by CCW | 16 April 2023 10:00
Throughout Holy Week we hung upon the words of Christ in the unity of the Scriptures, most especially, we hung upon the words of the crucified Christ. The tradition of the Devotions on the Seven Last Words of Christ developed, as we noted by the Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya in the late 17th century in Peru, carried over into Europe and then back again to the Americas. It belongs to the Church’s constant attention to the Passion of Christ. That ordering of the words of the crucified as drawn from all four Gospels also carries us into the Resurrection and into the Easter season. For the Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion; if anything, each intensifies our understanding of the other and brings to light the radical concept of eternal life shown in both. The ‘death of death’ of Christ crucified is eternal life. It is Resurrection.
The proper preface for Easter and Eastertide makes the connection between the Passion and the Resurrection quite clear. We praise God for Christ’s “glorious Resurrection” for he is “the very Paschal Lamb which was offered for us,” an explicit reference to the Passion, who “hath taken away the sin of the world,” hence the forgiveness of sins, and “who by his death hath destroyed death, and by his rising to life again hath restored to us everlasting life.” Such words explain the theology of the Passion and the Resurrection.
It is radical new life, a new birth. As John in his epistle explains “whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.” God, he says, “has given to us eternal life” through the Son of God who came “by water and by blood,” referring to Christ’s Passion. Out of the pierced side of the crucified and dead Christ came water and blood which become the symbolic means of our sacramental participation in the radical life of God. “There are,” he says, “three that bear witness, the Spirit, the water, and the blood.” The overcoming of the world is part of the teaching of Eastertide. On the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Rogation Sunday, the Gospel from John ends with the telling phrase that “in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
What is this overcoming? It has nothing at all to do with our idolatry of technology in the illusions of control through the manipulation and destruction of nature and of human life. The overcoming means the breakthrough of the understanding about eternal life as the true and only source of all life and being and of all knowing and understanding. “The witness of God,” John tells us, “is greater than the witness of man.” Lent and Holy Week and Easter and Eastertide are profoundly self-critical of all the forms of human presumption. An essential feature of religion and especially the Christian religion is “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness”. Thus in both the pageant of Lent and Holy Week and now in the Easter pageant, we are not only comforted but challenged. We confront ourselves in our own confusions and the limits of our own knowing. That is the condition of our being reborn, born upward into the things of the spirit. The overcoming is not a flight from the world, nor is it a flight from the body. It is the overcoming of sin whereby we pit the world against God and deny the truth and reality of creation and of ourselves.
Only by confronting the fallenness of our humanity can we begin to learn the truth of eternal life given to us in the sacrifice of the Son. Easter shows us how we come to know this. On the road to Emmaus, for example, Jesus runs out after the disciples who are fleeing Jerusalem in fear and perplexity following the events of the Passion and Death of Christ. He enters into their conversation. For where there are two there is always a third, the truth that joins and unites our thinking, the Spirit. They did not recognise him at first because they weren’t expecting him. Their expectations had been completely shattered by the events of the crucifixion.
Jesus draws out of them their confusion and perplexity about what had happened. Only then can he teach them. “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures,” Luke says, “the things concerning himself.” The scriptures here are the Hebrew scriptures, not the Christian New Testament. But the teaching only comes to birth in them through the word made visible, we might say. His action of taking bread, blessing it, breaking it and giving it to them marks the moment of recognition, the breakthrough of the understanding. Why? Because what he does is exactly what he did on the very night of his betrayal at the last supper. The result is that “their eyes were opened, and they knew him.” This changes them. They return to Jerusalem and tell the others that he is risen and “how he was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” It is a powerful illustration of the logic of Easter about the Resurrection coming to birth in us.
The great witness to the Resurrection is Jesus himself. He is the eternal Son of the Father who in the very flesh of our humanity, crucified and risen from the dead, makes known to us the reality of eternal life. The overcoming transcends the world in its opposition to God but without negating or destroying the world or our humanity. The Resurrection appearances complement the spectacle of the Passion. Each is implicit in the other.
On the Octave Day of Easter, it might seem as if time has stopped but in reality what we are shown is the radical nature of eternal life being opened to us and gathering us into its meaning. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” is the first word of Christ on the Cross. Here on “the same day at evening,” the same day being Easter, peace and forgiveness flow out of the Resurrection in the very words of the risen Christ. The forgiveness of sins on the cross in Christ’s Passion remains a constant presence in the idea of the Resurrection coming to birth in us. He shows them “his hands and his side;” in short, the marks of the crucifixion are not extinguished. They are transformed into the marks of love because they belong to the triumph of love over sin and evil.
The forgiveness of sins is an essential feature of the life of the Church as the body of Christ. Here Jesus commissions the disciples. He breathes on them and says, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost.” In so doing, he commits to them the power of his forgiveness of our sins. His last word complements his first word on the Cross. ”Father forgive them … Father into thy hands I commend my Spirit.” The Resurrection proclaims peace and forgiveness: peace in the face of division and fear; forgiveness in the face of sin and evil.
Such is the radical life of the Resurrection revealed in the person of Christ, both God and man. We learn that we are more though not less than our bodies, more though not less than the circumstances of our lives and our world, more though not less than even the consequences of our actions. The words of the crucified and risen Christ challenge us and confront us with ourselves in our fears and uncertainties to awaken us to his life for us and in us; to eternity in our midst. They are a counter to our culture of fear and death.
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter, 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/04/16/sermon-for-the-octave-day-of-easter-14/
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