On the Sunday Next before Easter

Philippians 2.5-11, Matthew 27.1-54

We’re here. Our long Lenten preparation — our pilgrimage, if you take Robert Crouse’s reading — has reached its culmination with a week spent in meditation upon the passion. We began Lent by thinking about the call to holiness, the command to inhabit (by the Spirit’s power), a Christ-shaped, cross-shaped life. Then around the midpoint of Lent we turned to a focus on God’s grace, and on the person and work of Christ by which we receive that grace. And now, with last Sunday’s reading, we begin the prayer book’s week before Easter.