Month: April 2022

“Christ is your life. Christ is all in all”

I know. You have heard it over and over again, perhaps even on Good Friday. We know the end of the story, it is commonly said, the happy, clappy ending of Christ’s Resurrection that risks eclipsing Good Friday and the Passion of Christ. We may think that Easter is mere wishful thinking, a kind of hope against the experience of reality, the reality of a world of misery and hurt, of violence and destruction. That it is an escape from reality.

We get it wrong. The Easter celebration of Christ’s Resurrection is not the end of the story but its radical beginning. Paul in Colossians states the deep truth about our life as “hid with Christ in God,” the one “who is [our] life.” But not just us – the few, the elite over and against the deplorables, the others, the ‘them’ whom we despise – no. “Christ is all in all.” His Resurrection reveals the radical truth of our humanity as found in God.

We get it wrong. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how to think it right. They show us how the idea of the Resurrection and its reality comes to birth in human souls. They show us the awakening to the radical beginning. What is that radical beginning? That God is life. “In the beginning God.” “In the beginning was the Word.” “In him was life and the life was the light of men.” “In the beginning” means “in the principle”; our life in that which ever abides. Christ’s Resurrection is not simply an event in time; it is eternity in our midst. It cannot be contained in a tomb let alone the tombs of our minds. The Resurrection is the great break-through moment about essential life that is greater than death, the light that is greater than darkness, the good that is greater than sin and evil.

Postmodernism in its various forms is profoundly anti-intellectual, profoundly anti-spiritual, profoundly negative because of its weddedness to a technocratic way of thinking against which it rails in vanity. Why? Because it is trapped in the very problem which it seeks to escape. Technology per se is not the problem. It is our fixation on it as the form of thinking and being that is the problem, the problem of our linear thinking, of calculative reasoning, as Heidegger puts it, that eclipses meditative thinking. The consequence is nothing less than a loss of our humanity. It is anti-life. The paradox is great. The gnosticism of existentialism that pits the individual in his or her subjective experience against an indifferent and hostile universe parallels the technocratic culture in its flight from that world premised upon an absolute conviction about the isolated self. It seeks to flee the world but forgets, as Neil Postman observes about the issues of technology, that “there is no escaping from ourselves.” Such an insight belongs to what he calls “the wisdom of the ages and the sages.” The Resurrection is the Christian form of that wisdom.

Holy week is about confronting ourselves. But that is only possible through the truth and power of God without which our lives are but pretense and nonsense, folly and narcissism, sin and evil. Holy week has made that perfectly clear to us, if we have the eyes and the hearts to hear and learn.

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Christ is risen!

There is something quite powerful and moving about the Easter Vigil. It complements the intensity of Holy Week which has immersed us in the Passion of Christ by gathering us into its deeper meaning.

Our little country vigil simplifies the rituals of the Easter Vigil. There is the lighting of the Paschal Candle. There is the singing of the great Paschal Praeconium, the wonderful and joyous song and prayer of the Easter proclamation of Christ’s victory over sin and death. There are the readings of some of the prophecies of Scripture that belong to our thinking about the Passion and its meaning as realized in the Resurrection. There is the renewal of our baptismal vows, our dying to sin and to ourselves in order to live to God. And, finally, there is the Lauds of Easter morning. Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Mass.

Vigils are about our watching and waiting. The Easter vigil is our watching and waiting upon God in the work of human redemption accomplished in Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The Paschal Praeconium proclaims and teaches us the deep theological meaning of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. This is the night which illuminates our understanding about God as essential life. “The night is come” in which Christ triumphs over the darkness of our world of sin and death. “The night is come” in which we are “delivered from the shadow of death” and are “renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” All that stands between God and the world, between God and man is overcome in Christ who reconciles all things to God.

Our watching and our waiting in the great Vigil of Easter is the highest activity of our humanity. We can only watch and wait upon God but in so doing we learn who we are as God’s children. That is the great blessing because it counters all of the false notions about what it means to be ourselves in our contemporary culture. We are not cosmic orphans cast adrift in an indifferent and unfeeling universe, cast out into a hostile world. We are not abstract autonomous individuals isolated and alone, trapped in ourselves. Nor are we merely bots, cogs in the machine of our technocratic culture. We are recalled to God’s creation and to our life with God, a life which connects us with the world and one another. We are quite literally freed to God and so to a free relation with one another in loving care and compassion. We discover the truth of ourselves in the body of Christ.

The joy of the Vigil is our rejoicing not in ourselves but in Christ. Christ is our life. “Rise heart; Thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delayes,” as George Herbert’s poem, Easter, puts it. Sing his praise always.

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2022

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“Thou art the man”

Nathan’s word convicts David of his sin. It leads to his confession. “I have sinned against the Lord.” Sin is death in contradiction to life. But life is greater than death. This is something which the quiet of Holy Saturday reveals as we gather at the tomb. The full meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross begins to be explored through our quiet watching at the tomb in the readings for this day. What we contemplate is Christ’s death as the means of God’s overcoming of all that separates us from God and from one another. Holy Saturday points to the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation. Such is the meaning of the creedal teaching known as the “descent into Hell.”

We are meant to see ourselves in our sins in Christ. As 1 Peter 3 puts it, “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.” The fuller extent of that mystery is that this is, in principle, universal, for all, because “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” the prison of death, picking up on the imagery of Zechariah at Matins. “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit” (Zech. 9.11). The Epistle points to this as a “figure” symbolising baptism. It is the transition from death to life “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” which we await.

The Gospel reading continues the Holy Week theme of persecution, namely of us as the persecutors of God in Christ. It is the attempt to seal the tomb against the thought – the conspiracy theory of us as persecutors – that ‘they’, the disciples, might come to steal the body and then say, “He is risen from the dead.” Such is the extent of the violence of persecution even in the vain attempt to kill the idea already present that there is something different, something unique, something compelling and transformative in Christ’s crucifixion and death, something greater than death.

Such is the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. As the second lesson, again from 1 Peter puts it, Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.” In going and preaching unto the spirits in prison, we have the idea of being gathered by God’s Word who is light and life. God, as Thomas Aquinas, puts it, is “the beginning and end of all creatures but especially rational creatures.” Such is the deeper meaning of Holy Week. Only God makes a way for us to him through death. But it means confronting ourselves as dead in our sins that we might become alive in Christ.

We watch and wait both now and at the vigil. We watch and wait expectantly upon God, the principle of all light and life. Our watching is our waiting upon that perfect union of God and man in Christ which makes us one with God and which is greater than sin and death.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2022

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“Thou art the man”

We have used Nathan’s words as the interpretative text for the Passion of Christ throughout Holy Week. “Thou art the man,” Nathan says to David even as Pontius Pilate says to us, Ecce Homo, “Behold the man,” pointing to Christ wearing a crown of thorns and a purple robe, being scourged, mocked, reviled and scorned before being handed over to the madness of crowds to be crucified. We behold ourselves in beholding Christ. “They shall look on him whom they pierced,” as John’s account of the Passion (Jn. 19.37) concludes recalling Zechariah (12.10). The ‘they’ are ‘we’. We are not the victims but the persecutors who confront our evil in the crucified Christ, the one whom we have pierced and nailed to the cross. We behold our sins made visible in him. Why? To be convicted in our hearts of our sin by beholding in Christ the love which bears our sins. Only so can they be overcome. “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.”

The scapegoat mechanism of blaming others for our sufferings and fears is completely inverted. We are not the persecuted but the persecutors. The scapegoat is the Lamb of God. “Behold the Lamb of God.” “Behold the man.” Behold ourselves at once as sinners and as redeemed in Christ but only if we can say with David “I have sinned against the Lord.” For that is the good of Good Friday, the good of our atonement.

“It is finished” is the sixth word from the cross in the tradition of the preaching on the seven last words of Christ. This devotion was established in Peru by the Jesuits in the 17th century after several devastating earthquakes in Lima and from there carried back to Europe. It has shaped some of the great choral works of the Baroque period; for instance, Haydn’s Seven Last Words. The third, fifth and sixth words of Christ come from John’s Gospel which is read along with the lesson from Hebrews on Good Friday. Here is the love that is “the propitiation for our sins,” that is to say, the atoning sacrifice which makes us one with God and with one another. It means beholding the crucified and beholding our sins in him. “Thou art the man” is about confronting ourselves in the one whom we behold on the cross. “It is finished” refers to the overcoming of all sin that separates us from God and from one another.

It also means beholding ourselves in one another. Thus the third word from the cross bids Mary, his mother, to “behold thy son” in John, the beloved disciple, and bids John to “behold thy mother.” In other words, Mary is to see him in John, and John is to see her as his mother in Christ. It is a form of love, a form of mutual indwelling or coinherence grounded in the eternal coinherence of God as Trinity. Beholding one another in loving care means beholding one another in Christ. He gives John to her and he gives her to John. It captures wonderfully the unity of the love of God and the love of man in Christ. It is the meaning of Christ’s atonement. Our being one with God through Christ’s sacrifice unites us to one another in loving service.

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