Peace Be With You (John 20:19-31)

“‘We do not know… how can we know the way?’
Courageous master of the awkward question,
You spoke the words the others dared not say
And cut through their evasion and abstraction.
Oh doubting Thomas, father of my faith,
You put your finger on the nub of things
We cannot love some disembodied wraith,
But flesh and blood must be our king of kings.
Your teaching is to touch, embrace, anoint,
Feel after Him and find Him in the flesh.
Because He loved your awkward counter-point
The Word has heard and granted you your wish.
Oh place my hands with yours, help me divine
The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.”

—Malcolm Guite

The Work is Finished; Everything has Changed (John 20:11-18)

“The finality of Christ’s death on the cross - which left to itself, could be so soothing to us, in the somber glow of our wisdom and tragedy’s pathos - has been unceremoniously undone, and we are suddenly denied the consolations of pity and reverence, resignation and recognition, and are thrown out upon the turbid seas of boundless hope and boundless hunger.”

—David Bentley Hart

Behold Our King (John 19:1-16a)

“Lev.17:11: ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I, I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your soul…’ In the [Biblical] case of sacrifice, the offerer tends to think, ‘I am putting this blood on the altar for the Lord.’ But here, the Lord turns that idea on its head. As scholar Baruch Schwartz explains in his essay “Prohibitions Concerning the ‘Eating’ of Blood”: What our clause does, in its unique, metaphorically graphic way, is to take a set phrase, the ‘placing’ of the blood on the altar, and to reverse the conceptual direction of the action: ‘It is not you who are placing the blood on the altar for me, for my benefit, but rather the opposite: it is I who have placed it there for you—for your benefit."‘ In his mercy and grace, the Lord has provided a way for guilty sinners to be forgiven.”

— Jay Sklar

Pilot's Three Questions (John 18:28-40)

“The scale of the reversal cannot be exaggerated:  when Jesus stands before Pilate… he must seem from the vantage of all the noble wisdom of the empire and the age... merely absurd…  But in the light of the resurrection… the mockery now redounds upon all kings and emperors, whose finery and symbols of status are revealed to be nothing more than rags and brambles beside the majesty of God’s Son, beside this servile shape in which God displays his infinite power to be where he will be; all the rulers of the earth cannot begin to surpass in grandeur this beauty of the God who ventures forth to make even the dust his glory.”

— David Bentley Hart

The Work of the Holy Spirit (John 16:4-15)

“Come O Spirit comfort true, 
Help us by Your pleading. 
Come and every heart renew 
Breath of God proceeding 
You alone to God can win us 
Spirit now work good within us

Come our conscience to relieve 
From the sin remembered.
Come our Savior’s blood to plead,
Naked we surrender.
Sin hath left a wound revealing,
Spirit help us with Your healing
All our riches all our crowns

Cast we now before Thee
Scales removeth chains unbounded
Boldly we implore Thee
As You knit us once together
Fasten us to You forever.”

—Isaac Wardell