Month: April 2018

“The same day at evening”

Time, it seems, has stopped. We rest in the morning and the evening of the new Sabbath of the Day of Resurrection, it seems, with Mary coming early in the morning on the first day of the week to the tomb and finding it empty. She runs and tells Simon Peter and John and they both run and find that what she said is indeed true. Now, it is “the same day at evening.” Yet, we are behind closed doors.

It is a powerful image. Like the disciples, we too are behind closed doors out of fear. Our culture is very much the culture of closed doors, the culture of the various ghettoes of our minds, like so many gated communities, as it were. We hear only what we want to hear and see only what we want to see. But the more serious point is our fearfulness, our uncertainties and our anxieties.

We are behind the closed doors of our minds because we are uncertain about ourselves, about our world, and about the very idea of truth. This shows itself in a myriad of ways: from the increasing intolerance about diverse opinions about identity politics to the increasing fragility of ourselves as a self. It means a loss of confidence in being able to think and proclaim what belongs to the Christian faith and to the ways in which it engages the world. Yet the Resurrection breaks open the closed doors of our minds and our souls.

The Gospel for the Octave Day of Easter places us imaginatively on “the same day at evening” to counter all of our fears and uncertainties. Something happens behind closed doors that belongs to the Easter message of Resurrection. It changes everything. It changes us. Such is the Resurrection. It gives us a new perspective and a new understanding about ourselves. We are freed to God and are set in motion.

What is that motion? In today’s Gospel, it is about “the forgiveness of sins”proclaimed by the Apostolic Church. On “the same day at evening,” Christ breathes on the disciples and signals to them and us what his word and action means. “Receive ye the Holy Ghost,” he says.“Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” It is called the power of the keys.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Once again, we are presented with a lesson from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, often attributed to St. Luke. Once again a Gospel reading from The Gospel according to St. Luke. Once again, the word of Resurrection is being shown to us and we are being opened out to its meaning. And once again suffering and death are inescapably made an essential part of the teaching of the Resurrection along with repentance and forgiveness.

“To you is the word of this salvation sent,” Paul says to a group of Hebrews in the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia. The message of Resurrection arises in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures, among “the sons of the family of Abraham.” As Luke puts it, too, the idea of the Resurrection comes to us through “the open[ing of] their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.” Yet all of this builds upon the story of Christ on the road to Emmaus, upon the tangible realities of Christ being with us.

“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and blood, as ye see me have.” And in addition he asks “have ye here any food? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and of an honey-comb.” It is all part of the testimony to the reality of the Resurrection that “he took it, and did eat before them.” It is the Risen Christ who teaches us about the resurrection and its radical meaning.

It does not mean the annihilation of nature but its transformation and perfection. The body and the physical world are not everything; they are not self-sufficient and self-explanatory, but neither are they nothing. Here Jesus uses both the Scriptures and the things of the natural world to teach us the meaning of our humanity in God. He speaks to our fears and worries, to our anxieties and our uncertainties. He confirms his presence with us in simple ways, even through such simple things as “a piece of broiled fish and of an honey-comb.” This is part of the power of these Gospel stories.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The word for Easter is Resurrection. But how do we know about the Resurrection? How do we begin to understand what is meant by the Resurrection? Few Gospel stories illumine our understanding better than Luke’s famous story of Christ on the Road to Emmaus. “He was known of them in the breaking of the bread.”

“Him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly, Luke tells in the Lesson from Acts, rehearsing features of the life of Christ and especially the events of the Passion and then the Resurrection, or rather the making known of his Resurrection. The Risen Christ is made known “unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us,”Luke suggests, “who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead,”the very things which his Gospel account, too, will emphasize. The Resurrection, it seems, can only be known by way of testimony, by way of witnesses, by way of a reflection on extraordinary things. Thus Luke’s Gospel shows the Risen Christ running out after us, as it were, and inserting himself into our conversation about our perplexities and confusions, drawing out of us, in good Socratic fashion the nature of our own uncertainties and, then, providing a way to make sense of it all. So in the story of the Road to Emmaus, we have two disciples fleeing Jerusalem in fear because of the events of the crucifixion, “talk[ing] together of all these things that had happened.”Jesus joins them but is not recognized by them; after all, they aren’t expecting him given the events of the crucifixion and its aftermath.

He gets them to explain their perplexities about the crucifixion itself and then the report of the women and the other disciples, and even the vision of angels about the empty tomb. “Foolish one, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken,” Jesus says to them, “ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”Note, once again, that conjunction of suffering and glory. With that compelling introduction, “he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”It becomes a repeated trope by Luke, namely, the idea of Christ “opening to us the Scriptures”and “opening their understanding”to provide us a way of thinking the radical nature of the Resurrection.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his nine Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the Scripture text “Be it unto me according to thy word”, into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Be it unto me according to thy word”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

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.

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