by CCW | 12 April 2015 15:45
Not again! Surely we have had enough of this text from Zechariah! But yes, and perhaps most appropriately so on The Octave Day of Easter. Why? Because it belongs to the teaching, the doctrine of the Resurrection. Because it shows the inescapable and necessary connection between the Passion and the Resurrection. As we have noted, no Passion, no Resurrection; and, even more paradoxically, perhaps, no Resurrection, no Passion.
The Passion According to St. John read on Good Friday ends with Zechariah’s text, “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced.” Now that text carries us into the Resurrection in the ways in which the idea and concept of the Resurrection comes to birth in the disciples and in us. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews,” John tells us, “came Jesus into the midst.”
“The same day at evening.” What is that day? It is Easter. Holy Week began with Palm Sunday which marks the beginning of one long liturgy that ends with the Resurrection at Easter, and yet imaginatively and liturgically, Easter extends into the Octave and into Eastertide. Sorrow and joy are intermingled, each shaping our understanding of the other. There is something quite compelling about such a way of thinking.
Where are we? Behind closed doors, John says, and in that same Upper Room where Jesus had gathered with the disciples “on the night in which he was betrayed” and where he gave himself in bread and wine as body and blood anticipating his Passion and Resurrection and providing for us to be joined with him in Holy Communion. What happens behind closed doors is quite powerful and wonderful. The disciples were huddled in fear. All their hopes, it seems, had been shattered by virtue of Christ’s crucifixion and now they are in fear of persecution because of their association with him. Our minds, too, are like tombs, behind closed doors. We are dead in ourselves.
That is the point of Easter. Think back for a moment to Holy Saturday. Then we gathered at the tomb of Christ, the tomb closed with a large stone. And yet, in the Christian understanding, something was already happening behind the closed door of the tomb of Christ. What was that? It was the idea of God’s reconciliation with the whole of his sinful creation expressed in the creedal teaching of The Descent into Hell. Christ in an image from Zechariah (again) that is picked up by Peter in his First Epistle goes and “preach[es] unto the spirits in prison,” in Sheol, the place of the dead. Eastern Orthodoxy captures this in an image, an icon of the Resurrection which depicts Jesus drawing Adam and Eve out of the grave.
And so here behind closed doors “the same day at evening, being the first day of the week,” Jesus comes into our midst. And something happens. First, there is what he says and secondly, there is what he does. He says “Peace be unto you,” something which will be said in this chapter by Jesus three times. What he does is equally compelling. “He showed them his hands and his side.”
In the continuation of this chapter, Jesus will appear eight days later and show himself to Thomas who was not there that “same day at evening” but having heard about it refused to believe “except,” as he says, “I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side.” Jesus appears to him and he encounters the reality of the Resurrection crying out with the wonderful words, “My Lord, my God.” We are not told exactly whether he did put his fingers into the print of the nails or thrust his hand into his side, but what he looks upon and sees is the one who has been pierced. The wounds of Christ have become the signs of love. The past is not eclipsed but transformed.
The Resurrection is about the transformation of our minds and lives. All of the Resurrection appearances show us how this happens. It happens by way of looking upon him whom we have pierced and learning from him the meaning of sin’s disarray and deadly destruction and learning even more the love that conquers sin and death. It does so in the very body of our humanity.
The Resurrection is the profoundest affirmation of the natural world and of our physical bodies. It says unequivocally and clearly that the physical world and our bodies while not everything are not nothing either. It proclaims that the world and our bodies are embraced intellectually and spiritually in the communion of God. Through the mysteries of the Passion, the mysteries of suffering, sin and death, we are gathered into the greater mystery of God, the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection. We look upon him whom we have pierced and only so can we be changed from fear and worry to peace and joy. We are given a whole new way to think and live.
The sad tragedy of our Churches and culture is that we have either forgotten or denied the radical teaching of the Resurrection. And yet it is the strong counter and corrective to the techno-gnosticism of our age, to the ways in which we lose our humanity. There are three modern ways of thinking about nature and by extension human nature, all of them incomplete forms of the Judeo-Christian story, and particularly the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection.
The three ways or attitudes of mind about nature are, first, that nature is just dead stuff there for us to manipulate and use in whatever way we desire; it has no integrity or purpose in and of itself. This view asserts the radical independence of our humanity from nature and our dominance over nature; the problems with that approach belong to all our environmental, economic and political anxieties. Secondly, everything is nature and nothing more, including our humanity which is collapsed into the natural world where we are no different from every other living creature; we are just animals or less. This view makes our humanity completely one with and dependent upon everything in the world but can give no account of human responsibility about our actions. We are just nature too. The third account is the post-modern view that there is no nature and by extension no ‘us’ either, it seems to me. There are only our words and terms. They have no connection to anything outside of ourselves. We are simply what we think we are regardless of biology or nature or experience. This way of thinking turns the old phrase ‘you are your biology’ completely on its head. There is no biology. Increasingly this approach drives the gender and sexual identity issues of our world and day. There are also the ways in which these incomplete forms of thinking interrelate: for example, the technological dominance of nature serving the reconstruction of identities.
Yet these are all incomplete forms of thinking that the Resurrection counters and corrects. The Resurrection of Jesus reclaims the world and our bodies for thought and spirit; the Resurrection of Jesus shows our connection to physical and bodily reality without collapsing us simply into nature; the Resurrection of Jesus proclaims the real power of words and thoughts; they belong to the Creative and Redemptive Word of God who speaks the world into being and redeems that world and our humanity through the Word made flesh, the one who is pierced on the cross. Jesus opens our understanding that we might understand the Scriptures. Words conveying meaning, the meaning of reality. The only reality is our reality with God.
There is a change, a transformation that makes all things new. The disciples are opened out to a new way of thinking and they are changed from fear and uncertainty to joy and peace. There is forgiveness and redemption. It happens through our being with Christ. Such is the meaning of our liturgy. “He is with us in the breaking of the bread” (Gerard Manley Hopkins). What is always before us is how our minds and hearts are being opened to a new understanding.
In our parish today six people will be confirmed, renewing their commitment to Christ in the power of his Resurrection. It happens precisely because we look upon him whom we have pierced. Then and only then can we be like the disciples behind closed doors on that “same day at evening” who hearing him and seeing “his hands and his side” were “glad when they saw the Lord.” We look upon him whom we have pierced and only so shall we be glad.
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter, 8:00am, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/04/12/sermon-for-the-octave-day-of-easter-800am-holy-communion/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.