Month: April 2013

“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image and yet one which I think we utterly fail to comprehend. Perhaps the most familiar of all of the biblical images and certainly the one which is most commonly represented in the church culture of the Maritimes, it has, I fear, been co-opted by the therapeutic culture and emptied of its deeper meaning. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.

We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries upon centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read on the Second Sunday after Easter. The Collect makes the explicit point that Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of Christ the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And yet, that is exactly what our readings do this morning. The lesson from 1^st Peter is quite explicit. It speaks about Christ “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” as well as signifying that it is by his stripes – his wounds at our hands – that we are healed and even more, “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [o]ur souls.” This is strong stuff; the theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil and the philosophical idea that attends it that the power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Ad Jesum per Mariam – through Mary to Jesus.  Mary does not want us to come to her, the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther observes, but through her to Jesus. It is, ironically, it might seem, one of the great mottoes of the Jesuit order founded several decades after Luther’s outstanding commentary on the Magnificat and after the cataclysmic shift in religious sensibilities that changed the map of Europe to this day and which is part and parcel of the emergence of early modernity.

There is something quite marvelous about The Feast of the Annunciation. Perhaps one of the most common and familiar scenes depicted in Art and Sculpture, in Stained Glass and Tapestry, the Feast of the Annunciation always coincides with the seasons of Lent and Easter, sometimes even falling on Good Friday or Easter itself. By virtue of the coincidence of the 25th of March with the weeks before and after the Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox which marks Easter, her feast day is sometimes transferred to the first Tuesday after The Octave of Easter; in short, after Holy Week and Easter Week. What does this mean and what is its significance doctrinally and devotionally? Simply this, Mary points us to Jesus and to our life in Christ even as her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God’s being with us in the intimacy of his humanity which he derives from her. It signals the humility of our true humanity in the one who points us to Jesus even as it is through her that Jesus is with us.

Christ is, as Irenaeus put it is “that pure one opening that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” That pure womb is Mary; her purity is about her pure openness to God.

Mary’s word to us in the season of the Resurrection is her word to us at all seasons. “Be it unto me according to thy word.” We attend to this text in the tones of resurrection joy. His word living in us even as it lived for us through her. Our yes to his Resurrection through her yes to the Annunciation.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of The Feast of the Annunciation (transf.)

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“The same day at evening, being the first day of the week,
when the doors were shut …”

It is, I think, an arresting image. In a few simple words, John sets the scene. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week.” What day is that? The day of the Resurrection, Easter day. And yet we read this passage on the Octave Day of Easter, today, this morning actually, but how appropriate! Why? Because it is as if we are there, in that moment, still in the meaning of that day, the day of Resurrection. The idea of the octave, a concept belonging to the musical scale, applies to our lives theologically and spiritually, from the first note to the eighth note, the same note. Just so Easter Day and the Octave Day are, in a way, the same day. It is as if time is somehow suspended or better, as if we are in the eternal moment of Christ’s Resurrection. In a way, that is the meaning of every Sunday in the Christian understanding. Every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection.

But the real wonder of this image, at least for me, is in the idea of closed doors. The disciples were behind closed doors on that same day at evening and they were there in the same Upper Room “in the same night that he was betrayed” where Christ had identified himself with the bread and wine of the ancient Passover feast, the festival of Israel’s deliverance by God from Egyptian slavery. And they are there in fear, “for fear of the Jews,” John tells us in a phrase which might trouble us and certainly has had an ugly history in terms of how it has been used, namely, in blaming the Jews simply for Christ’s crucifixion and death. The whole story and, certainly the theological story for Christians, is that we are all implicated in the sequence of betrayals that contribute to the events of Good Friday. They are afraid for themselves because of what happened to Jesus. An inescapable feature of those events is Israel’s betrayal of God and the law but it is part of the larger story of humanity’s betrayal of the truth of God and our betrayal of ourselves.

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