by CCW | 9 April 2023 10:00
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.
Thus the Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion but shows us its reality in a new light. Here we see the beginnings of the awakening of the disciples to the idea of Christ’s Resurrection. “For as yet they knew not the Scriptures,” John says. This is the basis for what we proclaim in the Nicene Creed that the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ is “according to the Scriptures.” By Scriptures what is meant are the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, not the New Testament, something which John and Luke themselves both emphasize. Here we are being shown the beginning of the dawning awareness and understanding of the Resurrection in the disciples and thus the Church. It has everything to do with God and God’s engagement with us opening us out to the radical truth of our humanity as found in God’s life, not God as found in our lives. Ultimately, Christ himself will be the great teacher of the Resurrection but we will only learn by hanging upon his words as he opens to us the understanding of the Scriptures. Such is the pageant of Eastertide. God is essential life and thus greater than suffering and evil. The ‘death of death’ in Christ crucified witnesses to the Resurrection.
The Easter Day anthems proclaim the Resurrection and powerfully so but most wonderfully for all of us this morning here at Christ Church is the proclamation of the Resurrection in the baptism of Isabelle Rose Morash. Baptism is radical new life, a kind of rebirth, our being born into the things of God. Being born anew means being born upward into the things of God. Once again this is counter to the idea of God being something simply for us, a kind of commodity used for our interests.
Isabelle’s baptism proclaims the reality of the Passion in the vows of the renunciation of “the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh,” essentially expressing what Paul is saying in the Epistle. In short, the vows of renunciation are an explicit rejection of the things which stand between us and God who is the source and end of our life. This is exactly what Holy Week in the Passion of Christ sets before us. We can only name and face such things in the implicit knowledge of their being overcome by Christ in his sacrifice.
We hang upon his words of life and salvation, words that are captured in the Creeds. This is to say ‘yes’ to God and to want God’s grace to be the force for the good that moves in us. The radical teaching of the Passion and Easter is that we have no life apart from God. “You have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” That life is the new life, the rebirth which belongs to our baptisms. Isabelle’s baptism proclaims to all of us what belongs to our life in Christ, just as at the Easter Vigil we renew our baptismal vows. It is all about hanging upon the life-giving words of Christ and letting those words move in us. By water and the spirit, by Word and Sacrament, Isabelle is born again and made a child of God. It marks the beginning of her life in Christ.
This past week we have gone through the rigour and intensity of the Passion. For many, many years, Isabelle’s great grandfather, Bev, was with me every morning and every evening throughout the whole of Holy Week and Easter. He literally hung on every word of the Passion. It moved him greatly. It was his last wish before his death last December that Isabelle be baptized, a holy wish, a proper Christian wish born out of the understanding that our life is found in God.
“Never that which is shall die.” It is a fragment from a lost play by Euripides. It complements what belongs to the ancient truth and insight that shapes Baptism and our lives in faith. “Love is stronger than death,” as the Song of Songs puts it. We are more though not less than our bodies, more though not less than the circumstances of our lives, more though not less than even the consequences of our actions. Baptism, after all, is about the washing away of original sin and actual sins that have been committed.
This reminds us of the nature and power of the forgiveness of sins, itself a kind of rebirth. In every way, if we are “risen in Christ,” then we must “seek those things which are above,” the things which are everlasting. Such is the meaning of our hanging upon the words of Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who dies that his life might live in us. Even death has changed and has become a gateway to eternal life. We are, as the Easter Even Collect puts it, “baptized into the death of Christ” so that continually dying to ourselves and to sin and living to God, we may pass “through the grave and gate of death” to our joyful Resurrection.
Only in dying to ourselves and living to God, may we also learn to live for and in one another. Such is the meaning of the body of Christ. Baptism marks Isabelle’s incorporation into the Church as the body of Christ. She is born anew and signed with the Cross, marked as the child of God. Passion and Resurrection, but only by hanging upon the words of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Easter Day, 2023
Baptism of Isabelle Rose Morash
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/04/09/sermon-for-easter-day-9/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.