Christ Church

The collect for today, The Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast instructed thy holy Church with the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark: Give us grace, that, being not like children carried away with every blast of vain doctrine, we may be established in the truth of thy holy Gospel; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:11-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 13:1-10

The author of the second gospel, Saint Mark is generally identified with John Mark, the son of Mary, whose house in Jerusalem was a meeting place for the disciples (Acts 12:12,25). John Mark accompanied his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journey to Cyprus, but Mark’s early departure to Jerusalem caused a rift between Paul and Barnabas, following which Barnabas took Mark on the next mission to Cyprus while Paul and Silas traveled through Syria and Cilicia (Acts 15:37-41).

Paul later changed his mind about Mark, who helped him during his imprisonment in Rome (Col. 4:10). Just before his martyrdom, Paul urged Timothy: “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11).

Also, Peter affectionately calls Mark “my son” and says that Mark is with him at “Babylon”—almost certainly Rome—as he writes his first epistle (1 Pet. 5:13). This accords with church tradition that Mark’s Gospel represents the teaching of Peter.

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Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Octave Day of Easter.

“He showed unto them his hands and his side”

From Christ crucified and dead to the empty tomb, from the empty tomb to the marks of the Cross in the Crucified Christ. Quite a spectacle. We go from the intensity of the Passion on Palm Sunday to Easter to the wonder and mystery of the Resurrection on Easter to the Octave Day of Easter. Easter Week like Holy Week is one long liturgy: the beginnings of reflection and meditation on the Resurrection. Just as we have immersed ourselves in the Passion of Christ through the Scripture readings of Holy Week, especially through the four accounts of the Passion in the Gospels, so in Easter Week we immerse ourselves in readings that turn on the mystery of the Resurrection.

Holy Week and Easter Week are not polar opposites of one another, mere mood swings from sadness to gladness, as something psychological. First, you’re down, then you’re up (and of course vice versa! Where’s the good in that?). No Passion without the Resurrection, no Resurrection without the Passion. They are intimately and profoundly connected. The theological point is that the Resurrection makes visible what is hidden but present in the Passion; namely, the absolute self-giving life of God as sacrificial love. This is the meaning of the Trinity and belongs to the wonder and mystery of human redemption.

The readings of Easter Week point us towards the logic of the Resurrection, a logic or way of thinking that shows a constant and necessary emphasis on the Passion. The past (and the present and future) of human sin and evil are not eclipsed and negated but radically transformed in the triumph of life and goodness over death and evil. The point is that life is utterly prior and absolute; that life is the essential life of God made visible in the Crucified and Risen Christ.

The Resurrection speaks profoundly to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It belongs to a long tradition of reflection, philosophically and religiously, on the question of what it means to be human. The Resurrection is the strongest possible affirmation of our individuality understood not as autonomous selves, isolated and separated from one another, but as found in a community of reciprocal love and care as individuals committed to the good of one another. All as grounded in the self-giving life of God. That sensibility about human individuality has to do with our lives together as embodied beings. The logic of the Resurrection is that the body matters. It is not merely extraneous and indeterminate, endlessly malleable. There is no disembodied self.

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Tuesday, April 29th, St. Mark (transf.)
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, May 4th, Easter II
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, May 11th, Easter III
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, May 13th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, May 18th, Easter IV
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, May 20th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Leon Battista Alberti: Writer & Humanist, Martin McLaughlin (2024) and Inside the Stargazer’s Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Europe, Violet Moller (2025).

Sunday, May 25th, Easter V (Rogation Sunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The collect for today, The Octave Day of Easter, being The Sunday After Easter Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Almighty Father, who hast given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may alway serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:4-12
The Gospel: St. John 20:19-23

Artwork: Marie Bashkirtseff, Myrrh Bearing Women (Holy Women at the Sepulchre of Christ), 1883. Oil on canvas, Radishchev State Art Museum, Saratov, Russia.

Crucified and Risen! Radical new life!

Death and Resurrection. They provide the basic and essential pattern for Christian spirituality and life. It is always about dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another. In a way, it is a profound critique of the notion of the autonomous self. The ethical point emphasized in Chapel over and over again is that we can only be ourselves in the truth of our individuality through our lives in community with one another. The deeper point is that it entirely depends on the total self-giving nature of divine love which is the meaning of the Trinity in the Christian understanding.

Christ is risen is the Easter proclamation. What does it mean? The doctrine of the Resurrection belongs to a wider consideration about what it means to be human. How do we understand ourselves as embodied beings? There is no disembodied self – that is a kind of philosophical absurdity or fantasy. How do we understand the relationship between soul and body? Does the body matter? Or is it simply something extraneous and endlessly malleable? We may not be ‘happy’ about our ‘body image’, quick to find fault with others and ourselves in our image obsessed ‘selfie’ culture. Nonetheless, it seems to me that we are more though not less than our bodies. They are an essential aspect of ourselves.

The Resurrection of Christ belongs to a reflection on the idea of the self in relation to our bodies. It is not the same as reincarnation in either the Hindu sense or in Plato’s imaginary, though both are wrestling with the same question: the relation of the soul to the body in a kind of necessary interrelation. The Resurrection – a concept found in late Judaism as well as in Islam – is, in its Christian form, the strongest affirmation of human individuality understood not as a gnostic flight from material reality and the body as somehow evil but rather as the redemption of creation and therefore of the embodied nature of our being. More importantly, the Resurrection is the radical affirmation of life as greater than sin and death, and as the underlying principle of our being and knowing. That life is what is presupposed in everything. “God is the beginning and end of all creatures, especially rational creatures,” Aquinas observes.

The Resurrection is not simply the ending of Holy Week. Rather it makes visible what is hidden yet present in all of the events of the Passion. The stories of the Resurrection show the process of the birth of the understanding of Christ’s Resurrection in us. It is mostly about making sense of what is seen and heard, of coming to grasp the radical teaching of Christ and doing so in no small manner through the Scriptures of the Old Testament. In Easter Week and throughout Eastertide, we follow the processes of thinking our way into the mystery of Christ whose Resurrection is not the eclipse of the past (and future!) of human sin and experience but its transformation. We are given to see how the idea becomes real in human thinking.

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The collect for today, Tuesday in Easter Week, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who through thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: We humbly beseech thee, that as by thy special grace thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 13:26-41
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:36-48

Artwork: Cristofero de Predis, The Risen Jesus Appears to His Disciples (from Codex of Predis), 1476. Illumination, Royal Library, Turin.

Fr. David Curry has collected his four Lenten meditations into a single pdf document. Click here to download “The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy, and Anger”.

The collect for today, Monday in Easter Week, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who through thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: We humbly beseech thee, that as by thy special grace thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 10:34-43
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:13-35

Artwork: Benedetto Luti, Supper at Emmaus, c. 1709. Oil on panel, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.

Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the scripture text, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Holy Week and Easter at Christ Church 2025”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.