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Beginning to Flourish - Week Eight

Administrator February 16, 2025 0 0

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Jesus the Vine  — becoming branches ourselves — Easter!

 

Love has been stripped bare, but Jesus the vine still rooted deep in love bursts back into life! Love will flourish! As we look around the garden this Easter with our Father God the Gardener — let’s look to the vine — Jesus —  that runs through everything and be the branches that reach out widely under the rising and the setting of the sun. We breathe in, drink deeply, stand together in an arbour. It is not the beginning of the end. It is only the end of the beginning. It is time to flourish.

SEEDS TO SOW: This week consider how you can support individuals and organisations that work to show Jesus’s compassion and care in the world.

 

Read John 20: 1-18

‘Supposing him to be the gardener…’

The resurrection of Jesus is the new beginning for humanity. He becomes the new Adam and we find ourselves once again with Mary feeling the breath of the Holy Spirit, revealing to us a new future.

Q: As the Holy Spirit continues to work in our lives — what does the future hold for us this Easter? Isn’t there something interesting going on here in this conversation between Mary and Jesus?

In verse 15 the son of the Gardener is mistaken for the Gardener (Jesus called his Father the Gardener in John 15 in our reading opposite!).

Q: What do you think Jesus was doing that made it plausible for Mary to think he was the gardener? Perhaps it’s just because he was a man in the garden, but what if Jesus had been doing some weeding, or otherwise tending to the plants? How do you picture the scene that Easter morning as love blossoms anew?

 

Read John 15: 1-17

Loving branches.

So perhaps Mary was on to something when she supposed Jesus to be the gardener!

Q: How does the metaphor of gardening help us think about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and their relationship to us?

Q: If Jesus is the vine and we are the branches — we are in some sense bundled up in an extension of the divine — our lives are a human outworking of God’s Kingdom and heavenly purpose. How do we get our heads around that?

As branches Jesus calls us to love one another as he has loved us. We are loving branches of his vine, reaching ever outwards.

Q: What can we do today to shelter and shade those who need it today?

 

Read Leviticus 19: 10

Respecting the vineyard…

We often want to maximise profit, efficiency, and extraction of natural resources at the expense of those resources and of one another. God challenges us to see things in a different way.

Q: We are all connected! What are the principles that should guide the way we use the limited natural resources in the world?

Q: How can we support those in developing countries who depend on harvesting the resources of the natural world, (so that they can survive), to do so without destroying the earth’s eco system?

Q: What changes to our lifestyles are required to produce a more equitable world?

 

Lent Transformations Conclusion

The Transformed Tomb

Picture the empty tomb. Picture the friendly ‘Gardener' looking on, a smile playing across his face. 

Rejoice, eat, celebrate, treat yourself and others! Sing glory and hallelujahs to God! 

Let’s flourish!

He is risen!