Sermon for Tuesday in Easter Week
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
The readings for Easter Tuesday belong to the logic of the Resurrection. It is not a single simple event so much as a process of thinking. The Resurrection accounts all focus on the process by which the disciples come to the knowledge of the Resurrection. The lessons all turn on the interpretation of the Passion and upon our assumptions about the body and about death.
Easter celebrates “the death of death,” as it is famously said. Learning how to die equally means learning how to live. That really means the celebration of the radical nature of life which is nothing less than the life of God. God is essential life. The lesson from Acts shows how the idea of the Resurrection comes out of the confusion and chaos of the Crucifixion and death of Christ whom “God raised from the dead,” and out of our broken hearts. It also confirms a new and deeper idea about God as borne out of a new way of reading the Scriptures. This is partly what we saw yesterday in the story of the Road to Emmaus which immediately precedes today’s Gospel reading which builds upon the same logic.
Here Jesus makes himself known to them first by his words of peace. The initial effect is that “they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.” As on the Road to Emmaus, they have no expectation of seeing Jesus. He makes himself known to them as someone real, not in the breaking of the bread but in eating “a piece of broiled fish” and some honey-comb. It serves as testament to the reality of the body. But as with the breaking of the bread, so here there is the strong emphasis upon Jesus “open[ing] their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.”
The point turns on the interpretation of the sufferings of Christ and to his life in us by way of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Such concepts belong to the radical nature of the divine life which cannot be contained and constrained to the limits of human reason but transforms and perfects our understanding. Thus are we raised up to participate in God’s life in and through and not in spite of the things of the world and in and through the transformation of our hearts and minds. The body is not nothing but neither is it everything. The Resurrection is all about the transformation of our minds and about the radical nature of divine life and our participation in it.
Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Easter Week
