Month: March 2016

Fr. David Curry has collected his eleven Holy Week and Easter homilies, based on the Scripture text “One thing is needful”, into a single pdf document. Click here to download “One thing is needful”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“One thing is needful”

Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! He is Risen, Indeed. Alleluia, Alleluia! Such is the ancient Easter greeting for this day and this season. It is a joyous proclamation. But what does it mean? It celebrates a whole new way of looking at life and reality, to be sure, and yet one which is mystifying and perplexing to our prosaic and ordinary views on life. How so? Because it challenges all of our ancient and modern assumptions. That it does so is the radical good news of the Resurrection.

What it proclaims, quite simply, is that death isn’t everything. It isn’t the end of the story of you. Or to put it in another way, we are more than our experiences, more than our complaints, more than our sufferings and more than our deaths. We are even more than the things which make us tiresome and boring to others not to mention ourselves! We are more than our dying and death. “As dying, we live”. The Resurrection is radical new life because it changes death and therefore changes how we live. The radical idea is about our living for God and for one another. The radical idea is that God makes something more and greater out of our sin and evil; the ultimate triumph of the goodness and love of God.

We don’t want to hear about sin and evil, to be sure. And yet that is a necessary part of the good news of the Resurrection. Christ’s Resurrection is the overcoming of sin and death. His Crucifixion marks the triumph of good over evil in the very face and experience of evil. How we may ask? It is the lesson of Good Friday where in the crucifixion all sin – sin in its fullest array and force – is gathered into the greater love of the Son for the Father. But what does it mean for you and me? It means a new sense of who we are. For if we are just our thoughts, words and deeds, if we are just our actions, then we are nothing. Dead in our sins and nothing more.

The Resurrection is the strongest possible affirmation of human dignity and freedom. We are freed to God. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. The highest and the greatest good of our humanity, individually and collectively speaking is found in our communion with God. Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection are the two inseparably related concepts that overcome the separation between man and God and unite us to God. The love that creates is the love that recreates and restores. The Resurrection is God’s great second act after Creation. Redemption is Creation restored in and through the negativity of sin and death. Such is the grace of God.

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“One thing is needful”

Christ is risen. Alleluia, Alleluia! The one thing needful is the proclamation of the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, “early when it was yet dark,” John tells us. She “seeth the stone taken away.” And so it begins. She runs to tell the others, apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the apostles, as the Fathers put it. She says “to Simon Peter and to the other disciple” that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” He is not there. Who has taken him? Who are ‘they’ that “have taken [him] away”? Confronting something that counters her expectation, she suspects a conspiracy, it seems. Don’t we all? Simon Peter and “that other disciple” run and see. They, too, find only an empty tomb. And so it continues. It is the Resurrection. An intriguing and perhaps interesting idea?

Perhaps we feel the same way that the British travel writer, Alexander Kinglake, felt about seeing churches in England and wanting to inscribe upon their lintels the caveat, “interesting, if true.” Is that where we are with the Resurrection, “interesting, if true”?

If so, why are we here? Because the idea of the Resurrection has a strong hold on us, the hold of truth. It has changed the world, quite literally, one would have to say, and that, at least, is true historically speaking from the standpoint of social, political and cultural developments. The rise and spread of Christianity, its struggles and contests, first, with Jewish and ancient pagan culture, Greek and Roman, then, its conflicts and disputes with Islam, as well as its internal debates and arguments between east and west, Greek and Latin, Catholic and Protestant, and, then, with the rise of modernity and even modern science with all of its ambiguities and uncertainties that comprise our post-modern experience; how could one possibly think to explain any of that story apart from the Resurrection? It is the central defining truth of the Christian Faith, whether one believes it or not. That much can and must be said and cannot be gainsaid whether you are Muslim, Jewish, Christian or atheist in terms of our cultural history. We are here because we cannot not think it, even if our world and culture has forgotten and rejected it.

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“One thing is needful”

We do not just meet at the tomb of Christ on Holy Saturday to mourn and honour his death and the meaning of human redemption. We also meet expectantly, waiting upon God and his gracious acts. In a way, it is the radical meaning of our lives in faith. It is always about waiting upon God and finding the truth of our being and doing in him. Nowhere, perhaps, is that more joyously and wondrously seen than at the great Vigil of Easter.

The mystery of Easter is the triumph of good over evil, of light over darkness, of grace over sin. God’s great second act is the Resurrection, a second creation that overcomes the waywardness of our sins. Out of sin and evil, God creates a greater good. It is Christ’s Resurrection, the fruit of his Passion. It changes everything. The one thing needful is to rejoice in Christ’s Resurrection.

The great Paschal Praeconium exults in the wonder of the Resurrection. An ancient hymn and prayer, probably going back to the fifth century, sometimes attributed to Augustine, sometimes to Ambrose, it rejoices in the triumph of God’s grace and goodness over all sin and evil. It is sung in the light of the Easter Candle, itself symbolic of the Resurrection of Christ and of his life and light in us. The Paschal Praeconium is the great Easter Proclamation. What is that proclamation? “Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!” “The Lord is Risen Indeed. Alleluia, Alleluia!” What does it mean? Joy, an unsurpassing joy borne out of our griefs and sorrows, not just for what we have suffered but for what we do and have done. We celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death whereby we are united to God. “O night, wherein heaven and earth are joined, and mankind partaketh with the Godhead”. The love that creates now recreates. Nothing can hold back the power of the goodness of God who acts out of his own love and gathers all things into his love.

Creation and Redemption are closely joined. We forget that at our peril. And so the prophecies of the Vigil remind us of the significant moments from the story of creation through the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage to the Law and the prophets that contribute to our understanding of Christ’s Passion and that compel us to contemplate the wonder of his Resurrection. Nothing signals more profoundly the true nature of our humanity. We are more than our sins and our sufferings, more than our dying and our deaths. We are made for God. Thus the Resurrection is the greatest possible affirmation of human personality and individuality, the greatest possible affirmation of our souls and bodies as belonging to our spiritual identity in Christ. We are more though not less than our physical bodies. Our whole being finds its truth in Christ and his Resurrection.

That is why the Vigil entails the renewal of our baptismal vows. We are reminded of our essential spiritual identity in Christ which is realised through his Death and Resurrection and through our being incorporated into his Death and Resurrection. Only so can we be in Christ and Christ in us. We live not for ourselves but for Christ and for Christ in one another. It is ultimately what we celebrate in the great Mass of Easter. Christ, we learn from Mary in Bethany, is the one thing needful. To attend to his grace for us in our deepest joy.

“One thing is needful”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2016

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“One thing is needful”

There is a certain quality of peace and quiet about Holy Saturday. All of the fuss and bother, all of the rage and spite, all of the agony and pain of the preceding days is past and gone. Christ is dead and buried. We meet at the tomb of Christ. Why? What is the one thing needful? To contemplate the meaning of Christ’s death.

The point is that his death and therefore all deaths are not meaningless. His suffering on the cross and therefore our sufferings too are not meaningless. Something has been accomplished. “It is finished”, he says, in John’s Gospel before “bow[ing] his head and [giving] up his spirit”. What has been accomplished? What is finished? All that belongs to the reconciliation between God and man. All that belongs to human redemption.

What does that mean? It means that there is something more than the reality of our separation from God that accounts for suffering and death. God has done something in and through the humanity of Christ. There is atonement. The scriptures constantly call our attention to the idea of Christ dying for us. And through the eyes of John our attention is constantly drawn to his dying for us as belonging to his living for the Father. “I have come to do the will of him who sent me”. What is that will? To achieve our peace. To overcome our sin. To open us out to more than death.

The idea of reconciliation requires the recognition of separation. Sin and suffering, sin and death are all interconnected. We suffer as a result of our own sins. We suffer because of the sins of others. We suffer because it is the condition of our humanity. In the humanity of Christ, God suffers for us to redeem us. What is that redemption? The revelation of the absolute goodness of God which is far greater than all and any form of evil. Holy Week reveals to us the absolute goodness of God which seeks our good out of the very nature of the divine goodness itself. What Holy Saturday shows us is the fullest extent of the divine will to be reconciled with his sinful creation.

As with everything about Holy Week, we are meant to learn this. The Passion of Christ is about his sufferings for us. In some sense, his sufferings are our sufferings as a result of our separation from the truth and goodness of God. All sin is about that separation. The cross is the overcoming of it. It establishes a kind of peace and harmony, a restoration of Paradise, if you will. Something of its fuller meaning is signalled in the readings at Morning Prayer that illumine the Epistle and Gospel for Holy Saturday. Together they recall us to the creedal doctrine of the Descent into Hell.

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