This Holy Week has come as the climax to a Lent where we have been trying to listen more carefully for God’s call in our own lives. And a week ago I stood here and made a rash promise. I suggested that, for those who make it, Holy Week offers the possibility of deep change, even transformation, for us. I suggested that the radical stripping down that Jesus experienced in the first Holy Week offers us a model for confronting some of the hard truths of our own lives in preparation for our own deep resurrection. Put them together and I hope that we have at least begun to listen to God’s call and become aware of the shifts and changes that we need to make in our own lives to follow God’s call more closely.

From a human storytelling point of view, the resurrection of Jesus comes as the transformation par excellence. But what got him to that point? Where exactly have we been this week? In a way we have been on an uncomfortable journey with Jesus. We were reminded of the effort and the risk that is required to go on such a journey, the need for letting go and leaving certain things behind. We saw Jesus deeply troubled by the burden of friendships that he made on the journey, friendships that so easily turn into betrayals. We gathered around the table and tried to ignore the embarrassing and awkward washing of our feet that have been treading the path. And finally we were fed a last supper that was to keep us going through the dark hours of the night and on to the confrontation with death itself. We were left asking difficult questions of God, perhaps not knowing where to go next.

I love the image of the journey – so did the early Christians. It didn’t really matter where they were going; they just knew that the journey was important. I suppose it says something to the idea of God’s call to us. God’s call asks that we set out from one place that is familiar and relatively secure for a destination that can be only dimly perceived and that we cannot even be certain of reaching. I suspect that one of the ways of testing the authenticity of what we feel to be God’s call to us is whether it requires a journey. It may not be a geographical one; it may or may not require an outward journey. But it will always require an inward one. Holy Week shows us that we need to journey away from all that binds and smothers the real self.

Now, I said that we were left on Good Friday asking difficult questions of God. So, what is the answer we receive today? The answer is, of course, Jesus. More particularly, Jesus in his resurrection. It is something completely new, something utterly unexpected. Who would have thought that that first Holy Week journey would have ended here? Resurrection comes to Jesus and to us as a surprise, a gift. The culmination of Jesus’ journey is the discovery of his true identity – the one who possesses and gives out all new life and all new beginnings.

Having faced, with openness and honesty, the reality of his life, Jesus finds that it is transformed. And this is what we can learn from Jesus today. We do not live most of our lives in the haze of resurrection joy, more often our lives our lived in confusion, pain, loss and anxiety. That is the painful anxiety that is reserved for those who will not pay attention to what God is doing in their lives here and now, instead, fixing their eyes on the horizon, waiting for a bright, shining ray of light from the hand of God. This week we have seen Jesus with acute awareness of what was happening in the present moment and trying to meet it with honesty and openness.

The story that is always told at Easter is the story of the Israelites escape from slavery in Egypt. I suppose it captures something of the drama of the journey of transformation that Jesus himself has travelled on. And if it says something about Jesus’ journey then it also speaks to our own experience. It always strikes me that the new beginning that the Israelites enter that day, the new beginning that they celebrate with music and dance, takes place on the seashore. A seashore that stretches away toward an unknown new land in one direction whilst in the other direction the water laps against the dead bodies of those who had tortured and enslaved them. Isn’t that where we always are? Isn’t that where Jesus is as he proclaims new life and new beginnings in a graveyard? Isn’t that where we are today? Perhaps in huge dramatic ways, perhaps in tiny, imperceptible ways, we celebrate our own Exodus today. We rejoice that God offers us new life, a new beginning and the opportunity to change. But don’t hold on to it, as Jesus says, we can’t stay here. The seashore stretches in two directions – towards a strange and unknown land and towards a known and tested past, littered with the shadows of many little and great deaths. Where do you want to go today?