Holy Week Compline Reflections 2025

Monday. Marion Chatterley, Vice Provost.

Before he was given up to suffering and death, recalling the night of Israel's release, the night in which the sons of Egypt died, your Chosen One, himself the First-Born, freely offered his life.

As we begin our journey into Holy Week, I’d like to consider the context within which we frame our Passiontide narrative. And our Eucharistic prayer gives us a starting place. We are told in that text that Jesus recalled the night of Israel’s release, the night in which the sons of Egypt died. The reading we heard from the book of the Exodus describes that story in some detail. The people of Israel were given clear instructions – to prepare their meal and to mark their houses so that the angel of death would know where to pass over.

This passage comes at the end of a list of plagues that God sent upon the Egyptians because the Pharoah was refusing to let the people of Israel go. There have been frogs, flies, gnats, locusts and boils – and still Pharoah refused. And so this evening’s verses up the game considerably. The first born of the Egyptians are condemned to death. Each and every one of them. And the first born of the people of Israel will be identified by the markings of blood on their doorposts and they will be spared. And thus we find ourselves in the midst of a narrative that separates people out into those who are chosen to live and those who are chosen to die. The price of freedom for the people of Israel was death for the innocent first born of Egypt.
It's a very small step from this narrative to one that identifies some people as the Chosen, and others as those who have been left behind. Perhaps even discarded.

Over many centuries some groups have identified themselves as the chosen ones, set apart from the rest of humanity. Within Christianity and Judaism, that has been embedded thinking. But it’s binary thinking. It enables one group of people to self-identify as different, as special, as more important, as set apart. And it leaves behind everyone else. It’s been used to justify abusive behaviour by individuals and nations. That doesn’t resonate with my understanding of God’s love for the world manifested in the life of Jesus.
So what is our liturgy saying when it describes Jesus as the Chosen one? There’s an ambiguity in the wording that’s used. He was indeed the first born as were the first-born Egyptians and the first-born Israelites. Do we identify the chosen Jesus as one for whom the angel of death passed over because he was Jewish, or one for whom the angel of death did its work because he chose to give his life? And notice the rich symbolism in the back story. The blood that was painted on the doorposts of the people of Israel was blood from the Passover lamb. We’re being invited into an interwoven narrative. Life and death; marked out and anonymous; sacrifice and the one who offers a sacrifice.

My reading is that Jesus, the first born, can be identified with both the first born of the Egyptians and the first born of the Israelites. He unifies across that divide. We are being reminded here that in Jesus there is no binary division of people. No them and us. Just God’s people.

All of us, first born or not, can identify with the human Jesus who modelled what it is to live life with and for God. His life is a reminder that we are all God’s beloved children. There is no slave and free. No insiders and outsiders. We are all invited into the communion of the people of God. Invited to turn our faces to God and to follow in the way that God has set before us.

That way will be different for each of us. It will be different for those whose theology differs from ours or whose way of worship differs from ours. But none will be superior. Difference is healthy. Diversity is healthy. Mutual respect is healthy. Those things are at the heart of freedom. Freedom to follow God; freedom to explore what God might be saying to us; freedom to change our minds, to allow ourselves to grow in faith.

The story of the Exodus is about freedom. Moses repeatedly asks Pharoah to set the people free. God makes that happen. And the resulting freedom is not just for the Israelites but also for the Egyptians. They are freed from their dependence on the slaves who have been given no choice but to do their work. Freed from the constraints within their lives.

The message I hear in this liturgy is that no-one is free unless everyone is free. No one is chosen unless everyone has the potential to be chosen. That, I suggest, is a message to take with us as we journey into this Holy Week. It’s a message to sustain us as we seek to follow in the way of the one who went even to death on a cross in order to set us free.




Tuesday. Dr Esther Elliott, Lay Reader.

Worship and praise belong to you,
maker of light and darkness.
Your wisdom draws beauty from chaos,
brings a harvest out of sorrow and leads the exiles home.


Last night we went back to the story of the Israelites in Egypt. Tonight, I want to invite you back to the moments almost before the story begins. To return to a moment before. A moment before there was day and there was night. For this is another context in which we find rich symbolism for our journey through Holy Week.

Right in the beginning, there was. This much we can be certain of. What there was has been a matter of debate for as long as humans have been alive. In our traditions it is familiar to say, in the beginning was God, a changeless being, who somehow suddenly created out of nothing. But in our texts, it’s a little bit more complicated.

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters”.

In the beginning when God creates but before God speaks to take and make and imposing form and order there is also a formless void, sometimes translated as a deep, a bottomless abyss or chaos. The grammar in the original Hebrew of these first few verses is clunky and argued over. In the beginning was chaos, and it’s possible to say in the depths, the chaos lay the possibilities and the opportunities for creation, for crafting, for starting something new, for forming and raising up. And that new creation is something we can recognise and declare as good, as beautiful.

We pause tonight standing on the cusp of chaos as we wait for the drama of the very last days of Jesus’ life on earth to unfold. Let’s not deceive ourselves that what comes next in the story is straightforward and linear. We may on the surface of the next few days as we track the story, move from day to night, from light to darkness, from sorrow to joy, from death to life but underneath all of that, is a deep chaos that cannot be controlled, a mystery that cannot be solved and, to borrow a phrase from a modern multimedia opera, monsters of grace.

Down in these deeps are all of humanity’s hopes and dreams for a better more equitable and peaceful world. Hopes and dreams for rescue and salvation are there too. Down there are all the joys of friendship and family, of eating and living and praying together. Down there are all the memories of history and identity, of feelings of belonging. Down there, in the depths too are all of the patterns of how we use power and control and manipulation of each other and the situations we find ourselves in. Down there are betrayals and guilt, fear and need. Down there are political systems the ways we organise ourselves which give some freedom and purpose while others are trapped and alienated. Down in the depths of chaos these things flow together and collide. Damage is done, things get lost, attractions happened, and unlikely, almost impossible connections are made. It’s an unruly, turbulent space where tricks are played and questions and uncertainty rule. It is no wonder at all that in the experience of this space God, in the form of Jesus, cried out “why have you forsaken me?” A howl at the distress of the absolute chaos of the loss of oneself.

Standing on the cusp of this chaos, tonight we wait. It’s a time for breathing deeply to remind ourselves of the sheer fact of life itself. Breathing to remind ourselves of spirit. It’s a time perhaps for gathering, gathering up ourselves and the parts of the whirlwind of our own stories, gathering our wits, gathering together with those through time and space we would want to stand alongside in solidarity. Most of all, it’s a time for honesty for the chaos of what is to come takes real courage. Not the sort of courage that is sheer will power, that feels the fear and does it anyway. This will take the sort of courage that comes from taking heart, from finding within ourselves the root of love. This will take the sort of courage that sings its sorrows and laments through the night. Perhaps you don’t know if you have that in you this time around. Then my advice, is to be absolutely honest and still wait, genuinely wait without trying to force anything, and see what turns up from out of the depths. See what the monsters of grace will bring. And the story will come round again.

We believe in the God whose wisdom draws beauty from chaos. Not a beauty that we expect, a beauty that conforms to our preconceived forms of style and splendour. Not a beauty that conforms to our latest fads and fashions. Not a beauty that people are drawn to. This is a beauty that is still wild, still bears the marks on its very body of the chaos it has come from. This is a beauty that comes from the depths of the deeps and from beyond the limits of the beyond. This is a beauty that doesn’t take our breath away but gives us life in all its fulness and life beyond life itself. The next few days will be full of chaos, it will draw you in, and yet, right there in the depths of the deep is a new beginning.




Wednesday. John Conway, Provost.

We who by Christ’s power follow the way of the Cross,
sharing the joy of his obedience,
now offer you our praise.


We have been reflecting this week on passages from our Eucharistic Prayer for Lent, for the time of preparation for Holy Week and Easter. Today’s short passage is part of the invitation to join with the song of angels and archangels, and the whole company of heaven, singing the hymn of God’s unending glory. But that invitation into praise encapsulates the paradoxical heart of the Christian gospel: We who by Christ’s power follow the way of the Cross, sharing the joy of his obedience, now offer you our praise.
The joy of his obedience. We heard earlier Mark’s account of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night he is arrested. ‘Remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want,’ he prays. At the heart of Christian devotion, at the heart of the Gospel, we have to reckon with the cross – with the clear articulation in the Gospels that this was the way that Jesus knew he must walk. That his death was not simply something thrust upon him; the result of actions by those in positions of authority, as well as by the baying of a crowd. It was all that, but it was also something chosen. Jesus understood his death as the will of his Father – to put it in the bluntest terms. He was obedient.
And that makes us uncomfortable, I suspect. It makes me uncomfortable. What is the understanding of God that underpins this obedience? Christian history is littered with understandings of the cross that build from that sense that Jesus was being obedient to the will of his Father, to suggest that the Father needed – in order to be satisfied, in order for the price of sin to be paid, the reasons can vary – but in some sense, needed the Son to die, in order for a transaction to be accomplished. Is that the nature of obedience – obedience to the will of a Father requiring satisfaction?
That’s not the God I believe in, or that I encounter in Jesus. But then how do we understand ‘obedience’, nevermind the ‘joy’ of his obedience? For many of us, that word obedience is hard to separate, I suggest, from the kind of authoritarian figure we are rejecting in that characterisation of God, not least if our own experience of a father has been like that. Obedience, we think, is usually blind obedience. It is about duty done for duty’s sake. But perhaps there is another way to approach that word, and see why it might be needed, and why it might be joyful, and carry us into praise.
Who is Jesus obedient to, and why? His life, encountered in the Gospels, suggests that his life is lived in full obedience to the love and grace he proclaims and embodies. His life is lived fully in the power of the Spirit who is love. What carries him to the cross is love; that love which gives of itself utterly; that love which doesn’t count the cost, calculate the odds, pragmatically decide the course. He is in obedience to the love which follows the path of solidarity and goes to the place of deepest suffering; which is not in denial about anything; but enters into the depths. Jesus walks the way of the cross in solidarity with all who suffer – that is all of us, in different ways; and to reveal who is complicit in that suffering – and again that is all of us, in different ways. What the cross reveals, what it names and redeems, is our human condition – our suffering, and our capacity to inflict suffering. What we face in the cross is what we would rather deny.
As T S Eliot famously said in his Four Quartet’s, human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.
Jesus’ journey to the cross, in love and for love, opens us up to a little more reality; to have the courage to name what is going on. To be obedient ourselves to that journey in love into brokenness. Our benches name species, in Scotland, on the verge of extinction, of no longer existing; Capercaillie, Snow Bunting, Atlantic Salmon, Whorl Snail, Sand Deceiver; gifts of creation, made for praise, removed from the face of the earth through our human greed and carelessness.
Can we let that sink in? We would far rather be distracted; rush on to something else. But the love which gifts creation in all its beauty and fragility, asks that we attend, that we walk into the brokenness of this moment, this crisis.
Jesus walked the way of the cross in obedience to love; into the place of deepest brokenness in love; into God-forsakenness for love. And the heart of our Christian faith and journey is the experience that if we can begin to do that too, walk in solidarity in love, and open ourselves up to our complicity, our failure to love, then we discover that the place of brokenness can be the place of new life. That we don’t have to live in denial, but in the power of new life; the power of praise. That our obedience to love is joyful, joy-filled; for we are in the business of being freed from our practice of denial. We are discovering that our deepest vocation, our obedience to love, is in praise, the praise of all creation.
That discovery of new life in the place of brokenness happens in a garden too; as the dawn chorus begins its song of praise, Mary encounters a gardener, and is named anew. She is turned from lament toward praise. From isolation toward community. We together walk the way of Holy Week because the Risen Christ enables us to. We can approach the place of brokenness because Christ has gone before us and names it and occupies it, and redeems it. We are brought to the place of new life and possibility and praise, with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven, by the one who lived in total obedience to love.
We who by Christ’s power follow the way of the Cross,
sharing the joy of his obedience,
now offer you our praise. Amen.