There are still lots of events taking place over Holy Week, but these days I go to very few, and only those that I find helpful in focussing on the central elements of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus. It is my firm belief that we can only experience the full joy of Christ’s victory on Easter Day if we have plumbed the depths of the disciples’ despair on Good Friday.

It has been my privilege in recent years to lead the Good Friday evening service of reflection in our home congregation, and I find that makes me think afresh about the crucifixion. Over several readings we cover almost the whole of the crucifixion story and it’s amazing the different details that call attention to themselves over the years. This year, from Mark’s Passion narrative, we’ll be thinking of Pilate’s amazement at Jesus’s silence in the face of his accusers, the taunts for him to come down from the cross, and the temple curtain that is torn in two. Each detail has something to add to the meaning of the story.

Holy Saturday is the Cinderella day of the weekend. It was the Sabbath on which Jesus’s body rested in the tomb, but it is usually treated as a day when we go about our business as usual, getting everything ready for a big Easter Day celebration. There is one personal discipline I keep that day to remind me of its significance, and that is to take off the shelf a book by one of my late teachers, Alan E. Lewis, called Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday. Alan was writing this book as he was fighting the cancer that took his life and these circumstances shaped in a creative way how he saw Holy Saturday and what it can say to us.

This coming Easter Day I have the unexpected responsibility of covering for the illness of a friend, and with the lectionary text set as Mark’s Gospel, it finishes on the note of the women being scared and not telling anyone. While there is scholarly dispute over whether Mark 16:8 could be the original ending of the book, and while early church leaders wrote two endings to smooth things out, the text as it stands has impressed upon me just how scary an event the resurrection was for the disciples. And it is scary for us too, because although we take great hope from it, especially at times of bereavement, when we get round to thinking about the implications of it for future existence and how it impinges on our behaviour in the present, that is an awesome realisation.

Wherever you mark the Easter Story, and in whatever circumstances you find yourself, I pray that you will know both the sorrow and joy it brings, and that it will speak into your own life in ways that you never imagined.