by CCW | 3 May 2020 08:00
Really? Do we really believe this? It lies at the heart of the Christian understanding. “You now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice.” Death and Resurrection are the fundamental pattern of Christian life. That pattern marks the rhythm of the liturgy and of our lives of service and sacrifice. It is really all about dying to live, dying to ourselves and living for one another. It is only possible through our being alive to God, to Christ in us.
The lessons of the Resurrection are quite profound and poignant. They are all about the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples and by extension in us of the truth and power of the Resurrection. It changes our understanding and outlook. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how we come to learn the things which matter most. And far from being a flight from the past, they reveal the redemption of the past and show us the power of memory.
Jesus makes himself known on the Road to Emmaus not just in the opening of our understanding about his Passion through the Scriptures but “in the breaking of the bread.” Jesus tells us Mary Magdalene not to touch him but “go and tell” the disciples about his mission and ours in his going to “my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Yet in the same chapter he tells Thomas to touch and see and so believe. Jesus proclaims peace and forgiveness behind closed doors to all of us huddled in our fears about Covid-19, our fears, I am afraid, of one another and our world, our modern fears of death and uncertainty. Jesus bids us “come and have breakfast” at a barbecue on a beach – Oh, don’t we wish!
All of these encounters have this point in common. They are all about what Christ teaches. They are all about the radical presence of God with us, not as collapsed into the world, but as raising us and our world into its real truth and meaning in God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (Jn.1.4). The recurring theme is signalled here in today’s Gospel when Jesus says, “I will see you again.”
The last three Sundays of the Easter season offer an extended teaching about the meaning of Christ seeing us and being with us. It has altogether to do with an essential feature of the Christian religion, namely, the focus on the relationship between the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. At once universal and intimate, it crystallizes the essential and classical attributes of God as “infinite wisdom, power, and goodness” into the Trinity, into the divine self-relation. God in thinking himself thinks all things and God’s self-loving means his loving of all things in himself. The Gospels of Eastertide draw us into the love of God in and through all of the limitations and uncertainties of human experience. It means going “through the valley of the shadow of death” but without the fear of evil because God is with us.
What the Eastertide Gospels show us, especially in the passages from the so-called farewell discourse of Jesus in John’s Gospel (Jn. 14-17) is the connection between sorrow and joy. They show us joy in the midst of sorrow and sorrow in the midst of joy. They instruct us about the nature of human redemption. Today, that is signalled powerfully in the imagery of childbirth as emblematic of sorrow and joy and as belonging to the overarching theme of the Resurrection. The overarching theme is captured in the recurring phrase “because I go to the Father.”
Through these concepts and images we learn about the abiding love of God in himself and about the ways in which we participate in that love. It is all a process of education about intellectual and spiritual life which shapes and informs our social, emotional, and everyday lives, if we will let it live in us. The Gospel stories of the Resurrection have that kind of power. They show us what is real – God in us and for us but only through God in himself. “Because I go to the Father” is the essential teaching and meaning about death and resurrection.
We are given a glimpse into the divine life. Jesus reveals to us this essential motion; he is eternally oriented towards the Father, eternally in motion towards the Father. “The Word was with God,” John tells us in his extraordinary prologue to his Gospel (Jn. 1.1). The Word with God is really the Word towards God. The living Word and Son of the Father is Jesus gathering us into his essential life. This the real joy and the cause of our rejoicing because it is eternal and as such cannot be taken from us.
It is always there for us to grow into more and more. That is the challenge and the difficulty because of our tendencies to default to ourselves and to our fears and worries. We forget who we truly are which is found in God. The Resurrection lessons are all about how we are returned to the truth of ourselves in and through the sufferings of our lives and our world. One of the greatest literary and philosophical treatises of our humanity is Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy written while he was in prison, behind closed doors, as it were, awaiting an unjust execution. Lady Philosophy appears to him, not unlike Christ the Good Shepherd, to return him to his true self. How? Through a series of teachings that like the divided line in Plato’s Republic or Diotima’s ladder of love in the Symposium lift us up not just out of ignorance but out of sorrow and fear. Boethius is recalled to the divine understanding that abides even in the midst of sorrow and suffering; such is death and resurrection, we might say, in which he learns that all which we endure and experience through the divided forms of our reason (ratio) actually belongs to the unitive love of God, to understanding (intellectus).
In the Eastertide Gospels this is indicated in the imagery of “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again a little while and ye shall see me.” At once paradoxical, it reveals the eternal presence of God with us in and through the divided forms of our finite and fallen world. As Jesus is at pains to emphasise, something is made known through our divided and broken world that cannot be taken from you: something lasting, something divine, a “joy no man taketh from you.” This is, perhaps, our greatest comfort in our current world of fear and uncertainty. The message of Easter is that God is with us. Such is the love of Christ. His love living in us is resurrection. Rejoice!
Fr. David Curry
Easter 3, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/05/03/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-after-easter-10/
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