Year: 2014

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

The dominant icon in the little Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School in Windsor is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The dominant icon at Christ Church is the image of Christ Crucified. Together they belong to the spiritual landscape that shapes our Anglican and Christian identity here in Windsor.

They go together. The further paradox is that they both belong to the teaching of the Resurrection. In other words we only think the Crucifixion through the doctrine of the Resurrection and the image of Christ the Good Shepherd, too, is a Resurrection image. It belongs to the radical meaning of the Resurrection, something which we know about primarily through the eyes of John.

John’s  Gospel shapes our thinking about the Resurrection throughout  the whole of the Easter Season and right through to Trinity Sunday. We learn to think the radical meaning of the Resurrection through the eyes of John.

“The good shepherd,” Jesus says, “giveth his life for the sheep.” It is impossible to think about the idea of the good shepherd apart from the reality of Christ’s sacrifice. That is critical to the idea of care which the image conveys but it is care in a far deeper and profounder sense than the forms of care in our contemporary therapeutic culture. This care is about suffering and death which have to be gone through and not simply bandaging and medicating with drugs. Christ dies and rises. Death and Resurrection underlie the more radical care of Christ for us.

The teaching of the Resurrection is largely conveyed to us through the eyes of John. He shows us the dialectic of sorrow and joy and the transition from disappointment to wonder. We may cling to our pains and sorrows, our bitterness and our resentments. We are rather good at doing that and in a way we live in a culture which encourages our complaints rather than the idea of passing through them. We refuse the radical care of Christ the Good Shepherd. That more radical care has to with how the Resurrection opens us out to the love of God.

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“For they were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark. Why? Because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the accounts of the Resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical Gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the Doctrine of the Resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his Gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary.

And yet, what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is a powerful and poignant ending, and serves to make the doctrinal point about the Resurrection even more strongly. After all, it is only in the light of the Resurrection that the story of Jesus makes any sense. The Resurrection has captured the imaginations of the Gospel writers, such as St. Mark, and compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels could never have been written.

The additional verses serve as an epilogue and as a further point of confirmation, whether as added by Mark or by someone else later on is entirely uncertain and unknowable, and, I must add, quite irrelevant to our understanding of the Christian Faith.

But some speculation is called for. (more…)

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“Mary stood without”

We are all like Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb of Jesus, I suppose. Whatever and whomever we love, we want to hold onto; in short, to possess. Too much of our love for one another is really only for ourselves. Our love is not really for them; it is for ourselves. It is always ourselves – our self-love – which gets in the way of the deeper lessons of love. We have, like the disciples a hard time letting go.

Love is not love when it is possession. Christ has not given himself for us so that we might possess him. If anything it is the other way around. We belong to him. He does not belong to us. And yet, our belonging to Christ is no possessive love, for the love by which we are his is self-less love. It sets us in motion. And it makes us more not less than ourselves. When individuals and churches become obsessed with questions about personal salvation, then they are in danger of wanting to possess Christ and to keep him to themselves, against all others.

But that is not what Christ wants for us. He does not want us to possess him but to enter into the freedom of his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. He who cannot be contained by the grave of death can hardly be contained by us.

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“Jesus came and stood in the midst”

“The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early,” we heard last Sunday. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week,” we hear today. Time is magically stopped and we are mystically present at that day, the day that never, never ends. The Day of Resurrection is just like that. In the spirituality of the ancient Eucharistic lectionary, which is at the heart of the Common Prayer tradition, we see through the eyes of John and especially, the doctrine of the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is not something which we celebrate in a moment, even for a day or for a season. It runs through the whole of the year and indeed through the whole of our lives in Faith. The Octave Day places us in that endless day of Easter to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day,” the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive or dead to his presence?

“Jesus came and stood in the midst.” He was “in the midst” on Good Friday, too, crucified between two thieves! How different and yet how similar. Christ is in our midst if only we would have the eyes to see him in Word and Sacrament, in liturgy and song, and in lives of service and sacrifice, in lives of love lived for God and one another. For Christ is in our midst. It is the Church’s proclamation.

But on this day, the day of Resurrection extended for all eternity, as it were, Christ is in our midst behind closed doors. The disciples were behind closed doors in the Upper Room. They were there in fear and great anxiety. The world of their hopes and expectations had been shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to come together again into something new. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.

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