This is the final one of my Holy week addresses for this year. Thank you for journeying with me from Palm Sunday to the evening of Easter Day.

Catch up TV has revolutionised my life. In the past I was never able to watch series, I could never guarantee to be in and even when you were able to set the video recorder the tapes used to fill up and I could never seem to find the time to watch what I’d hoped to watch. Now those days are over and I can simply look forward to binging on the third series of ‘Happy Valley’ and see what finally happens to Sergeant Catherine Cawood and very bad boy, Tommy Lee Royce. As with anything you have to watch ‘Happy Valley’ from beginning to end!

It’s absolutely pointless to see the first and last episodes of anything – you know where the story began and you know where the story finishes – but all that stuff in between that you don’t know, that links the beginning with the ending – well, you’ll never know it.

So, I hope that there’s no one here who came last Sunday and has only come back on this Sunday – because if you have you’ve missed a heck of a lot. A great deal went on, happened to Jesus between his entry into Jerusalem and his resurrection. The shocking thing I have to tell you is that he died – he really died. It was no pretence, it was no trick.

There was a real death and there was real grief around. We were there. We witnessed it. We witnessed his final days when he was with his disciples and they cared for him. We witnessed the final evening that he shared with them, the meal he gave to them and to us, the way in which he washed their feet.

We waited in the garden whilst he prayed and we saw the act of treachery take place, that kiss that marked him out as the man they wanted.

We stood among the mob as they bayed for his blood and we watched with Mary and with John as the nails were hammered home and he was lifted high, wearing his thorn crown like a mighty king. We saw him die and we were there as his lifeless body was brought down from the cross and carried away – carried towards the rocks close by.

He died and he was buried. He was buried in the rock and the rock was sealed as his final resting place.

For me the rock itself was important and I want to include it amongst the instruments of the passion, though it isn’t usually there, among the ‘Arma Christi’, those things which were employed to bring about his death, the palms and the ladder and the nails and the cross and all the other things that we see represented in Christian art and iconography and that we’ve been thinking together about over these last eight days.

Rock has this incredible force and presence, this is what the earth is made of, this is the stuff of our planet, the rock is the base of everything, beneath everything – all else, the soil, the sand is simply derived from it, broken down from it. The rock is the ground of our being.

And someone had broken into the rock, broken into mother earth and created a room, a place, a womb in which to lay a dead person, someone somewhere had broken into the rock and made a place in which to lay God. The creator was laid in the very heart of his creation, one with all that is. The rock is hard and harsh and unforgiving – but those same qualities made it a secure and safe place to entrust the precious remains of God-among-us, Emmanuel.

The Jews had a deep sense of relationship with the rock – perhaps because there was so much of it around but also perhaps because it seemed so unchanging.

For the early Hebrews rocks were used as a witness. I love the story in Genesis when the covenant with God is sealed and a rock is set aside as a continuous witness to what’s been said and done. The rock is anointed and stands there as a perpetual reminder and witness against the people if needs be. Life is lived beside the rock and life itself is laid inside the rock until the time when it will re-emerge. ‘I am about to do a new thing;’ says the Lord through the prophet Isaiah, ‘Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?’

T S Eliot writes the following in his epic poem ‘Choruses from the Rock’.

‘The soul of man must quicken to the soul of creation.
Out of the formless stone, when the artist unites himself with stone,
Spring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is joined to the soul of stone.’

Life springing forth, the new thing that God does through the passion and death of his son. Our new life springing forth, bursting from a rock like a stream of living water cascading from a dry rock in the desert. And as St Paul says in his First letter to the Christians in Corinth, ‘that rock was Christ’ (1 Cor.10.4)

Michelangelo’s fantastic sculpture ‘The Awakening Slave’ is perhaps the best image of the truth that Eliot is hinting at. Michelangelo’s figure is seen to be struggling to life out of the rock itself. The man is stretching as though waking to life, sensual as if coming to terms with his new body, in the ecstasy of birth, in the ecstasy of life.

Jesus laid in the rock, is Jesus risen from the rock. His death has to be contemplated and confronted, the reality of his death, the implications of a universe in which God is dead, if we’re really going to be able to feel the force of the new life that comes through resurrection. Avoid the death and we avoid the life.

St Paul is quite clear about this in his Letter to the Colossians (3.1-4). We have to die if we are to live and that death might be the death to old self and old ways that we can, through the grace of God achieve now, or the death that will ultimately and in God’s time be ours that will lead to eternal life. Our own death is bound to Christ’s death and our own life is bound to Christ’s life.

We are wrong when we try to avoid the death of Jesus, when we’re seduced into thinking it didn’t happen. It did happen and our own death will happen.

This Holy Week has been about participation in the events of the passion and resurrection of the Lord, about, to some extent, seeing ourselves amongst those instruments of the passion, recognising that it was in response to our disobedient and sinful nature that God sought to save us, to redeem us. And the week has also been about recognising more about ourselves about seeing ourselves in the things that happened to Jesus.

Those who miss the death and celebrate only the resurrection will never be able to share in the stunned amazement of the disciples in the Upper Room on this evening of Easter Day. And perhaps our avoidance of the hard part of the story, the painful episode in the series has marks of what so often goes on in contemporary society in which so many avoid thinking about their own mortality.

It’s a hard thing to think about – as hard as rock, as uncompromising as granite. Yet Christ the Corner Stone, the rock on which we build for all eternity, is the one who gives us the confidence to look not just at our life but also at our dying.

The great seventeenth century Anglican bishop and theologian Jeremy Taylor wrote this in his book ‘Holy Living: Holy Dying’,

‘And how, if you were to die yourself? You know you must. Only be ready for it by the preparation of a good life, and then it is the greatest good that ever happened to thee’.

God has done a new thing. From the rock new life has burst free and no tomb will ever keep us either. ‘Do you not perceive it?’ Life, our life this week has changed and God has used the instruments that we made and chose to end life, to make life, new life, for all people, for all time. This is why we rejoice.

In the joy of this place, in the joy of this evening, as the light of a new day and a new world begins to fade we ask God to help us to live well that we might die well and that from the rock we too may rise.

Christ our rock, on the firm foundation of your passion, death and resurrection we build our lives. May we know you to be the ground of all being on which we can trust. Amen.