Lent & Easter

After an unforgettable three years, the charismatic teacher who called you and your brother James to follow him says, ‘Right, lets go to Jerusalem.’ It’s thrilling to be setting out on the next stage of the adventure. But life in the company of Jesus is not for the faint-hearted. Certainly there’s fun as you mess about with the other young disciples. But it’s pretty edgey too, not knowing who is going to turn up next and what might be expected of you. And as the days pass by, the huge demands on Jesus as he heals and teaches invoke both a strange tenderness and a growing dread of why exactly you are journeying to the holy city... Looking through the eyes of the disciple John, The Journey follows Luke’s chronology from Luke 9:51, as Jesus ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem’. Absorbing, exuberant and affective, it offers daily (weekday) readings for Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday, with a poem for each Saturday. It is suitable for use by individuals or groups.

As we pass through the weeks of Lent, our gaze is drawn ineluctably to the Son of God. The crucified Christ fills our gaze as we move closer to Easter, but in order to grasp more fully the scope and significance of his supreme sacrifice, we need to embrace and believe in the whole Christ, Alpha and Omega, rather than focusing only on isolated aspects of his life, such as his teaching or his example - or even his death and resurrection. There are two journeys to make in this book. The first takes us on an extended exploration of the person and work of Jesus Christ, from the word present before the creation to the Messiah reigning in glory at the end of time. The second journey is one of devotion and discipleship through the events of Holy Week, a journey made in the light of the earlier exploration and enriched by all that we have learned as a result.