Christ Church

Did not our heart burn within us?

This week in Chapel, the second part of Luke’s story of The Road to Emmaus was read. It is a powerful story about how we come to know things; in this case, it reveals the way in which the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us through the interplay of words and deeds. The story illustrates what will become a distinct feature of the Christian religion, along with other religions, namely, Word and Sacrament, something proclaimed and heard and something seen and touched, ideas which are received in our hearts and minds. “Did not our heart burn within us?”

The Resurrection is an important doctrine of the Christian Faith but not a concept which is exclusive to Christians. The concept and idea appears in late Judaism and is an important feature of Islam as well. The idea of the Resurrection connects as well to other traditions of philosophical questions about what it means to be ‘you’, a self, a person, an individual, that involves the idea of the immortality of the soul, on the one hand, and the place of the body and nature in relation to the soul, on the other hand, in such things as reincarnation. The Resurrection affirms the idea of the individual as soul and body; the body matters in a radical way and belongs to your individuality.

The story of the Road to Emmaus is profoundly counter-culture in several ways. It affirms the individual as embodied and as an integral part of a community as distinct from being isolated and separate from others and in flight from the world and the body. It is the Christian event that opens us out to the universal event of God as essential life. As such it shows how death and sin are not ultimate but neither are they denied. The past is not eclipsed in some techno-fantasy flight to an imaginary future of our own devising. The Resurrection never lets us ignore or forget the Passion.

Last week we read about Jesus coming alongside the two disciples who were fleeing from Jerusalem in fear and uncertainty. Jesus engages them unawares; “their eyes were holden.” They didn’t recognise him since they had assumed he was dead. Our assumptions quite often constrain and limit our understanding. We often only see and hear what we want to see and hear. But in true Socratic fashion, Jesus draws out of them their fears and uncertainties and their expectations. That is part of the teaching.

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The collect for today, The Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast instructed thy holy Church with the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark: Give us grace, that, being not like children carried away with every blast of vain doctrine, we may be established in the truth of thy holy Gospel; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:11-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 13:1-10

The author of the second gospel, Saint Mark is generally identified with John Mark, the son of Mary, whose house in Jerusalem was a meeting place for the disciples (Acts 12:12,25). John Mark accompanied his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journey to Cyprus, but Mark’s early departure to Jerusalem caused a rift between Paul and Barnabas, following which Barnabas took Mark on the next mission to Cyprus while Paul and Silas traveled through Syria and Cilicia (Acts 15:37-41).

Paul later changed his mind about Mark, who helped him during his imprisonment in Rome (Col. 4:10). Just before his martyrdom, Paul urged Timothy: “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11).

Also, Peter affectionately calls Mark “my son” and says that Mark is with him at “Babylon”—almost certainly Rome—as he writes his first epistle (1 Pet. 5:13). This accords with church tradition that Mark’s Gospel represents the teaching of Peter.

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Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Octave Day of Easter.

“The same day at evening … Jesus came and stood in the midst”

It is as if time has stopped and we are gathered with the disciples in the upper room on the day of Christ’s Resurrection but we are behind closed doors, huddled in fear and uncertainty. The Resurrection accounts all seek to show us how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. It comes to birth in us out of our fears and uncertainties, like Mary coming to the tomb in her early morning grief seeking the body of Christ only to encounter the Risen Christ, like the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus fleeing Jerusalem on this same day in fear and confusion only to have Jesus coming alongside them to engage them and teach them. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” T.S. Eliot asks in The Waste Land; the third is the truth that is always greater than ourselves.

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” Jesus says (Mt. 18.20). And that makes all the difference and changes everything. It changes our understanding of time. Here is the idea of kairos, time as rhythmic and circular, as gathered and concentrated into purpose and meaning as distinct from time as chronos, linear and extended, as a sequence and duration – one thing after another. This Gospel opens us out to the radical meaning of Christ in our midst.

Christ in the midst is a recurring image, especially in John’s Gospel both in terms of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. “They crucified him, and the two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst” (John. 19.18). “The same day at evening… came Jesus and stood in the midst” (John 20.19). As we have had occasion to remark, Easter is not the end of the story but its radical beginning, the radical beginning that has no ending because it is the awakening to the essential life of God which is always prior and yet always present; time is baptized and gathered into eternity. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever. His are the times and the seasons and the years,” as we heard at the blessing of the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil. The awakening to Jesus in the midst is what we contemplate both in the Passion and now in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the event that awakens us to the greater event that is God himself. In media res.

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Tuesday, April 26th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Robert N. Spengler III’s Fruits of the Sand: The Silk Road Origins of the Food We Eat (2019) & Linda Colley’s The Gun, The Ship, and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021)

Sunday, May 1st, St. Philip & St. James / Second Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The collect for today, The Octave Day of Easter, being The Sunday After Easter Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Almighty Father, who hast given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may alway serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:4-12
The Gospel: St. John 20:19-23

Artwork: Hesdin of Amiens, Christ blessing the apostles, c. 1450-55. Illumination, From a “Biblia Pauperum” (Bible of the Poor), Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, The Hague.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

This line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, draws upon the lovely story of ‘The Road to Emmaus’ in Luke’s Gospel, the first part of which was read in Chapel this week along with the story from John’s Gospel of Mary Magdalene coming in grief to the empty tomb only to encounter the Risen Christ. Both stories belong to the Resurrection of Christ. Both stories reveal how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection come to birth in our hearts and souls. They are both about the teaching of Christ himself.

The Resurrection is the Christian form of the ancient philosophical “wisdom of the ages and the sages” (Neil Postman) about God as eternal life in our midst. Easter, contrary to what is commonly said, is not the ending but the radical beginning, the beginning which has no ending because it is about eternal life. It is what has been opened out to us in the spectacle of Holy Week and now in the wonder of the Resurrection. It is what Christ teaches us about himself as the principle of radical life. It is not hard to see that the Passion of Christ in all four gospels can only have been written and can only be contemplated in the light of the Resurrection.

Christ’s Resurrection is the event that opens us out to the greater event of God himself. “In the beginning God.” “In the beginning was the Word.” “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” These words from Genesis and John shape our understanding of the Resurrection which is nothing less than the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of good over evil. Such is the powerful lesson of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The Resurrection never lets us forget the Passion. The sorrows of the Passion deepen the joys of the Resurrection even as the joys of the Resurrection are intensified by the sorrows of the Passion.

The accounts of the Resurrection show us how this idea and its reality come to birth in us and as a consequence shape the accounts of the Passion. Here immortality extends beyond the soul, beyond such ideas as reincarnation – a kind of cycling in and out of various life-forms – to the idea of Resurrection: the body matters. It too belongs to the deeper truth of our humanity, to the fullest possible affirmation of our human individuality. The Resurrection is emphatically counter-culture precisely because it is not a technological flight from reality, from the reality of the body into some imaginary techno-fantasy about the isolated and separated self of gnostic existentialism – effectively a denial of the goodness of creation and of its restoration in redemption.

Mary comes seeking a dead body, a corpse. She encounters beyond all expectation the risen Christ. His words to her are most intriguing. “Touch me not,” he says but then sends her on a mission to the others. She is apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the apostles, the first witness to the Resurrection, the first to be taught by Christ himself. “Touch me not” means that she is to know him in a new way, no longer as clinging to the things of the past. The Resurrection is the new beginning, the beginning of a new order and relationship to Christ.

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The collect for today, Tuesday in Easter Week, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who through thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: We humbly beseech thee, that as by thy special grace thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 13:26-41
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:36-48

Artwork: Raphael, Pax Vobiscum, c. 1505. Oil on panel, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia.

The collect for today, Monday in Easter Week, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who through thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: We humbly beseech thee, that as by thy special grace thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 10:34-43
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:13-35

Artwork: Mikhail Nesterov, Road to Emmaus, 1897. Oil on canvas, Krasnoyarsk Art Museum, Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the Scripture text, “Thou art the man” into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Thou art the man”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.