by CCW | 1 April 2018 15:09
What is that word? It is all Resurrection. “Christ is risen, Alleluia, Alleluia. The Lord is risen, indeed, Alleluia, Alleluia.”This is the Easter word and the ancient greeting of Christians. It is the great proclamation of the Church about the wonder and the mystery of God in the work of human redemption. Death is not everything; it is nothing. Death is changed. God makes something out of human sin and wickedness, even out of death. Such is new life, the radical new life of the Resurrection.
The tomb has become the womb of new life. We are provided with an entirely new way to think about human life; it is life with God, now and evermore. The word of Resurrection resounds in the liturgy of Easter beginning with the Easter Anthems. And resurrection and rebirth, new life and new beginnings are seen visually and actually in the baptism of Jen and David Appleby on this day. They are the visible reminders to us of our life in Christ. Their baptisms immediately recall us to our own.
Word and Sacrament. Easter is a word derived fromEastra, an ancient pagan Germanic Goddess of Spring. Other cultures speak of the Pascha, referring to the Passover and, indeed, the new Passover of Christ. The Easter Day anthems help us to understand something of the radical meaning of the Resurrection. “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.”The consequence of that for us is made clear in the Epistle, itself a proclamation. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.”That means we have to die to ourselves and our old ways, “cast[ing] off the old self with its evil deeds, and put[ting] on the new.”There is, in short, an new orientation and direction for our lives, a new birth for all, a new way of looking at things.
The challenge of Easter Day is quite simple. We are dead in ourselves. We live only in Christ. It is all about getting out of the tombs of our minds and our lives to be alive in Christ. How? Through the Gospel encounter with a new and transforming reality. It begins with the empty tomb with the puzzlement and perplexity of expectations shattered. It begins with confusion and uncertainty out of which will come a new understanding. Mary Magdalene comes early to the tomb, alone, only to find the first wonder, “the stone taken away from the sepulchre.”This sets her motion to tell the other disciples, Simon Peter and “the other disciple whom Jesus loved,”, John. “So they ran both together.”John outruns Peter but only stoops down and looks in; he does not enter. Peter enters first and then John follows. Then suddenly, beyond the moving of the stone, they find that there is no body but only the linen clothes lying. It is for them and for us a complete mystery.
What sense can we make of it? And will that then be a human construction, the fabrication of a story by us? No. The accounts of the Resurrection have a compelling character to them. They show us the coming to birth of an idea and an understanding of the Resurrection, the dawning of an awareness that goes beyond what we ourselves could imagine. What drives that discovery is the Risen Christ himself. He will be the main witness to the Resurrection. In other words, we are opened out to an idea which cannot come from us but is worked out through our thinking upon the words and deeds of Christ. It is a kind of divine intellection at work in and through us. New birth and new life precisely because we look at death and life in a new way.
The Resurrection counters many of the dogmatisms of our world and day. It proclaims the idea that you are more than some sort of organic algorithm, that you are more though not less than your bodies, that you are more though not less than dead and dying. Death is not longer the final word. Indeed death is transformed from being simply an end to becoming a way, a means to an end. How? By Christ’s Resurrection.
The Resurrection does not ignore any of the harsh realities of human life. It confronts them head on. Sin and death, suffering and sorrow are not ignored nor denied; they are however profoundly transformed. Such is the nature of grace. It does not destroy nature, but perfects it. We are recalled to our life in God in Christ, “for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
The Resurrection speaks to our modern anxieties about the self as well. We don’t have to be defined by the pathologies and patterns, addictions and syndromes that so often come to define us. The Resurrection proclaims something new and different that has entirely to do with the redemption of our lives, by our lives in transformation. Not always suddenly and immediately but constantly and always by way of letting the grace of Christ move in us. That is what our life in faith is all about. It is the constant struggle to be defined not by our words and emotions but by Christ’s Word proclaimed and celebrated, by our constant remembering of Christ in his sacrifice for us. This is our good and our joy, the great joy of resurrection. It changes everything if we will let it into our hearts and souls and so be, well, born again.
An important phrase, it does not have to do simply with our personal assertions and certainties. It has everything to do with a new way of life and a new way of looking at things. To be born again to be born upward into the things of God in Jesus Christ. It means dying to ourselves in order to live to God and for one another. Such is the radical new life of the Resurrection. We are only alive in Christ. He is our life and our life with one another in his body.
Jen and David have been made “the children of God, members of the body of Christ, and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven”by virtue of what Christ has commanded and provided. The things of the world, like water, are by virtue of a new sign made the instruments of eternal life. Only so can we be in God and with God in Christ. Bread and wine by virtue of a new signification are the body and blood of Christ that he may be truly in us and we in him. Such are all the things that belong to the Resurrection; it is the marvellous new fruit of the Passion. Out of the wounded side of the dead Christ, flow water and blood, the signs of the sacraments of the Church in Baptism and Holy Communion. Our joy, the joy of Easter, is simply to live in this wonder and mystery.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/04/01/sermon-for-easter-3/
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