This afternoon W and I met with our Iranian friends for the final Bible study of the session.

We used our imagination to imagine the temptations Jesus may have faced from Gethsemane to Calvary using hints found in the gospels...

• The temptation to avoid the cross altogether - and the decision to submit to God's will
• The temptation of violence - and the healing of an injured man
• The temptation to lie to escape conviction - and the dignity of truth
• The temptation of anger/bitterness - and the choice to forgive
• The temptation to save himself (and others?) by coming down from the cross - and the refusal to do so
• The temptation to focus on himself - and the compassion for his mother, his friend and a convicted criminal he may never have met before
• The temptation to give up in the face of seeming abandonment by God - and the decision to commend his spirit to God's safekeeping

No doubt there are other temptations that could be deduced, without the need to imagine things not directly hinted at in the gospels.  The key message we drew out was Jesus' humanity, which was/is as real as our own.

Afterwards, we shared a yummy Easter tea and more wide-ranging conversation.  A good afternoon!

Last August, I set myself a challenge - to invite everyone in church, in groups of 8-10, round to my home for a meal.  Last night, the final group gathered, and we enjoyed food and friendship.  Everyone has now been invited, even if not everoyne has been able to attend (a quick count suggests around ten adults have not made it, though of those, most have been to the manse many times before).

It's been fun.  I have cooked goodness knows how many chicken portions for meat eaters as part of the centrepiece 'roast dinner'. Over the months, I've got more lazy and done less scratch cooking - last night I served bought soup!  More than the food, though, it has been the coming together and the chat.  For the most part, we don't talk about church, we talk about real life.  It has been pure joy to have some 'don't do church' partners at my table knowing they would not feel excluded or be prosyletised.  It's been lovely to talk with people for longer than is feasible on a Sunday morning.

On Saturday, our Bible study will conclude for this session with an Easter Tea, and I have plans to invite round the Bible Class and their leaders for a meal too.  After that, it's a bit of break before I start all over again in the autumn!  Might have to think of a new menu though!!

The focus for today is curtains (and a link to the 'veil' in the Temple or 'curtain' in the Tabernacle), and their use to 'keep out' prying eyes from what is private.

I can only assume the writer hasn't walked through Glasgow in the evening, when unshuttered, uncurtained windows shine with the flickering light of televisions or glow yellowish with electric light.  I pass few homes with net curtains or voiles, and find myself unusual in that I do draw my curtains once it's dark in order to, as my Mum used to say, 'shut out the night'.

I found myself thinking about curtains and privacy, and the 'fake' privacy afforded by curtains in medical settings... There's the nurse who pulls round a curtain while you remove articles of clothing, precisely to walk in and examine whatever is now revealed, as if somehow it is the disrobing that is private not the body part.  Or there's the four bedded bay/room in a ward where the consutlant draws round the curtain and speaks in tones not quite hushed enough of medical diagnoses and implications, whilst those in adjacent beds try not to listen in but cannot help but overhear.

There certainly is a time and place for privacy, and certainly there are times when the swish of the curtain being drawn round a hospital bed/treatment area is a welcome sound.  But I can't help but thinking there is something worth pondering in the permeability of curtains - whether that's light coming in through a voile or net, or sound coming out from treatment area.

Whatever we may claim about the rending of the Temple curtain/veil, there remains a 'something' between us and God, but that something is not totally opaque or sound proof.  Every now and then we catch glimspes of God's smile; every once in a while we hear heaven's laughter; perhaps sometimes we sense God's annoyance or hear God's wracking sobs...  Only when we cross the mysterious threshold of death will we finally see the curtain opened - until then it's slivers of light and whispers of eternity.  

An experiment for this evening's dinner guests - a vegan spiral vegetable tart.  Hope is tastes good! If nothing else, it's pretty!

What does the word 'nightlight' suggest to you?  To me, it'as the forerunner of the tealight.  When I was a child, there was always a pack of Price's nightlights in the cupboard under the sink in case of a power cut (1970s, three-day week and all that).  For the writer of the book, it is something else, it is the kind of electric lights that parents leave in their baby's bedroom, or that people install in a bathroom or hallway to give a low level of light for night time use.

The Bible story is Nicodemus visiting Jesus under cover of darkness and famous story of John 3.  With links to John 1, Jesus as light in the darkness of a disordered word is easily made.

A Taize chant:

Stay with us, oh Lord Jesus, Christ, night will soon fall; then stay with us, oh Lord, Jesus Christ - lighten our darkness.

A prayer:

“Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy, defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.”