Year: 2021

“There are three that bear witness”

The week of Easter immerses us in the accounts of the Resurrection just as Holy Week immersed us in the Passion. In both the Gospel of John plays a crucial role as providing the underlying logic to the accounts of both Passion and Resurrection. This is simply to recognize what we see or know through the eyes of John whose Gospel helps to illuminate what belongs to the unity of the Scriptures of the New Testament and in its relation to the Jewish Scriptures; in short, to what is known as the Canon of the Scripture, and by extension to the development of the Creeds. The Bible did not just drop out of the sky. To call it the Word of God does not deny in any way how it has come together in its parts and as a whole through human agency precisely in our engagement with the things which are written and passed on.

It is important to mention this with respect to the Resurrection since the readings both in Easter week and throughout the Easter season show us the way in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. John’s Gospel is particularly helpful in highlighting the unity or balance between ontology and epistemology, how we think about being or reality, and how we think about thought or the forms of knowing.

It is known as the Johannine Comma. It is not about punctuation – itself a most helpful innovation that helps to clarify the relation of phrases and words. The term here refers to a phrase or clause either added to the fifth chapter of I John or removed from it. It is one of the notorious mysteries about the transmission of texts. While not found in the earliest New Testament manuscripts known to us which don’t predate the second and third centuries, it seems to have been received and accepted by some theologians such as Origen. And it appears in much later texts and entered into the later translations such as the King James Version of 1611 which, following Tyndale, drew upon Erasmus’s third critical edition of the Greek New Testament which included it. It doesn’t appear in Luther’s Deustche Bibel since he based his German translation of the New Testament upon Erasmus’s second critical edition of the New Testament which excluded it.

The classical Book(s) of Common Prayer which have used the King James Version for the Epistles and Gospels since 1662 have therefore included this phrase right up until fairly recently. It was in the 1918 Canadian Prayer Book but absent from the 1928 American Prayer Book and quietly disappeared in the 1959/1962 Prayer Book. Some of you are just old enough perhaps to remember this. What is the phrase and what is the controversy?

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“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

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

The Road to Emmaus is one of the most interesting of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It shows us the transformation of grief and sorrow into joy and understanding. It shows two of the disciples in flight from Jerusalem in perplexity and confusion about Christ’s crucifixion. It shows Jesus running out after us, as it were, in our confusion and uncertainty to engage our minds with the radical meaning of his Passion as seen through the witness of the Scriptures, on the one hand, and through the forms of Christ’s identity and presence with us sacramentally, on the other hand.

The story has a wonderful narrative force. We sense the dismay and broken-heartedness of these two unnamed disciples. Their expectations have all been shattered. Their world has been turned upside down. They are in a state of confusion and complexity. They are “talk[ing] together of all these things which had come to pass.” But where there are two, there is always a third. “Who is the third who walks always beside you,” Eliot asks in The Waste Land (Death by Water). Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.” As Luke puts it, “their eyes were holden, that they should not know him.” This is not really so strange and unbelievable. After all, their confusion and uncertainty is because they saw Jesus crucified and dead. They have no reason and no expectation of seeing him.

The exchange is what is most telling. Jesus draws out of them what belongs to their confusion and uncertainty. Such things are not hidden, they are clearly and unambiguously acknowledged: the crucifixion, the empty tomb, the testimony of the woman about the witness of angels to his being alive. Only then, does Jesus embark upon the teaching. It is done in an objective manner, in third person narrative. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” The phrase challenges their expectations and their thinking. And ours, too. The teaching is by way of “expound[ing] unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself,” again in third person narrative. He is providing them with a way of understanding, a way of thinking the deeper meaning of all that has transpired. It is through the rebirth of images, we might say, in terms of the interpretation of the Scriptures which here refers necessarily and only to the Jewish Scriptures. He is opening out to them and to us the radical idea and meaning of the Resurrection. As we argued at Easter, Passion and Resurrection go together.

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