Fr Robert’s April 2025 Parish Letter

My dear friends,

&nbspI am typing this letter two days after Ash Wednesday. Holy Week seems a long way off, but Lent will rush by and Holy Week will soon be upon us. Holy Week is the most important – and wonderful – week in the Christian year, because during it we accompany Jesus on the last week of his earthly life, culminating in his Crucifixion and Resurrection.

&nbspOn Palm Sunday we walk alongside Jesus as he enters Jerusalem on a donkey, to be greeted enthusiastically by the crowds. Over the next few days the mood darkens. On Maundy Thursday our service has many layers of meaning: we remember Jesus’s washing of the disciples’ feet and his institution of the Eucharist, the sacrament of his body and blood. We remember, too, his betrayal by Judas Iscariot, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and his arrest by the Temple guards. On Good Friday we recall Jesus’s trial by Pontius Pilate, his carrying of the heavy Cross along the Via Dolorossa, and his Crucifixion just outside the city walls. The Lord died at 3.00pm and the curtain in the Temple suddenly split in two: a sign that something was going on that was unseen by the human eye.

&nbspJesus was given a hurried burial in a tomb near his place of execution. His friends were devastated: they had come to realise that Jesus was the Son of God come to earth, and now it all seemed to have gone wrong. What they couldn’t see, however, was that as Jesus hung upon the Cross, he offered his life in sacrifice to God the Father, to take away the sins of the world. Three days later, on Easter Day, Jesus rose from the dead in what we call the Resurrection. The worst thing that could possibly happen in the entire history of the world – the murder of the Son of God – had happened; but God’s love was greater still.

If we look at the various elements of Christianity – the Church, the Sacraments, the New Testament, our traditions of prayer, the Creeds, care of our fellow men and women – and trace them back to their origins, we always end up at Easter. After Christ’s Resurrection, nothing could be quite the same ever again. As Mrs Alexander wrote in her famous hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’:

There was no other good enough

To pay the price of sin;

He only could unlock the gate

Of heaven, and let us in. 

O, dearly, dearly has he loved,

And we must love him too,

And trust in his redeeming Blood,

And try his words to d

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Lent, Holy Week and Easter services 2025

Thursday 3 April 

St George’s Church, Crowhurst

 7.30pm Compline with short address

  I believe in God the Holy Spirit 

    The Very Rev Lee Duckett