by CCW | 7 May 2017 15:00
Nowhere, perhaps, is the idea of the Resurrection as radical new life more profoundly and provocatively expressed than in this gospel story. We are presented with a compelling image of transformation, an image that somehow connects to our experiences, whether we are literally mothers or not. All of us can relate to the experience of pain and sorrow, suffering and disappointment in some way or another. For Marilyn and me, it is a particularly poignant image given that our daughter Elizabeth gave birth this week past to Silas Barry King. All is well. The pains of childbirth transformed into the joys of motherhood for her, fatherhood for Evan, and for us the new reality of being grandparents.
The wonderful point of the gospel story is that the difficult and hard things in life are neither denied nor ignored. In a way, it is the experiential reality of such things in our lives that is being emphasized in order to underscore the greater idea, the idea of transformation from the graves of our sorrows and pains to the paths of joy and peace, the idea of the Resurrection itself.
“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of the Easter season and that refrain becomes the critical matrix through which to understand the radical meaning of these readings on the third, fourth and fifth Sundays after Easter. The gospels that are read on these Sundays are all taken from the 16th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a chapter which belongs to what is known as the “farewell discourse” of Jesus. Jesus bids adieu, literally, we might say, to God but yet more profoundly to God as the Father and to his disciples and friends. Such things are, of course, wonderfully and emotionally charged but how much more so in this situation? Why? Because of the radical meaning of Christ’s going from us. It is, ultimately, the condition of his being with us. At the heart of that paradox lies the Resurrection.
In the farewell discourse Jesus is talking about his going from them in a twofold sense: his going from them in his passion and death for “where I am going you cannot come”; and his going from them in his ultimate homecoming to the Father in his Ascension, that “where I am you may be also”. He goes “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us that he might open out to us the true homeland of the spirit. But the wonder of it all is that we live in that homeland of the spirit now through the comings and goings of the Son to the Father in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, and in holy lives of service and sacrifice.
The meaning of all that is captured in the Easter mantra, “because I go to the Father”. It signals the orientation of the Son – everything is ordered to God as Father – and it signals an end, a telos, for us in our lives through our identity with Christ, an identity which is forged in the crucible of his passion, but in which we are privileged to participate through the power of his resurrection in our baptisms into his death and resurrection for us and in our continual nourishment and succour from the food of the altar of his love in us. The further significance of this is expressed in the image of the transformation of our sorrows into joy, “a joy”, moreover, “that no man taketh from you.” The image is that of the pain of childbirth giving place to the joy of motherhood, an image which makes trivial and banal the commonplaces of our culture about ‘no pain, no gain’. Here is something far deeper, something far more profound.
It signals a freedom for us in our lives even in the midst of the struggles and hardships of our lives. It signals a freedom to God. It signals that there is a joy and a freedom to be found whatever the circumstances in which we find ourselves, whether we are dying upon our beds or in anxiety and great fear for ourselves and our children – whatever, quite literally. It requires something from us, of course. It requires our actively taking a hold of what is shown to us and what is provided for us; in short, we have to will it.
But then, that is the whole point upon which human dignity and human freedom ultimately turn. The grace of God demands our active acceptance and embrace of it. We cannot be passive and indifferent to it. When we are, then we empty it of its meaning for us in our lives, the very thing which the Gospel is at pains to show us. The grace of the Resurrection is accomplished only in and through the pains of the passion and that grace provides us with a whole new orientation on life and whole new foundation for our lives socially, morally, economically and politically. This is what the lesson from 1 Peter is saying – that we are freed to the will of God while living “as strangers and pilgrims” in the world.
The conditions of the world are seen in a new light. We can live in the world but as oriented to God in all that we are doing. Profoundly, there is joy in and through the hardships of life. But we have to will what has been accomplished for us. Here Jesus is providing his disciples and friends with the lesson before the events of his passion and death, his resurrection and ascension. But we, on the other hand, are hearing these things after both his passion and his resurrection! We are given to see the idea and its reality.
The Resurrection is this utterly remarkable thing which changes our whole outlook. It gives us a direction and a purpose that allows us to face with compassion the sufferings and the pains of the world without being merely victims, on the one hand, or without assuming that the world is everything, on the other hand. It gives us a freedom in relation to the practical affairs of our daily lives because it counters our idolatry of the practical, an idolatry so prevalent in the fearfulness and anxieties of our culture, itself a culture of disrespect and a culture of death. The two are related. There can only be a deep respect for the dignity of our humanity through the overcoming of the deep fears of the culture of death.
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust” as T.S. Eliot puts it, naming, in a poetic way, one of the conditions of “the wasteland” of modernity in its uncertainties and cynical despair of God. And yet, that passage, from The Burial of The Dead in The Waste Land points us to something more than cynical despair. It points us as well to our eschatological hope of the Resurrection. The handful of dust refers to the practice of throwing earth upon the casket at the time of burial with the words: “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.” There is joy in the midst of sorrow. In other words, it belongs to the idea of redemption signaled in the poem in the image of “com[ing] in under the shadow of this red rock,” the image of our being gathered back to God in Christ. Christ is the stricken rock out of whose side flow the sacraments of our life in God.
“[Our] sorrow shall be turned to joy” only when we enter into the radical meaning of the Son’s going to the Father and realize that the affairs and conceits of our world and day are not only worth nothing but are deadly and destructive when divorced from the Gospel of Christ.
In the mercies of the Risen Christ, there is always the hope that our sorrows and pains, our sufferings and disappointments, even our betrayals and wickednesses can become the occasion of redemption and joy. Then, like Piccarda in Dante’s Paradiso, we might say about our own follies and foolishnesses, “yet gaily I forgive myself”, but only “because I go to the Father”, only because “[our] sorrow has [indeed] been turned into joy” by the crucified and risen Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Easter III, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/05/07/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-after-easter-7/
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