​On Sunday 19 April 2026, Rev. Bridgette Siepker spoke on a topic that is a theme for this Easter Festival and will be taken up again in a future conference; the theme of “Walking with Christ”. What does this really mean and how does it enter our own lives?

When we read scripture we can come to an understanding of what “Walking with Christ” may be. The women go to the tomb on the first day as the sun is rising with spices and no idea of how they are going to roll away the large stone from the entrance so that they can fulfil their task. When Mary Magdalene encountered Christ on the first day of the week, she thought he was the gardener. She spoke with Him. When he spoke her name, she recognised him. Later in the day, two of the circle were walking across the fields and “they were talking about the event”. As they were talking a third person drew near and asked a question. When they confronted his ignorance of the event that was uppermost in their mind, he began to lay out for them in scripture all that had been said about the Christ. When they arrived at their destination in the town of Emmaus, he was about to leave them and they invited him in. Yet, it was only in the breaking and blessing of bread that they recognised who their companion had been. Then they recognised that their hearts had been burning as he had spoken with them as they walked.

We can uncover a few things from these scripture readings: firstly, intention. The women had intention in their going to the tomb, Mary Magdalene in her questioning of the gardener and the disciples in their analysis of the event of the crucifixion and the body that was not in the tomb. Secondly, an openness towards the unknown in the intention. The women went alone to the tomb knowing there was an insurmountable obstacle to be overcome, a stone too heavy to move. Mary Magdalene was open to learning what had occurred. The disciples were open to understanding the mystery of the event. Thirdly, the ability to sense the Christ. The women expect to see, and see the angelic being. Mary Magdalene hears her name. The disciples recognise that their hearts had become aware of a truth.

In the Act of Consecration, we hear the words “walking with Christ” in the Canon. Yet, this translation from the German is insufficient to express the full meaning intended in the sacrament. The German word also implies a transformation, a deep and lasting transformation, that occurs in this “walking with Christ”.

We may also remember the theme of Passiontide which was the walking towards death. Death is a process of letting go. In our “Walking with Christ” is implicit the letting go of what is no longer of service to us.

In letting go, holding intention, being open and sensing the reality that approaches us, we can enter into an experience of “Walking with Christ”, and the practice will bring momentum to our ability to “Walk with Christ”.

​In the previous month’s article on the Gospel of Matthew, I wrote about a particular theme that I hope to follow throughout the Gospel. After Jesus speaks the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount He speaks about what it means that he has come to fulfil the law (not to abolish it). He raises six aspects of the law: killing, dishonouring marriage, divorce, swearing an oath, revenge, and for whom to have love. In each case, after stating the law, Jesus says, “But out of my own power, I say to you …”, placing to power of judgement upon the “I”. It is through the “I am” incarnate in us that we discern what is right and what is wrong. In this way the law is fulfilled in our right discernment and without having to turn to the written law of the Old Testament.

Jesus then turns to our engagement with a spiritual life. Our connection with the spirit is in our innermost being and not something that is visible or displayed outwardly. He teaches the disciples the universal prayer that connects us with the Father, and brings the will of the Father into earthly life through the human being. It connects each aspect of our constitution with our need and shortcomings.

Life of earth can so easily be about earthly matters, yet these bring nothing to our eternal being. Jesus instructs that any area of life (our being) that has fallen into earthly darkness is best discarded. This is followed by one of the most mysterious aspects of this Sermon on the Mount, how life is provided for by the spiritual world and our stiving should not be about food and clothing. When our stiving is directly correctly, the world of spirit will ensure that our earthly needs are also met.

​by John-Peter Gernaat

As promised in the April newsletter this article is repeated with the last days of Holy Week added.

We experience the Holy Nights at the time of the birth of Jesus as being connected with the month of the year. We can experience the events of Holy Week connected with human destiny.

In the southern hemisphere, we are in Autumn and the days are getting darker. Nature does not mirror the renewal of life that is celebrated at Easter. In the northern hemisphere, it is the opposite, and the mirror between nature and the renewal of life in the Resurrection is visible. Is it possible for us to hold both of these images within us simultaneously in balance?

Nature in the southern hemisphere can teach us something of the path towards death, the turning of the leaves, the ripening of fruit and the surrendering of seeds into the dark of earth. Holy Week is the path to death; it leads to the Deed of Golgotha. This was part of Christ’s time on earth. The possibility of Christ being on earth had been there from the beginning, yet the Deed was not accomplished until it was accomplished. What might have been the state of the spiritual world at this time?

Before this Deed of Christ there was a way of being for humanity; after the Deed of Christ there was another way. There was no going back. The Deed of Christ was done for all humanity.

In Holy Week, Christ walked the way to death. How do we walk this way? Resurrection is possible only after the process of death. We can experience resurrection more clearly in our lives if we can walk this way of death.

Each day of Holy Week has a particular signature of how to walk this way of death. Becoming conscious of this signature leads us to approach this way of death in a conscious manner.

Beginning on Palm Sunday, there is a deliberate act of entering Jerusalem. Christ is saying ‘yes’ to what lies ahead. The great welcome that he receives does not deter him from the road ahead.

In the picture of the palm tree, we have a plant that has no branches, only a trunk. At the top of the tree is the heart of three from which new fronds arise. It is a picture of a tree that raises its heart to the light of the sun.

From Palm Sunday, we see a frenzy of chaos and in the midst, Christ, undeterred, travels the road into this week. In this week we hear that Christ is in the Father. How may we receive the will of the Father in our lives? It is through the higher self that we access the will of the Father.

On Holy Monday, the day of the Moon, we are confronted with the story of the cursed fig tree. This is not so much a physical tree and the representation of a spiritual way that has ended and is no longer valid. The new way is clearly declared by Christ; it is faith. We can contemplate what this looks like.

There is a second activity connected with Holy Monday, the deliberate activity of clearing the Temple. Interest and active participation bring about change.

Holy Tuesday is a very active day with every section of society questioning Christ in order to find fault with him. It is the day of Mars and decisive activity. Christ answers the challenges in a way that points to the incorrect thinking of the questioner. He responds with parables. Some of the greatest teaching given by Christ is done on this day. We can experience hope in the change of thinking needed.

Holy Wednesday is the middle of this Holy Week. Nothing is said of the day. It is as if something ends, and in the evening something new can open up. In the evening we confront the deed of devotion of Mary in anointing the feet of Christ. Devotion for Christ arises out of love for Christ. We encounter two people who have been with Christ for an equal period of time, yet they have very different approaches to the developing way to death. Mary has developed devotion, while Judas has developed another way and walks out. Both of these ways live in each of us, and we can become aware of them. We can also contemplate the sacrifice of Mary, which angered Judas, because it is only through sacrifice that human destiny moves forward.

Maundy Thursday. This again is a day where the activity is primarily focused on the night. Thursday is influenced by Jupiter which is connected with the forces of life. Jesus washes the feet of the disciples demonstrating our future as humanity. It is through servitude towards each other that we arrive at a fully christened being. During the Last Supper Jesus (as presented by John in his Gospel) speaks extensively to the disciples about his relationship to the Father and to humanity. He speaks the last of the “I am”-statements, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” and “I am the vine”. Then follows the giving of his life forces as he unites them with the Bread and the Wine and initiates the Eucharist. Christ has given his life-forces into the sphere of the earth. He walks out of the Upper Room with his disciples spent of all his life-forces. What follows Christ Jesus achieves through the power of his will. The kiss of Judas lends Him life-forces to continue and, in one of the Gospels, the young man who runs away naked is another source of life-forces loaned to Jesus.

The Good Friday contemplation was a focus on the complete mission of Christ.

On Holy Saturday we started the artistic activity without a contemplation on the day that occurs in a realm invisible to the human eye. Our Creed reveals the significance of the deeds of Christ on this day.

On Easter Sunday, the octave of Palm Sunday, the question can arise in us: What can I acknowledge? And in acknowledging this, what changes for me? We take note of the devotion of the women who go at daybreak to the tomb. They speak of the insurmountable obstacle they must overcome to fulfil their task of anointing the body, yet even though they do not know how they will roll back the stone, they are not deterred in their devotion to fulfil this deed for Jesus. What obstacles do we allow to deter us from our goals?

Now follows a period of forty days of Easter. This is the number of gestation and of initiation.

​On Sunday, 15 March, Rev. Bridgette Siepker spoke about the Passiontide Epistle. What can we learn from the letter from the world of spirit about our relationship to the spiritual world and the spiritual world to us?

Before Christ came to the earth, human beings felt themselves to be separated from the spiritual world. The desire to connect with the spiritual world led people to attempt to purify themselves as a way of reconnecting. Through a long process of purification, an initiate could raise himself out of life into the spiritual world for a short period of time. The writings of the Hebrews share that they had to remove sins before they were worthy to enter the Temple.

When John the Baptist was able to proclaim, “There goes the Lamb of God”, it signified that Jesus had become the scapegoat for human sin. The divine united with human sin. The divine entered into the realm of sin and took this realm upon himself.

Through this deed, we can now live with sin and with God at the same time. The need for purity to approach the divine is past. The One bearing our sins lives in us!

Although we have this new knowledge, we have continued to live from the old mysteries. We no longer have to ascend to God; God has come down to humanity. In the Movement for Religious Renewal, we are working from this new Mystery.

In 2 Corinthians 4,

​we hear that God Himself spoke the word, “Out of the darkness let the light shine forth!” He has lit the light in our hearts. This tells us that although we may live in the place of death, death will not overcome us: the life of Christ is in us. Our heart may feel empty, yet Christ is the seed within our core.

We experience earthly life as if we are asleep because the spirit of awakening is difficult to access. It is in our blood that we experience the place of our life where longing arises. We share the air we breathe with every other living being. It is here that we may experience hope arising. Our consciousness experiences the separation from the divine, and we may become aware of a mournful lamenting within our consciousness that is seeking to reunite with the divine. We recognise the sting of evil within us and ask only for it to be overlooked. We can overcome the tempting power of weakness within ourselves. We, who should be upright in this world experience ourselves as being flat on the ground. The spirit that lives in us and brings us to Christ Consciousness can raise us. The “I” is accessible to us through the spirit.

We are never alone in earthly life; our work is met with grace. Hope is the doorway for grace.

​The Gospel of Matthew has opened up a particular theme for me that I hope to follow as we continue. Matthew was Levi, the tax collector. He was well educated in the religious understanding of the Hebrews, and he uses his Gospel to show the Hebrews how the man, Jesus of Nazareth, is the fulfilment of the promised “Anointed One” (Messiah) spoken of in the Holy Scriptures. He therefore regularly refers back to the Old Testament, demonstrating how these teachings are fulfilled in Jesus.

Matthew begins his Gospel with the lineage of Jesus from Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people, to Jesus. This is a kingly lineage and tells the Hebrew people that this human being is the rightful king of the Hebrew people, from King David. This is emphasised in the wise men from the east who arrive in Jerusalem seeking the king newly born.

Now Matthew draws the attention of the Hebrew people to an important parallel. Herod orders the slaughter of the children two years old and younger. Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all Hebrew boys born. Moses was saved by being placed in a basket and set adrift on the Nile, where he was rescued by the daughter of the Pharaoh. Jesus is rescued by being taken by his parents into the land of the Pharaoh. This parallel draws the attention of the Hebrews to an important event in the life of Moses: the meeting of the “I am” in the bush that was green but appeared to be burning. Through this parallel, Matthew introduces the “I am” incarnate in the man Jesus.

Then Matthew introduced John the Baptist and his message that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Jesus repeats the message when he first begins preaching. John makes it clear that the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees has come to an end.

Then Jesus comes to John, and John is the witness to the Spirit of God descending and remaining on Jesus, and he hears the voice from heaven confirming that the Kingdom of Heaven has descended to the world of human beings.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus immediately goes into the wilderness to be tempted. The period of forty days is a clear message that this is an initiation for the man Jesus. The initiation is completed with the physical body experiencing hunger. Even though the Gospel says that Jesus went into the wilderness to be tempted, the tempter arrives only when Jesus experienced hunger.

The temptation is very interesting. The tempter does not force any of the situations in the way that a human temptation might be played on someone. The tempter leaves the way open for Jesus to respond to each temptation. In each case Jesus responds with a quote from scripture, whereby Matthew strengthens his case for this being the Anointed One.

The first temptation can be seen as a temptation of the power of the will, feeding himself and averting the whole course of his ministry. The second temptation can be seen as a temptation of the life of feeling. Jesus even responds by using the word, the ‘capricious’ nature of the human being. The last temptation relates to thinking, the human capacity to see and know the world. In each case, Christ in Jesus brings the human quality under control, suggesting to the Hebrew people that a new condition is now at work in a human being that can shepherd the will, the feeling and the thinking. This condition arises from the “I am” that Moses encountered in the burning bush, which Matthew indicates is now present in this ‘new Moses’.

Matthew makes the case that the “I am” that Moses engaged with is now present in the man Jesus as a result of the baptism and the event that John the Baptist witnessed.

After making himself known throughout Galilee, Jesus gives his first teaching to the disciples he has gathered, known as the ‘Sermon on the Mount’. Rudolf Steiner suggests that the beatitudes are pictures of the condition of the human being as the “I am” works into the human constitution, beginning with the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, the consciousness soul, transforms the astral nature into Spirit Self, the etheric nature into Life Spirit and the Physical nature in Spirit Human. The beatitudes represent the evolution of human consciousness as a result of Christ, the “I am”, working in the human being. Christ demonstrates this as He penetrates the human being Jesus through the next three years. The completion is the Resurrection Body that appears to the apostles in the Upper Room and by the lake shore. This is the future evolution of the human being made manifest.

The message of Matthew appears to be to the Hebrews that the “I am” of the burning bush is now among them, the incarnate Spirit of God in the Anointed One, the Messiah. This means that the Kingdom of God is now in a human Being. We know from the events that unfold that at Pentecost this Spirit alights on each Apostle and enters into them. From that time on, the Kingdom of Heaven is in the human Being as Christ preached, fulfilling the promise of John the Baptist and Jesus in his early preaching that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

There are three festivals connected with Christmas and the manifestation of Christ in Jesus: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Then there is a period before we have four festivals of the Death and Resurrection of Christ: Passiontide, Easter, Ascension and Whitsun.

One way of reviewing these festivals is through the pericopes that have been selected. During Epiphany, the pericopes this year (because the last pericope is less rigid than the first three) the journey taken was:

• The story of the Magi and the killing of the little boy-children. This story in Matthew’s Gospel tells of the escape of the baby Jesus to Egypt, a story that mirrors the events when Moses was born. Moses’ life was threatened by a decree from the Pharaoh, and his mother placed him in a basket on the Nile. Moses was found and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter. Jesus’ life is threatened by a decree from Herod, and his parents take him into the bosom of Egypt. This similarity between the two children would have been significant to the Hebrews.
• The child Jesus, who is taken to the Temple at the age of 12, undergoes a transformation from an open, dreamy child to an alert child who can converse with religious teachers.
• The first sign of Jesus when he transformed water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana.
• The healing of the child of the Roman Centurion.

​These stories speak to the becoming, the epiphany, of Christ in Jesus. They ask of us to become conscious of our awareness of our own destiny.
Then, there is the period of Trinity between the festival seasons. There are five prescribed pericopes for this period:

• The parable of the vine grower who invited labourers to work in his vineyard and pays them all one denarius at the end of the day. The significance of ‘one’ is that it is complete. They received their due for the work completed. This is a picture of the Kingdom of God: everyone receives their full reward.
• The sower who sows seeds and some fall on rock, some in shallow soil, some among thorns and some in fertile ground.
• The story of the rich young man who has upheld the law and is commanded to sell all he has and give the proceeds to the poor in order to follow the Christ. What we are able to acquire in a lifetime has no value unless we put it to the service of those who have acquired less than we have. This does not speak of material wealth, but of spiritual understanding.
• The Temptation of Jesus in the desert after the Baptism. This is the imagination of the Christ, the “I am” taking hold of the soul constitution of the human being in order to begin the transformation of the earthly human constitution into the Resurrected human constitution.
• The Transfiguration, which pictures the transformed human being in whom the Law and all Prophecy are fully manifest.

A commentary written by Rev. Hans Werner Schoeder helps to connect these five pericopes. We have received one gift – the gift of the “I” – and every human being has it equally, the last and the first. The transformed water strengthens the “I”. The sower sows grain that is to be planted in our hearts. This is a parable of bread; Christ, the Word, becomes the bread of life. The Word is the nourishment for human souls. We have the two substances of the Eucharist in the wine and the bread.

We are called to go into Passiontide each year with something new that arises from our striving.