Christmas and Easter are central to what the Christian faith is all about and the preparations for and celebrations of each are demanding and exhausting, but in different ways. You feel that you’re just about getting over Christmas – if that’s not a wholly indecent way of putting it – and then you’re into Lent, Holy week and Easter!

The exhaustion associated with Christmas has more to do, I suspect, with the experience of the days becoming shorter, the weather getting colder and more difficult - snow, ice, fog! - the frenetic activity in getting everything ready for the festivities - shopping, Christmas presents and so on – and with the general expectations of society at large.

The exhaustion of Easter is of an altogether different kind. Apart from buying Easter eggs and perhaps hot cross buns, there isn’t an overwhelmingly secular build-up and pressure associated with it. No, the exhaustion in Holy Week and Easter is spiritual in nature, and it derives from being identified with Jesus in his ordeals, suffering and death. In other words, tiredness and exhaustion are intrinsic to participating in what is being celebrated. Jesus, after all, was spent by the time he breathed his last.

We are currently in the midst of Lent, and I should like to say a word or two about what it really means to be identified with Jesus in this period of Lent and into Holy Week and then Easter, for it’s important that we see it all of a piece.

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and really marks the time - forty days - that Jesus spent in the wilderness after his baptism. In the early church, it was the time when those wishing to be baptised were prepared for this through prayer, fasting and teaching. It’s important to begin, however, with Jesus’ baptism.

When he was baptised by his cousin John in the River Jordan, Jesus clearly awakened to a sense of the fullness of his Father’s love. He became aware of an unbreakable union in all its fullness, and the whole purpose of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is to enable us to share in this same experience.

You and I are invited to discover in the very depths of our being the fullness of God’s love by being wholly identified with Jesus. We know, however, that we fall very far short. This is the significance of Jesus’ temptations in the desert. Humanly speaking, Jesus faced all that threatens to subvert the knowledge of our true identity as those who are already in union with God in the Spirit. Lent is a time for growth in self-knowledge, but always in the awareness that it is the love of God which enables this.

We can sometimes be tempted to think that we are utterly unworthy and beyond redemption. At such times it’s important to remember, as the Gospel of Mark puts it, that Jesus found himself in the wilderness after his baptism because the Spirit drove him there. In other words, it was the experience of love that required that Jesus discover in himself the possibility for the opposite of love, so that he could give himself wholeheartedly and in total awareness to Love itself.

Facing up to the truth of ourselves can be a difficult, painful and exhausting process, but it’s worth remembering that it might be because we’ve grown in love that God knows that we’re ready for divine love to work on us more deeply. And then, when all this is going on, the burden and the darkness seem to deepen. We approach Passiontide and Holy Week just as we can feel that we’ve had enough, but God asks us to be identified even more wholly with Jesus. We are called to be at one with Jesus in his death because you and I have to die, too.  A great deal has been written over the centuries about the meaning of Jesus’ death. One way of understanding his death is that Jesus reveals to us the universal pattern and path of our journey into the fullness of God. Truly to know God, we have to die to ourselves, to our self-centredness and egocentricity.

This is the significance of baptism, a baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus, a baptism in which we are identified with Jesus himself. To live out our baptismal vocation is to be drawn into a lifelong spiritual process of learning to surrender ourselves more and more to the love of God, so that in the end all that is left is the love of God itself, incarnate in the particular person that you and I are. In death the self which lives for itself and not for God is swallowed up. But again, if that sounds terrifying, think of yourself as being consumed by the Holy Spirit, the fire of love, to be set alight with divine love. For the experience of being stripped of all that is not Love is itself the work of Love, so that Love might have greater possession of us.

In his passion and death, Jesus reveals to us what is required of us if we are truly to give ourselves to Love. Once we’ve been touched by this Love, there’s no going back. We might try to avoid it and reject it but eventually we’re brought to the realisation that if we’re to be truly human, true to ourselves, we have to give ourselves to Love and to the work of transformation that Love performs on us. There is no other way than to be identified with Jesus in his passion and death. This is what the liturgy, the worship, of the Church is intended to make real.

In the season of Lent we begin this process of being identified more fully with Jesus. On Palm Sunday we travel with him into Jerusalem and then in Holy Week we identify with the sense of foreboding and the inevitability of what is to take place. It dawns on us that we cannot escape what lies ahead; we have to go through with it, for in entering into the events of Jesus’ passion and death we begin to discover that we are at the same time entering into the truth of ourselves.

On Maundy Thursday we share in the ritual re-enactment of the Washing of the Feet to become more aware that it’s in the service of others not least that we have to learn to die to self-centredness. And then in the celebration of the Eucharist we identify in the self-giving of Jesus in order to receive more fully the divine life that is already present in us as it is in bread and wine. As if that weren’t enough, we’re invited to watch with Jesus in Gethsemane through the night. By then we’ve just about had it; exhaustion is truly setting in

But by then we’ve scarcely begun, for there are the events of Good Friday and Easter Eve. As far as Good Friday is concerned, there’s no escaping the fact that our identification with Jesus requires our death, too. Jesus encourages us to see for ourselves that far from being disastrous, this is the way to the fullness of God: the way of surrender to divine love itself. And in this act of surrender in faith and trust Love is truly revealed. Everything appears to be to the contrary but the Easter Liturgy on Easter Eve is intended to enable us to participate in the real truth. In the depths of darkness the Easter Candle is lit. The resurrection takes place in darkness, hidden, as it were, from view. We renew our baptismal vows to identify ourselves with Jesus not only in his death but also, unbelievably so it seems, in his resurrection. For the truth of the matter is that we are all living already in the resurrection life. New life streams in and the exhaustion of dying is transformed little by little be the ever-present energy of divine love within us.

May Lent be for all of us, both individually and together, a time when our identification with Jesus deepens, so that we may awaken in and with him to the fullness of the divine life and love for which we are made.