Matthew 11:28-30 NIV 28“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
John 3:16 ESV “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
1 John 4:19 ESV We love because he first loved us.
Romans 5:8 ESV But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Zephaniah 3:17 ESV The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
1 John 3:1 ESV See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
A man seen lying and praying on top of the tomb of Jesus Christ, as thousands of Orthodox Christian worshippers take part in the Holy Fire ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, traditionally believed to be the burial site of Jesus Christ, in Jerusalem’s Old City during the Easter holiday. April 30, 2016. Photo by Hadas Parush
The house is quiet. They close the door, latch it, and sink down exhausted onto the stone bench. John rises once to make certain the latch is secure, and Mary another time to light the lamp. Outside, people pass in the street. The oil lamp flickers unsteadily. The evening rolls into the night.
Remember Great Lent is like a tripod. If one of the legs is shorter than the other the tripod will be unbalanced and the camera will fall. We need a balanced tripod to get a clear picture of the Resurrection. That is the goal.
I drew a set of Stations of the Cross for my community. You can find all of them at thestations.net This is the first one, Jesus in the Garden of Gesthemane.
I’ve been obsessed with the Stations for a while—I love constraints in comics, and the Stations of the Cross are a comic that has been drawn and redrawn by cartoonists in the Christian tradition for at least a millennium and a half. (I’m using the word “comic” broadly—I define a comic as any series of images designed to be read sequentially.) The last month has been a hard, strange time, and I’ve spent most of it indoors, drawing these hard, strange pictures. I have found a paradoxical comfort in sitting with the violence and horror of Jesus’ humiliation and death. I think they mean that God is intimately aware of our fragility: he knows what it is to live in a soft, fragile body and anticipate painful death; he knows physical pain; he knows unjust political systems that bring death to the innocent. He is not a stranger to all our fear and pain and sorrow. He has held all that and more in his own soft body.
Reblogging for Holy Week 2022. Please feel free to share with your friends + communities: thestations.net
