Month: April 2009

“Christ is risen. Alleluia, Alleluia!”

Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, “early when it was yet dark,” John tells us. She “seeth the stone taken away.” And so it begins. She runs to tell the others, apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the apostles, as the Fathers put it. She says “to Simon Peter and to the other disciple” that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” He is not there. Who has taken him? Who are ‘they’ that “have taken [him] away”? Confronting something that counters her expectation, she suspects a conspiracy, it seems. Don’t we all? Simon Peter and “that other disciple” run and see. They, too, find only an empty tomb. And so it continues. It is the Resurrection.

With apologies to President Obama, and for that matter most politicians, the Resurrection is change you can believe in. This is what the Gospel accounts show us. In a way, of course, it can only be believed in. There is, after all, no ‘CSI Jerusalem’ with respect to the Resurrection, nor can there be. There is no DNA. There is no forensic evidence whatsoever; not much to go on, it might seem. Folly to even think there could be, it seems to me.

At best, we might say there is only evidence which points to an absence beginning with the stories of the empty tomb. Then, there are the accounts of angels. Ah, an angel told me! Right! Hardly convincing, it might seem, at least to the empirically minded. Then, there are the supposed eye-witness accounts of strange encounters with the risen Christ who appears and disappears behind closed doors. Right! Explicable, perhaps, according to “superstring theory” in Physics, but then one might feel about that the same way the British travel writer, Alexander Kinglake, felt about churches in England, wanting to inscribe upon their lintels the caveat, “interesting, if true.” Perhaps that is where we are with the Resurrection, “interesting, if true.”

If so, why are we here this morning? (more…)

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“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

“All the people hung upon his words.” So Luke tells us in his account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. These words are read at Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday. “Take with you words,” the prophet Hosea, says, “and return to the Lord.” These words are read at Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week.

Words, and our attention to them, are one of the strong features of our Anglican heritage with respect to the observances of Holy Week. The point and purpose of this week has been to immerse us in the totality of the Passion of Christ, reading from all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. No other Christian tradition demands quite so much. For the attention deficit culture, it is, perhaps, too much. And yet, so necessary.Along with the Passion, readings from the Old Testament and the New, as well from the Old Testament Apocrypha, such as The Book of Wisdom, offer a rich commentary upon the spectacle of Holy Week. Once again, there is much of a muchness, once again, it is de trop. And yet, so necessary and so instructive.

Holy Week is the spectacle of sin and love, the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. Everything converges on the Cross, “that strange and uncouth thing” as the poet, George Herbert, puts it. And yet, as another poet, John Donne, puts it, himself no stranger to the hideous realities of sin and suffering, the image of the crucified is itself a “beauteous form” that “assures a piteous mind.”

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“A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another

even as I have loved you”

“On the night that he was betrayed,” this night, this very night, Jesus gives us a commandment, an institution and an example. He gives us a commandment that is at once established in the institution of the Holy Eucharist, “do this in remembrance of me,” and expressed in the example of the foot-washing, “for I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” Such is the rich fullness of Maundy Thursday, dies mandati, the day of commandment, even a new commandment, novem mandatum, but more than that, the ultimate mandate, ultimatum mandatum. We are accustomed to taking seriously a person’s last will and testament. Here on the eve of his Passion, in the meaning of the events of the Passover, Christ signifies his ultimate will and new testament towards us. Here on this night is the mandate of our Lord’s love, hence Maundy Thursday (from mandatum). (more…)

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