Below are the reflections, Bible readings and prayers for Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday from Thirst for Life, the Lent book from Christian Aid and Cafod.

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• Good Friday
• Easter Saturday
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Maundy Thursday

How beautiful are your feet?

Ex 2:1-8,11-14; Ps 16; I Cor 11:23-26; Jn 131-15

'Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!'
(John 13:9)

Seeing me standing on a Cornish beach one my wife Mary remarked that she didn't marry me for my feet or for my money, for that matter.

Interestingly, it was the feet on the bodies of peasant pilgrims painted by Caravaggio that incensed one of his patrons. They just weren't respectable enough. They didn't create the right devotional impression. I wonder what this patron would have made of the liturgical washing of feet each Maunday Thursday?

As a teenager I dreaded priests asking me to have my feet washed. So much so that I made sure I was doing something else with them: I took up the organ! I was already conscious that my feet were large and that my toes were somewhat squashed and certainly unattractive to the eye.

But as a priest myself - and one who has sometimes met a degree of resistance on the part of those whom he's asked to have their feet washed - I have to say that washing feet is quite one of the most spiritually moving and humbling experiences I've ever had.

There's something here in the way in which vulnerability on the part of the washee meets the kneeling humility of the washer.

Feet weren't of course enough for Peter to be going on with. He wanted Jesus to wash his hands and his head as well. As usual, he missed the point.

Since one who's bathed already - in other words, one who's been baptised - doesn't need total immersion in water, just a loving reminder for tired feet of their symbolic importance as the means by which God's message of peace is borne into the world.

Put your own feet up for a few moments and contemplate those of all the Christians world-wide who will walk to church today to begin to accompany Jesus in his lonely trek to the cross.

The courage and the contexts involved in making some of these journeys doesn't bear thinking about. Well, actually it does. Think about it now and thank God for all those feet.

Thought for the day

'How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace.' Romans 10: 15

Prayer

Lord, help me to walk with you and for you, to plant my footprints in yours, and run the way of your commandments. Amen

Good Friday

Cross-shaped power

Is 52:13-53:12; Ps 31; Heb 4:4-16, 5: 7-9: Jn 18:1-19:42

Pilate therefore said to him. 'Do you not know I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?'
(John 19:10)

Every Good Friday pilgrims walk the length of London's Victoria Street from Methodist Central Hall to Westminster Cathedral and then back towards Westminster Abbey in a Procession of Witness.

A heavy cross is borne through the streets to the beat of a lone drum, as Christians of every denomination follow its journey to the point where three hammer blows see the cross set up in the Abbey's nave.

One year, I found myself next to the human rights champion, James Mawdsley whose story of imprisonment for pro-democracy activities in Burma is lovingly documented in his autobiography, The Heart Must Break. The book is nothing short of a spiritual classic.

The most haunting episode is the moment when he sees his prison warder - a man who has tried to wear down James's spirits in all sorts of petty ways - working in the courtyard beyond his cell.

Over the initial weeks of a sentence that could run a 25-year course, this man has come to symbolise all that James hates about his Burmese oppressors.

But, suddenly, seeing the man silhouetted against the courtyard wall James realises that this warder is no longer an object of hate but of love. The warder clearly thought that he was the one who held power over James. But James now realised that here was a man much more a victim of oppression than his prisoner.

James's innate sense of freedom could never be taken from him. But for this warder there was little prospect of him ever escaping his life as functionary in the oppressive machinery of the Burmese state.

Like Jesus before Pilate, or Gandhi facing the clubs borne salt-mine guards, or Desmond Tutu standing in Cape Town's Wale Street, the tear gas canisters shooting past his ears, James had realised a fundamental truth, that the only real power there is in the world is cross-shaped. It is the transforming power of sacrificial love.

Thought for the day

Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death. Victory is ours through him who loves us.
Desmond Tutu

Prayer

Lord, help me never to suppose that I have power over any other human being, save the power of your Cross. Amen

Holy Saturday, Easter Vigil

Waiting and hoping

Gen 1:1-2.2; Is 54:5-14; Mt 28:1-10

'Come see the place where he lay.'
(Matthew 28:6b)

In his remarkable book, Real Presences, George Steiner commends Holy Saturday to his readers - of whatever faith or none - as the most important day in the life of the world.

Given his Jewish roots, this at first seems puzzling. But with remarkable generosity and insight he sees the movement from suffering to hope, that frames the journey from Good Friday to Easter Day, as a movement beyond the specific Christian context in which the story of a crucifixion and a resurrection is rehearsed.

In this movement, Holy Saturday is a day of waiting, a day to take seriously the self-emptying character of the cross, a day to focus on the emptiness of a tomb with all its liberating possibilities. It is the day on which we most discern the nature of our humanity because, as RS Thomas once suggested, 'the meaning is in the waiting'.

I found myself early one morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Eucharist was celebrated around the site which - symbolically – has become known as the place of Christ's tomb and hence his resurrection. The ministry of the word was heard in front of the tomb. The Franciscan priest then went inside the tomb to preside over the ministry of the sacrament.

As the congregation, we sat facing the place from which the stone had been roIled away. When the priest brought the consecrated bread out of the tomb towards the congregation, I felt I was being commanded to come and see the place where Jesus lay and to accept the reality of his abiding presence in a new way. I dare not refuse to do so.

And then having looked and eaten, I, an Anglican priest, was sent out by the Catholic priest into the complexities of a world which, from the perspective of a place like Jerusalem, seemed pretty stark. But I'd glimpsed hope before leaving, it had touched my lips and my heart – a hope and strength whose power can still change everything.

It had, after all begun to change me.

Thought for the day

Hope: there is no word less deconstructible.
George Steiner

Prayer

Lord help me to walk the Saturday journey, between suffering and liberation, with a hopefulness that waits with eager longing and a truthfulness that never loses heart, because it is breaking down all the barriers in your world.
Amen

Easter Sunday

Loving and eastering

Acts 10:34, 37-43; Ps 118; Col 3:1-4; Jn 20: 1-9

'Then the other disciple . . saw and believed '
(John 20: 8)

The fifteen-painting series 'The Journey' by the contemporary artist, Penny Warden, in Blackburn Cathedral reworks the traditional stations of the cross as a journey in colour and bodily movement·- represents the world of torture, loneliness and death surrounding the central protagonist with purples, dark reds, browns and blacks.

But it also contains hints of yellows and oranges throughout in order to show the sufferer fighting back as he seeks to overcome whatever is thrown at him. In each of the paintings, the artist also offers a thoroughly balletic figure, revealed as participant in a dance of death which becomes - at length - a dance of new life.

The viewer's eyes immediately detect behind her brushstrokes shadows of distended Ethiopians in. the famine of 1985 or the skeletal figures so painfully revealed to the world in 1945 when the Allies liberated the concentration camps, the napalm girl from Vietnam running towards

us, the machete-marred bodies of Rwandans strewn along the roads in Kigali in the 1994 genocide or the charred Iraqi in his tank in the 1991 Gulf War.

But paintings speak not just to the eye or even to the memory. Colour, as Kandinsky asserted, exerts a direct influence on the soul and people who walk Penny Warden's journey in colour, experience it as one by which a victim becomes not just a survivor but actually a victor.

You can't fail but to get the point when in the final picture, a wonderful representation of the resurrection, the whole canvas is yellow and orange with just hints of mauve where nails were once driven - and the dancer pirouettes exuberantly from the tomb.

But only one child - after the paintings had been installed for six months - noticed that around this figure the artist had made some 'splashes' that form the shape of a heart.

What does that mean?' I said to her. 'Loving', she replied, adding almost by accident as she continued to think aloud, ' ... eastering.' 'Yes,' I thought. 'You're so right Easter's much more verb than noun.'

So to the task we share with God of eastering the world ...

Thought for the day

'Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-crested cast.'
from 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', Gerald Manley Hopkins

Prayer

Lord, easter in me, the reality of your transforming love, that changing the landscape within I may work with you to transfigure the world without with the colours and the dancing of your eternal kingdom.
Amen

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