Year: 2012

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s response to God at the Annunciation informs our learning about the Resurrection, too. The actual feast day of the Annunciation more often than not coincides with Lent and Passiontide but occasionally, the 25^th of March can be Easter Day itself and whenever that happens or when the Annunciation coincides with days of Holy Week, the commemoration is transferred to Eastertide. There is a wonderful sense in which Mary’s word belongs to the lessons of the Resurrection, especially when it is the Risen Christ who teaches the most and most clearly about the Resurrection.

One of the most powerful lessons about the Resurrection appears in the Gospel for Easter Monday. It is Luke’s marvelous account of the events on the Road to Emmaus. It is an extraordinary scene and one which ultimately focusses on the interpretation of the Scriptures and even more poignantly on the complementariety of the Word spoken and explained and the Word enacted and performed. It is Christ who teaches. Christ is the exegete of the Scriptures of the Old Testament that reveal the meaning of his Passion and Resurrection. We are opened out to a new and radical understanding of our life with God in Jesus Christ.

The Risen Christ runs out after the disciples who are fleeing from Jerusalem in fear, their hopes and expectations having been utterly destroyed by Christ’s crucifixion and death. They had “trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel,” they say. Such words say a lot about their expectations and their understanding of the nature of redemption. Christ is the redeemer of the world, the redeemer of Israel in a new and radically transforming way, not in a political or social way, but spiritually and theologically. There is a radical transformation of the understanding of redemption. It can no longer be confined to the hopes and expectations of politics and power.

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Fr. David Curry has compiled all of this year’s homilies for Holy Week and Easter into a 45-page booklet, complete with appropriate sacred art. Click here to download as a pdf document.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word to God at the Annunciation has provided us with a way of contemplating the Passion of Christ through Passiontide and Holy Week. Her word signals the most profound idea and reality. God engages our humanity in the most intimate manner imaginable in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In the Christian understanding of things, the Incarnation has its beginning in time with the Annunciation which marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary. The larger significance of that is the greater celebration of this day, Easter.

Christ is risen, Alleluia. Alleluia!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia. Alleluia!

For Mary’s word signals her affirmation of God’s new creative act, the act of redemption. The Resurrection is the new and radical creation of our humanity. Such is the joy of the Annunciation in the blessedness of God being with us through Mary but such is the greater joy of the Resurrection in the renewing of our creation, hence all our alleluias on this day!

New life and new birth, the triumph and overcoming of all sin and folly, marks the celebration and meaning of Easter. And, in a way, all because of Mary’s word to God. It signals our task as well.  What is that? To let the word of the Risen Christ define us; to let his word be unto us; to let Christ teach us the great good news of his Resurrection. Why? Because it defines our Christian identity and witness. Because it is about the radical truth of God’s being with us. Because the Resurrection celebrates the divine purpose for our humanity.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Vigil of Easter is most emphatically “according to thy word,” the word of prophecy and hope, the word of prayer and praise, the word of expectant excitement, and, above all else, the word of renewal and re-creation. The Vigil is all about our waiting upon the divine word, like Mary pondering the words that were spoken about the child Christ. We wait at the grave but we wait expectantly, waiting upon the word which called all things into being and now recalls everything to its truth and principle. It is by all accounts a new creation.

What we await is not about a return to Paradise. There can be no going back. No. What we await is something more, paradise plus, perhaps, for the creation as renewed and restored cannot mean the forgetting of all the folly and wickedness of the human experience, past, present and future. Indeed, the Resurrection presents to us the radical nature of our disobedience in order for us to consider the greater power of divine love. In other words, we await God’s new creative act in a spirit of anticipation, in a mode of holy expectancy. Why and how? Because of God’s word to us. We wait just as Mary waited for her time to come. We are waiting upon God in the knowledge of God that has been revealed to us.

It is not presumption but holy waiting. It is an essentially Marian attitude of faith best captured in her word, “be it unto me according to thy word.” We await expectantly as based on the witness of Scripture and the hope in God that arises from the strength and glory of ancient Israel. We await the great something new that will be wonder and delight, peace and joy abounding unto glory. Our waiting must be like Mary, a waiting that is always “according to thy word.”

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2012

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The radical nature of Mary’s word in response to God appears not only in the terrible intensity of Good Friday but also in the quiet peace of Holy Saturday. Through her word we have endeavoured to consider the creedal elements of human redemption. The crucified Christ dies and is buried. Holy Saturday reflects on the grave and death of Christ. In way, everything is at peace since all that belongs to the overcoming of all that separates God and man has been accomplished on the Cross. “It is finished,” as Jesus says in John’s account of the Passion.

But there is one further creedal element that belongs to the Passion and which is a further consequence of Mary’s ‘yes’ to God. It is the Descent into Hell. The readings on Holy Saturday take us to the grave but they also present to us this arresting idea and image of Christ “[going] and preach[ing] unto the spirits in prison,” as the Epistle reading from 1 Peter 3 puts it, and of the radical nature of “the blood of the covenant” which “will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” bringing salvation to the “prisoners of hope,” as Zechariah suggests. And as the Mattins lesson from 1 Peter 2 suggests, not only are we healed by his wounds but we are “returned unto the shepherd and bishop of our souls.” The radical nature of that returned is represented to us on this day and in ways that relate directly to Mary’s ‘yes’.

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