Year: 2021

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

This text has carried us throughout the pageant of the Passion. Yet it belongs equally to our celebration of the Resurrection. To know ourselves as the broken-hearted is “to reckon ourselves to be dead indeed unto sin and thus alive unto God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion anymore than the Passion eclipses the Resurrection.

Sorrow and joy, not either sorrow or joy but both / and. Both sorrow and joy belong to the deep truth of our humanity in union with God. The joy of the Resurrection intensifies to the greatest extent imaginable what we have, in our poor fashion, endeavoured to go through in the sorrows of the Passion during Holy Week. The sorrows of the Passion intensify the joys of the Resurrection. Sorrow and joy mark the deeper meaning of the Resurrection.

The simple truth is that the accounts of the Passion are and could only have been written in the light of the Resurrection. It is not a fairy tale, and certainly not the Disney version of any of the classic fairy tales. It is not a feel-good, happy-clappy ending to an otherwise grim and gruesome spectacle. In other words, Easter is not some desperate attempt to gloss over the realities of human sin and the sufferings of the world. It is not some astral flight of gnostic fantasy. It is not an older, benighted and unenlightened, and, ultimately, superstitious form of positive thinking and of the desperate attempts to be ‘kind to yourself’ which unfortunately appears to be where the cultural mantra of ‘be kind, be calm’ has taken us in the current pandemic. The deep truth of the Passion and the Resurrection is the same. We only live when we live unto God. Be kind to others and be kind to yourself is too small a vision especially when so easily it turns into a focus on ourselves, a distortion of the nature of sacrificial love which both Passion and Resurrection teach us.

The whole point of Easter is not the contrast with the Passion but the illustration and demonstration of its essential logic. It is altogether about the radical nature of God and the fullness and the mystery of divine life. It is all God and all God in us just as it is all us and all us in God. The new life, the new birth is the renewing of the life of God in us without whom there is no life. Prayer, as Herbert puts it, is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth”(Prayer (1)). Such is the Resurrection in us, the renewing and returning of our souls to God. The Paschal feast recalls Paradise but only to deepen our understanding of the purpose and truth of Creation. It does not take us back to some imaginary Garden of Eden which so easily turns into some utopian fantasy on our part from which there are any number to choose, especially in the techno-fantasies of contemporary culture.

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

Our text has carried us throughout Holy Week and brings us to this moment, to the wonder and mystery of the great Vigil of Easter. The Praeconium in its words and music captures the mystery of Easter. “This is the night.” This ancient prayer and hymn gathers up the rich imagery of the Exodus and the Passover and focuses it on the meaning of Christ’s Passion. What is that meaning? It is actually Resurrection.

The new fire, the blessing of the Paschal Candle, the singing of the Praeconium, the readings of the prophecies of the Resurrection, the renewal of our baptismal vows, all of these things belong to the sense of joy and life. Christ is Risen, we proclaim. Life is all alleluia.

It is not an add-on to the dismal drudge and trudge of Holy Week. It is its underlying truth. We can only contemplate the Passion through the Resurrection. And yet the Resurrection is meaningless without our contemplation of the Passion. The Vigil service is powerfully moving even in this simplified country service, shortened yet comprehensive of all of the elements  except communion that belong to the Easter Vigil in its more elaborate forms.

God is life essential. Easter is about our life with God in and through all and every trial and circumstance of human experience. The great meaning of Easter is the radical nature of God’s life made our life in its fullness. “I am come,” Jesus says, “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” That more abundant life is the meaning of the Resurrection.

The great joy and wonder of the Vigil is the dynamic of that new and abundant life arising out of the forms of death and darkness. It is dramatic but the drama is the drama of dogma, the drama of redemption in the ways in which God gathers us to himself in his abundant life. The sacrifices of God turn out to be more than a broken spirit. That something more is the abundant life of God accomplished through Christ’s sacrifice and the way in which that life lives in us. Easter is about joy in the midst of sorrow even as Holy Week was about sorrow in the midst of joy. The two are interrelated and intrinsic to each other as the essential form of our participation in the endless life of God.

Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia. The Lord is risen, indeed.

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2021

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

There is a sombre and holy quiet to Holy Saturday, a sense of peace and calm after the storms and chaos of the Passion. And yet we are and must be broken-hearted. Such will be the deep meaning of all of the comings of the disciples and, especially Mary Magdalene, to the tomb of Christ. We meet in the sombre quiet of Holy Saturday as mourners, meeting at the tomb of Christ.

All is done and finished. Consummatum est, as John has Christ say on the Cross. It is completed and finished. What is? All that belongs to human redemption. So then what is the meaning of this day? The readings for Matins and Ante-Communion make the theological point clear. Holy Saturday celebrates the fullest possible meaning of the concept of redemption. It highlights the idea of the radical redemption of all creation, of God drawing back to himself the whole of our broken-hearted humanity. Such is the meaning of the credal doctrine of Christ’s descending into hell, into the place of the dead; the Greek Hades, the Jewish Sheol, the Christian Hell.

This, too, reminds us of what belongs to the truth of human agency. Christ goes and preaches to the souls in prison. Our humanity is essentially rational. We are not utterly passive in the matters of redemption. We are meant to be engaged with Christ in the work of human redemption. It happens, after all, in his humanity, in what “he has now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us,” as Hooker puts it (Lawes, V. LI.3). What is on view this day are the deeper mysteries of human redemption. It is captured best in the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy which depict Christ drawing Adam and Eve out of the grave. This symbolizes the radical nature of redemption. God seeks to be reconciled with the whole of sinful humanity, past, present, and future.

The quiet peacefulness of Holy Saturday has a paradisal quality to it but it marks only a moment, a transition to something greater than paradise. The Garden of Eden was only a starting point not the endpoint of creation. We meet as mourners but in the awareness of something greater in Christ’s descent into Hell. Our meeting as mourners will then turn to waiting and watching for something even greater, the greater mystery of undying divine life which makes resurrection out of our deaths. We will watch and wait.

In a way, this is the truth of human agency. It is about our watching and waiting upon God. That is the highest activity of our humanity, the activity of contemplation. It means to contemplate the extraordinary goodness of God. We do so as the broken-hearted on this quiet morning. There is a sense of peace, the peace that passes human knowing, the peace of God which reconciles all things to himself. Such is the radical peace of God, the peace which passeth all understanding. Such is the peace which speaks to the broken-hearted.

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

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2021

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

Good Friday brings us to the Cross. Simply as spectators? As mere on-lookers? Is this a matter of curiosity? A spectacle? Something of passing interest? A matter indifferent?

Good Friday goes to the heart of the Christian Faith. What unfolds before us in Scripture and Liturgy on this day is utterly essential. No Good Friday, no Easter. Easter is meaningless without Good Friday. It is the tragedy of the contemporary churches to have downplayed the meaning and significance of Good Friday. So what is the real and essential good of Good Friday? That we confront the spectacle of human sin in all of its destructive force in the figure of the Crucified. The good is the love of God manifest in the terror of the Cross. The good is our sense of being utterly and completely broken-hearted because of what we do in our sins. Here is sin writ large. It is what we contemplate in the crucified Christ. We contemplate the utter folly and destructive nonsense of human sin.

What is that folly and nonsense? Our parody of God. We presume to kill God. Good Friday is the death of God because of the willingness of God in Christ to place himself in our hands. What we do is crucify him as if to annihilate God from the horizons of our minds. Such is the folly of our humanity in its disarray and disorder, in its destructive attitude to the world around us and towards one another. Good Friday challenges and counters all of the nonsense of our fallen humanity. The good of Good Friday is our being humbled and broken-hearted at the spectacle of human wickedness in the greater spectacle of divine love.

It has always been something of a shock to me about how little attention is paid to Good Friday in our Maritime world. The intensity and drama of Good Friday, as I have sometimes experienced it, included the three-hour service of preaching on the Seven Last Words as well as the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday. The second is what we have in this service. The first is practically unknown, unthinkable and unwelcome. “Look on me all ye who pass by.” Indeed. Look and pass. Unaware and unmoved by the central doctrine and teaching of the Christian faith. No wonder our churches are empty. We are insensible to the truth of this day.

Good Friday is at once a workout for our hearts and minds. It counters the middle class presumption to life as all comfort and coziness and to the more deadly assumption of ourselves as the center of everything. In that sense, Good Friday calls us to account, to reality, to the reality of sin and suffering. Even more, the real good of Good Friday is nothing less than the greater spectacle of divine love. We behold sin and love but not in equal measure. Love is the greater power that makes out of our own awareness of sin the way of love in us. This is the wonder of Good Friday that makes it already the resurrection. Such is the radical nature of love.

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