Day: April 9, 2023

Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the scripture text, “All the people hung upon his words”, into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Hanging upon the Words of the Crucified”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

The Resurrection is not the ending of the story as is commonly said. It is not a happy-clappy ending to an otherwise sordid tale of unspeakable cruelty and ugliness. It is the radical beginning of our life with God in and through and not in flight from the realities of sin and evil, of suffering and death. The Passion is impossible and meaningless without Christ’s Resurrection. Both are interrelated and intertwined; each is impossible without the other. There is joy in our sorrows and sorrow in our joys. Each reveals the essential and radical life of God and our participation in it.

Easter Day proclaims the Resurrection, to be sure, yet at the same time the Gospel shows us the forms of our unknowing and uncertainty, our confusion and perplexity. Mary Magdalene, coming early in the morning before sunrise “when it was yet dark,” finds the stone taken away from the tomb. What she says to Simon Peter and to John is that “they”, whoever “they” might be, “have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” John is countering already the conspiracy theory objection that the Resurrection was really a deceptive ploy, a kind of mind trick. Peter and John then run to confirm Mary’s witness to the empty tomb.

John runs faster than Peter and gets there first but only looks in, “seeing the linen cloths lying.” Peter follows John and goes in directly “seeing the linen cloths” in one place and the burial shroud for his head “in a place by itself.” The details are intriguingly precise. No body, just the evidence of the burying cloths and the empty tomb. Only then does John enter. We are told that “he saw and believed.” But believed what exactly? “For,” as John puts it in his Gospel, speaking it seems about himself as well as Peter and the other disciples, “as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.”

In this sense the Resurrection, like the Passion, is more than merely an episode in the life of Christ. It belongs to the radical idea of God’s engagement with our humanity which does not reduce God simply to us and for us which runs the risk of making God nothing more than the projection of human desires, a metaphor for human interests and concerns, as it were. In so doing, we negate the reality of God in himself and deny the very reality of our life in Christ. This is the point which Paul makes in Colossians about “seek[ing] those things which are above” where Christ is. “When Christ, who is your life, shall be made manifest, then shall you also be made manifest with him in glory.” All of the moments in the life of Christ make manifest what is in him but not yet fully realized in us. That is why the pattern and vocation of Christian life is always about death and resurrection, the constant dying to sin and living to God. It is the constant struggle and challenge of our lives made possible in us only by the grace of Christ through our hanging upon his words.

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