Month: April 2015

“For ye were as sheep going astray”

Sometimes known as Good Shepherd Sunday, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is set before us today as part of the Easter season. It is, most tellingly, an image that connects the Passion and the Resurrection. As Isaiah says in a passage that belongs to our Good Friday liturgies, “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Peter picks up on this image in this morning’s epistle. “For ye were as sheep going astray,” he says, “but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls,” on the one hand, echoing Isaiah, and, on the other hand, seeing the image of sheep and Shepherd through the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

God as the Shepherd of his people is a powerful Old Testament image. It is further intensified and made visible in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. He goes “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us and with us, an image which in the Passion and Resurrection takes on a greater depth of meaning and suggests the greater gathering of our lives to God.

Christ identifies himself with the Old Testament images of God as the Shepherd of his people. “I am,” he says, “the Good Shepherd.” He makes explicit what that means. In other words, he teaches us who he is for us in this image. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,” he says. We are the sheep; he is the shepherd. What that means is signaled in the events of the Passion recalled for us in 1 Peter. “Christ also suffered for us” and in his suffering we find ways to face the sufferings of our own lives, sufferings that arise from our own sins and follies or sufferings that happen to us as a consequence of the actions of others, sufferings that in some sense or another belong to the general disorder and disarray of our humanity, like sheep going astray, indeed.

(more…)

Print this entry

“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”

This text from Zechariah concluded the reading of the Passion in Holy Week in John’s account of the Passion read on Good Friday. And yet, this text also provides us with a way to think the mystery of the Resurrection. We see that wonderfully today in the second story of the Resurrection that Luke tells.

Yesterday on Easter Monday we had the amazing story of Christ and the disciples on the Road to Emmaus; the point is that the disciples’ hearts “burn[ed] within [them]” as Jesus talked with them on the way and opened the Scriptures for their understanding about the logic of his Passion and Resurrection. In other words, they are pierced, as it were, by what they have learned in the encounter with Christ who provides an interpretation through things said and done. “He was known of them,” specifically “in the breaking of the bread.”

Here Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples. That alone is an intriguing concept. In the Christian story, God is in our midst in Jesus Christ as the Crucified and as the Risen Lord. As an image it captures the central dynamic of the Incarnation. In the Gospel reading for Easter Tuesday Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples who are shocked with joy and disbelief. Their confusion and uncertainty becomes the setting for learning about the Resurrection from the Risen Lord. Beyond the empty tomb of Easter Morn, beyond the report of Mary Magdalene and the other women, beyond the words of an angel, beyond the report of the other disciples, there is the whole matter of Christ making himself known to us in the truth of his Resurrection.

We cannot know this ‘scientifically’ in any kind of empirical sense; paradoxically, though, the Resurrection is one of the strongest concepts that makes science possible. Why? Because it affirms the intelligibility of the material world. We cannot know the Resurrection of Christ experientially only spiritually and imaginatively, intellectually, we might say. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” as the old spiritual puts it; the point of the rhetorical question is that we are there not literally but symbolically and really in terms of our sins being the cause of his being pierced. But ask the question about the Resurrection. Were you there when he rose from the dead? And the answer is both yes and no. How do we know the Resurrection? Through the power of these accounts that show us how the idea of the Resurrection takes hold of human minds and changes human lives.

(more…)

Print this entry

“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”

Zechariah’s text carried us through the intensity of our meditations upon the Passion of Christ in Holy Week. His word is literally the last word of The Passion According to St. John read on Good Friday. But as we saw on Easter Day, his text also carries us into the understanding of the mystery of the Resurrection. We look upon him whom we have pierced and learn above all else the love of God for our wounded and broken humanity restored to love and by love in Christ Crucified.

To learn the Resurrection is to be pierced as well. It means to have our hearts and minds moved by what we see and hear. It means to contemplate the mystery of the Passion and the Resurrection for they are inseparable. No Passion, no Resurrection; and paradoxically, no Resurrection, no Passion. We can only make sense of the Resurrection through the Passion of Christ. This is what the Gospels show us both in Holy Week and in the pageant of the Resurrection which is before us in the Octave and through Eastertide. We are meant to be pierced into love and understanding by what is given to be seen and felt in the accounts of the Resurrection. Those accounts show us the ways in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to be known and believed.

On Easter Monday we have the Peter’s address about the Resurrection from Acts and the powerful Gospel story from St. Luke about the Road to Emmaus. Peter’s testimony bears witness to the bodily reality of the events of the Resurrection. Jesus “whom they slew, and hanged on a tree: him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” The word after is most telling. Christian witness is always about the Resurrection and that in turn is unthinkable without the Passion and the deeper meaning of the forgiveness of sins with which Peter ends his sermon in Acts. The Resurrection is proclaimed as made known to chosen witnesses “who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” A pretty powerful statement and one which is rendered even more powerful by Luke’s Road to Emmaus story. In both, the idea of looking upon him whom we have pierced is a critical part of the learning.

(more…)

Print this entry