Members of the Theos team reflect on the significance of Holy Week and Easter. 15/04/2025

The good thief in us 

There are moments of grace. They catch us off guard. They are not scripted.  

Holy Week is largely lost to us now. We need to dig deep, study, re–imagine even to glimpse the maelstrom it must have been. One part Question Time, one part Inquisition, one part street party, one part street riot, revolutionary fervour, power games, tense, febrile, angry, confused, and at the end determined, desperate, noise, taunting. There is no order here. Just the turmoil of lives lived out. 

Thanks to Luke, we eavesdrop a private conversation, screamed between dying men in public, and even at the distance of two millennia and a different language, we can still hear the desperate hope. 

It comes from a criminal, in Seamus Heaney‘s words, “so body–racked he seems/ Untranslatable into the bliss.” The request is not just self–interested, however little time there may be left for this self to be interested in anything. It is not merely “save me now”. It is only “remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” 

But the answer catches us, wrongfoots us. Here, where there is no reason for hope, we hear the words “today you will be with me in paradise”. They pierce like undiluted grace, light on the blood–dimmed tide, “a phenomenal instant” (Heaney again) “when the spirit flares/ With pure exhilaration before death.” 

Nick Spencer 

Everything will be alright  

I often burst into my children’s rooms when I hear them cry out following a night terror. Being comforted by our parents in the midst of pain or anguish describes a basic human need. Sociologist Peter L. Berger describes this moment of reconnection as a ‘signal of transcendence’. The soothing words ‘there, there… everything will be alright’, he says, point to an ultimate reality in which everything really will be alright: “The parental role is not based on a loving lie… it is a witness to the ultimate truth of man’s situation in reality.” Abandonment by a parent figure in these moments affects children’s development, sense of self and security. It’s a pain that is never forgotten. I heard this pain in Kriss Akabusi’s recent The Sacred interview, where he describes how – crying out for his mother in a children’s home – he realised she was not coming back and that he would need to fend for himself.   

It’s been said that in people’s dying moments, they cry out for their mother. Soldiers on battlefields do it, as did George Floyd in his final moments, despite his mother having died two years before.   

Jesus too feels a cosmic sense of abandonment on the cross. Though his mother Mary bears witness to his suffering, he cries out to his heavenly Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”   

Echoing David’s lament in Psalm 22, this is not a gotcha moment which reveals Jesus is just a man who despairs because he thought he would escape death. It does however reveal Jesus’s humanity; his solidarity with all those who cry out and long to be comforted.   

In this most heart–wrenching of anguished moments, Jesus – just like us – longs to be close to the one who gave him life. The paradox is that it is precisely in this moment that we see God’s ultimate love for us, and hear God say: “everything will be alright”.   

Chine McDonald   

The feast is for all 

“O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown! Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!” proclaims St John Chrysostom in his Paschal Sermon, which is read every year in churches around the world at Matins of Pascha (Easter).  

On Resurrection Sunday, we celebrate Christ’s triumphant victory over death with boundless joy – and the invitation to the celebration is universal. In the midst of a world burdened by division, exclusion, relentless comparison and the pressure to constantly produce and achieve, Easter proclaims a liberating message. Christ’s Resurrection, and the glorious feast that celebrates it, is for all: the fatted calf awaits those who have toiled since dawn, as well as those who arrive at the eleventh hour.  

God’s victory is absolute, but is this liberation a reality in our lives? We live, weighed down by fears of inadequacy, overwhelmed by expectations and self–judgment, struggling with burnout, loneliness and anxiety. In short, although Hell itself has been embittered, abolished, mocked and slain by Christ’s death, we live all too often still in hells of our own making. Yet the way out is clearly indicated: all we have to do is show up and enter joyfully into Easter. Whether we are diligent or late, rich or poor, virtuous or burdened with regret, and indeed whether we go to church or not, everyone, without exception, is invited to feast abundantly. 

Let us forget about intellectually assenting to Christ’s Resurrection. Instead, Easter invites even the sceptics to enter wholeheartedly into its abundant joy. It calls us from anxiety to celebration, from isolation to community, boldly proclaiming: “Christ is risen, and life reigns! Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave!” Here is truly the greatest reason for each one of us to rejoice. 

George Lapshynov 

Something to run for 

We rarely run for no reason.  

Our ancestors once ran to escape predators. Perceived threats trigger the physiological ‘fight–or–flight’ response, raising our heartrates so we can make a quick exit. Nowadays, we are more likely to run for our cardiovascular health, to win a race, to catch a train, or just show off our marathon accolades.   

Increasingly it seems that people, particularly Gen Z, are running for community. The annual survey from fitness tracking and social media app, Strava, reports a 59% increase in running club usage on the app in 2024 with 58% of users reportedly making friends through a fitness group.  

Though I struggle to find the appeal of running in general, let alone forming a community where everyone is sweating and breathless, it’s hard to deny the breadth of ways people find meaning through running. 

The Greek word to run or move with haste, trechō, features more times in the accounts of Holy Week than anywhere else in the Gospels.   

When, in unbearable agony, Jesus cried out to the Father on the cross, an onlooker immediately ran to fetch him something to drink (Mk. 15:36; Mt. 27:48). In witnessing the suffering Jesus, his care moved him to action, attempting to soothe Christ’s pain as quickly as possible. 

When Mary Magdalene came to anoint Jesus’ body only to find that he was no longer lying dead in the tomb, she ran to tell the other disciples (Jn. 20:2; Mt. 28:8). On hearing this, two disciples raced each other to the empty tomb to see for themselves (Jn. 20:4; Lk. 24:12). In John’s gospel, they run out of concern for the whereabouts of their friend; in Matthew and Luke they run for joy to tell the others that their Teacher lives.  

Two–thousand years later, Jesus’ death and resurrection still gives us reason to move with more speed and purpose than our natural walking pace allows. We are called to run towards others in compassion and to run towards the world–changing miracle that is the risen Christ. 

Rosie Bromiley 

“Here be dragons to be slain.” 

In her 1918 poem ‘Christ Walks The World Again‘, Dorothy L Sayers casts the resurrected Jesus as a swashbuckling “bonny outlaw”, a “prince of fairytale” who wanders the world nomadically with “music in His golden mouth and laughter in His eyes.”  

The lyricism which makes Jesus both human and hero is Sayers’ attempt to ground Christ the man in the rough beauty of the earth, roaming with no place to call home as he “heedeth not the morrow and never looks behind”. Her later radio drama about the Easter story, The Man Born To Be King, was controversial for its colloquial English language and depiction of Jesus Christ as a saviour with a regional accent. 

A century on, it has almost the reverse of the intended effect. Rather than humanising the Jesus of the gospels, it takes a bigger imagination, a more convoluted intellectual exercise, to see Him as a lute–playing folk hero now. It is worth the mental gymnastics though. 

“Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain,” Sayers’ imagined Jesus says in the poem’s final lines, rendering death small and inconsequential. For me, it took this surreal injection of dragons into the most familiar of stories to remind me that Easter, and especially the resurrection, is both profound and fantastical, and our need to understand it on our own terms nothing new. I’d like to think that Jesus sees this too with gentle laughter in His eyes. 

Hannah Rich