Christ Church

“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.

The whole point is that it is given to be lived in us. It is accomplished in what belongs to the truth of our humanity. That is what we see on the Cross in the body of Christ. Redemption costs. No death, no resurrection. There can be no Easter without Good Friday.

The paradox is that there can be no Good Friday without Easter. That is actually part of the greater good news of the Resurrection. It is not just about sin and evil, not even just about the overcoming of sin and evil. It is the far greater revelation of the absolute goodness of God against which sin and evil are as nothing. Even more, they are nothing.

The Resurrection is nothing less than the life of God in our humanity. Only as dying do we live. Christ shows us the Resurrection on the Cross itself. It is there in the gathering up of all things into the hands of the Father. More than the sufferings of Christ physically and psychologically on the Cross, there is his will actively willing the will of his God and Father who becomes our God and Father. The Cross shows us the meaning of the prayer “thy will be done”. It means that God and God alone can bring something good out of the greater nothingness, if there can be degrees of nothing, of our sins. This suggests that we are something worth and something more in the eyes of God. “For God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten son into the world, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”.

It does not mean that we will not die. Mortality is part of our lot but “through the grave, and gate of death” we pass to our joyful resurrection because of Christ’s Resurrection. As he is so shall we be but only if we “seek those things which are above”, as Paul puts it, echoing in a way the scriptural words of Luke which has been the interpretative mantra for our Holy Week meditations. “One thing is needful”, Jesus says to Martha about Mary in Bethany. The one thing needful is to attend to those things from above meaning the things of God revealed to our humanity. The one thing needful is to think upward.

This is the task and the struggle. The tendency of our age and culture is to think downward, to make God accountable to us which ultimately results in a kind of atheism. Holy Week and Easter are about how we are necessarily engaged with God in the intimacy of his engagement with us. The Resurrection of Christ is about new life and a new way of thinking about our humanity and that is something which has to be learned and re-learned. In all of the Gospel stories about the Resurrection we see how the idea of the Resurrection comes to be grasped and known, believed and lived.

The traditional Gospel of Easter is this story from John about Mary Magdalene coming early to the tomb and seeing the stone taken away and then running to Simon Peter and John who then run to the tomb to confirm her claim that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him”. And so it begins with the empty tomb, it seems, and with the two disciples running to the tomb. John gets there first but doesn’t enter. Peter comes after but enters first and then John enters after him. They see the linen cloths and the napkin that was about his head but no body.

What does it all amount to? The stone taken away and an empty tomb? Not much, it must seem. And yet, it awakens faith. John “saw and believed”. But that is really only a kind of beginning. “For as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead”. There has to be our contemplation of these things, our thinking upon them and learning from them. The Resurrection is there to be thought and only so can it be lived and celebrated. It is the one thing needful. Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!

Fr. David Curry
Easter 2016, 10:30