CCC Gainesville | Blog
Parent’s planning on attending the Maundy Thursday service please read this.
On Thursday evening we are having a time we are coming together as a community to worship on the day Jesus and his disciples gathered before Passover. This is a date on the church calendar that we call Maundy Thursday. It is recognized as the time that Jesus showed his friends what he meant when he said, “Love one another” by doing what needed to be done through the act of washing his friends’ feet. It is also the evening before Passover was to be celebrated. The disciples were remembering how God had delivered them from the Egyptians many years before. It was this evening that Jesus served his friends the first communion meal.
This is a more somber service because while Jesus and his friends are eating together there is still the understanding that it was out of that room Judas would leave to betray Jesus.
We are offering child care on Thursday for children Infants – 3rd grade. While the 0 – 3 year olds are to go to the Toddler room, we are having a special Maundy Thursday worship experience for the 4 years – 3rd grade kids. Please prepare your children for this event. Your children will be in the K-1st Sunday School room (3rd room on the left). They will not be in their normal Sunday School rooms. When they walk into the room they will take their shoes off and have their feet washed, they will then sit around the tables and have a “simple” snack together. We will also read a story about the Big God Story. This will be a story about God’s plan to bring us His Rescuer from the beginning of time. While there will be a brief explanation of why we are washing their feet and why we are eating together, it will not be in detail. Please take time this week to explain to your children what Maundy Thursday is all about.
If you have The Jesus Storybook Bible, read The Servant King together.
Parents of children 0-3rd Grade please read this
Dear Parents,
Easter is just a few days away. We wanted to send you an email letting you know what is going on on Easter Sunday so you can prepare for that day and your time of worship.
If you have an Infant-3 year old, please check them in at the Welcome Station and then take them into the Toddler room. You may check then in up to 15 minutes before the service starts.
If you have a 4 year old – 3rd grader, please take them down to the last adult Sunday School class on the right, at the end of the hall. Their Easter worship service will be held in that room. You may check them in up to 15 minutes before the service begins.
***There will be no dismissal from the Adult worship service. If you want your children to be a part of the special Easter worship experience for children you need to check them in before you worship in the sanctuary. If you want your children to worship with you in the sanctuary they will need to stay with you the entire service. There will not be a time for children’s dismissal from the sanctuary.
We have a group serving at Calvary Home For Children in South Carolina this week. Please keep praying for them.
White potted Hydrangea plants will be used to decorate the foyer & sanctuary on Easter. If you would like to help off-set the expense by purchasing a plant to take home after Second Worship on Easter morning, please contact Debbie at the church office to reserve your plant. Email: dstaples AT christcommunitychurch DOT com Cost: $11 each Checks should be made payable to Christ Community. Memo line: “Easter Plant”
After his last meal with his friends, Jesus went with his closest friends to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Tom Wright provides helpful guidance: Put this passage alongside the other time when Jesus took Peter, James and John away with him by themselves. In chapter 17, the four of them went up a mountain, and the disciples watched in amazement as Jesus was transfigured before them, shining with the glory of God and talking with Moses and Elijah. Now the same group of three are together in a garden, and the disciples watch in amazement as once again Jesus is transfigured, this time with the sorrow of God. Again, he is very much aware of the ancient scriptures which said it must be like this (verses 24, 54, 56).
This scene in Gethsemane is absolutely central to any proper understanding of who Jesus really was. It’s all too easy for devout Christians to imagine him as a kind of demigod, striding heroically through the world without a care. Some have even read John’s gospel that way, though I believe that is to misread it. But certainly Matthew is clear that at this crucial moment Jesus had urgent and agitating business to do with his father. He had come this far; he had told them, again and again, that he would be handed over, tortured and crucified; but now, at the last minute, this knowledge had to make its way down from his scripture- soaked mind into his obedient, praying heart. And it is wonderfully comforting (as the writer to the Hebrews points out) that he had to make this agonizing journey of faith, just as we do.
‘If it’s possible — please make it that I don’t have to drink this cup!’ The ‘cup’ in question, without a doubt, is the ‘cup of God’s wrath’, as in many biblical passages (Isaiah 51.17; Jeremiah 25.15, and elsewhere). Jesus was resolutely determined to understand this fateful moment in the light of the long scriptural narrative that he saw now coming to its climax in his death. But, precisely because of that, he realized in a new and devastating way that he was called to go down into the darkness, deeper than anyone had gone before, the darkness of one who, though he was the very son of God, would drink the cup which symbolized God’s wrath against all that is evil, all that destroys and defaces God’s wonderful world and his image-bearing creatures.
We can see this very process working its way out as the story unwinds. All the strands of evil in the world seem to rush together upon him. The power-seeking politics of the local elite. The casual brutality of imperial Rome. The disloyalty of Judas. The failure of Peter. The large systems which crush those in their way, and the intimate, sharply personal, betrayals. And everything in between, the scorn, the misunderstanding, the violence. The story is told in such a way that we see and feel, rather than just think about, the many different manifestations of evil in the world. Matthew invites us to see them all converging on Jesus. That is what this story is all about.
We are encouraged to see this scene, too, as somehow a revelation of the glory of God. It is one thing to be transfigured in the sense of shining with the dazzling light of God’s glory. It is another thing, perhaps equal if not greater, to be seen in agony, sharing the sorrow and pain of the world. Perhaps the two scenes need each other to be complete. Certainly our own pilgrimage, if we are faithful, will have elements of both. One of the reasons we read and reread this extraordinary story is because we know, in our deepest beings, that the scriptural story to which Jesus was obedient must be our story too. Matthew, telling us that Jesus’ disciples all forsook him and fled, wants us by contrast to stay the course, to see this thing through, to witness the glory of God in the suffering face of his crucified son.
TODAY
Teach us, good Lord, to watch with you in your suffering, that we may learn also to see your glory.
