Tag: Holy Week

Women of Holy Week

bible, church resources, easter, holy week, lent, pictures, worship

Last year I worked on a project with the fabulous Paula Gooder to illustrate her nine short stories entitled ‘Women of Holy Week’. The resulting book was hugley popular last Lent, and I suspect it will be again this year, so it’s absolutely not too late to get hold of copies and use them in your church or in your personal devotions, or as a gift for friends. It’s wonderfully readable, and includes ideas for reflection as well as historical / scriptural details drawn from Paula’s scholarly wisdom that really enrich the narrative.

Buy the book here (links to Church House Publishing)

If you would like to use the images alongside the book in worship or Lent groups etc, you can download them from my book illustrations page. There are nine individual paintings, and one large composite image, to be ‘read’ in a spiral direction starting at the top left hand corner, following the order that the stories appear in Paula’s book. Because the stories are all interwoven with each other, so are the paintings – you can enjoy them separately or together.

NB if you don’t have the means to do high quality colour printing you may find projecting the images more satisfying.

Passiontide and Holy Week in pictures

art, clipart, easter, holy communion, holy week, lent, Other cool stuff, pictures, worship

This post is all pictures. I’ve put all of my pictures that possibly pertain to Passiontide and Holy Week here in one place so that if you’re looking for images to use in reflective material for yourself or for your dispersed congregation you can just help yourself. Sorry the digital quality isn’t great for all of them and some are a bit blurry.

The woman with the ointment
Jesus washes his friends’ feet
Peter went out and wept bitterly
Crucifixion
  • sleeping disciples
  • Judas betrays Jesus
  • Sanhedrin trial
  • Peter betrays Jesus
  • Scourging
  • Hand washing
  • Carrying the cross
  • The women of Jerusalem
  • Simon of Cyrene
  • nails
  • Looking at the thief by his side
  • Jesus creates a new family
  • Jesus dies
  • Pieta
  • Jesus is buried
Stations of the cross (the biblical version- please do check I’ve got them in the right order!)
The women of Jerusalem
Easter morning
Resurrection breakfast on the beach 1
Resurrection breakfast on the beach 2
Mary hugging Jesus after the resurrection when he comes downstairs from seeing the disciples in the upper room.

Cambridge Stations: Peter denies Jesus

art, bible, holy week, lent, pictures

Westcott House is once again commissioning Stations of the Cross for churches and chapels across the city. This year, I have been allocated station 4: Peter denies Jesus.

“And he went out and wept bitterly”

  1. Charcoal on paper
  2. Digitally manipulated print

 

 

 

 

 

Peter’s betrayal of Christ is deeply personal, yet he weeps on behalf of all our failures.

In the original charcoal image, we are invited into the raw immediacy of Peter’s experience by the charcoal fire.

In the digital print – created using a scanned image and some of the basic image manipulation features in Microsoft Word – we are invited to recognise the ease with which Peter’s sin can be duplicated, and the ordinary, daily ways in which we improvise upon his betrayal.

Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. A servant-girl came to him and said, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean.” But he denied it before all of them, saying, “I do not know what you are talking about.” When he went out to the porch, another servant-girl saw him, and she said to the bystanders, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.” Again he denied it with an oath, “I do not know the man.” After a little while the bystanders came up and said to Peter, “Certainly you are also one of them, for your accent betrays you.” Then he began to curse, and he swore an oath, “I do not know the man!” At that moment the cock crowed. Then Peter remembered what Jesus had said: “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.

Matthew 26.69-75

What do the stones say?

holy week, poems

This is a reflection / poemy thing based on the Palm Sunday gospel (the one with the stones), and making reference, among other things, to the Temptations of Jesus, the averted stoning of the woman in John 8, and the prophecy about the destruction of the temple.  

We could have been the temple,
if we were bigger, or more beautiful,
but we are the despised and the rejected,
our shape and size are wrong,
or we are broken, not quite strong
enough; the House of God surely demands
that only perfect stones
may be accepted.

We are the downtrodden,
trampled in the dust,
we are the cursed,
the cause of battered feet and stumbles,
the playthings of the poorest children,
and for the beggars as they sit in boredom,
Equally unnoticed, equally humble.

We are still stone, when once,
we might have become bread.
And just before he turned to look the devil in the face,
to us he bent his head, ‘Remember this,’ he said.

We are still unbloodied, still unscathed,
when once we could have been picked up and weighed
in the hand, and flung in cruel contempt.
He saw us then, as he leant
down to mark the dust
and whispered to us, once again, ‘Remember this.’

We remember how he saw us, even though we
were not intricately carved or nobly
combined in stately, sacred architecture.
He saw us as we were, the least, the small,
the unimportant, despised, rejected all.
We remember how he saved us from the shame
of becoming unwitting instruments of blame.
We remember how he wished that we were food,
but would never use us for a selfish good.

We remember.

And now we see him, riding like a king amid the raving crowd,
towards the Temple’s lofty towers, so tall and strong.
And just as we begin to wonder if we’d read him wrong,
he looks deliberately at the stony ground,
then raises his head and looks about
and speaks aloud:
‘If all the crowds were silent,
then the very stones would shout!’

Call us as your witness,
hear this testimony,
about a man who saw us
and gave us this, a story.

We tell that story on every rocky path
and in every wayside cairn,
in every church that’s built from rocks
to be a house of prayer and living sign
of the man who was himself
a stumbling block
to all who could not
love him as the corner stone.