other than silence and desolation. But within the silence there grows a sense of peace and completion, and then rising excitement as the Easter Vigil draws near on the Saturday evening.

Contrast all of that, if you will, to a Church of Ireland Church, not a million miles from here, which had a brass ensemble at their Good Friday Service.

So, yes, I’m sorry, but this is all very serious stuff; it’s that time of the Church’s year when we attempt, however inadequately, to identify with and share in Christ’s own journey.

I often think of that lovely story which I think we first heard from our Alpha Courses, of Lord Radstock who was staying in a hotel in Norway in the mid 1920’s. He heard a little girl playing the piano down in the hallway. She was making a terrible noise: ‘Plink...plonk...crash...bang...’ It was driving him mad! A man, however, came and sat beside her and he began playing alongside all the notes she was banging out; he was filling in the gaps. And the result, through his genius, was the most beautiful music. Radstock later discovered that the man playing alongside the little girl was her father, Alexander Borodin, composer of the opera ‘Prince Igor’.

Paul writes in Romans 8, ‘in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose’. As we falteringly play our part through Passiontide, and especially Holy Week itself,

God comes and sits alongside us ‘and in all things works for the good’. He takes our ‘plink...plonk...crash...bang...’ and makes something beautiful out of our meagre devotion.

Only when we know something of Passiontide will Easter Day ever make sense.