Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Easter Day.
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Χριστος Ανεστη! Αλληλουια, Αλληλουια! Αληθως ανεστη! Αλληλουια, Αλληλουια!
Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! He is Risen indeed, Alleluia, Alleluia!
And so it begins? Begins? Isn’t this the end of the rather gruesome spectacle of Christ Crucified and hanging dead on the Cross that we would rather not think about? Isn’t this supposed to be the happy, clappy ending to a tragic story? No. Christ’s Resurrection is radical new life and this day marks the new beginning which has actually carried us through the Passion of Christ. Here is the true meaning of Holy Week. The Resurrection is not some sort of add-on; a way of glossing over the ugliness and the despair that belongs to our culture of death now well along in its death throes; that of course is not exactly something new.
We get it all wrong if we think that Easter is the end of the story. It is only through the meaning of the Resurrection that the pageant of the Passion is even possible and thinkable. Heraclitus’s profound observation that we recalled on Palm Sunday bears repeating. “The way up and the way down are one and the same,” meaning that the way to the principle, to God, and the way from God is nothing less and nothing more than God in his own self-complete motion and life and that motion in us. What is new at Easter is the making known of that eternal truth and motion for us and in us. And to paraphrase Sophocles, “All that we see here is God,” All that we see in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ is God: God in himself and God in us. The radical meaning of the Resurrection is God, the root and source of all life.
Our Easter joys are about the triumph of life over death just as the pageant of Holy Week is the triumph of love over sin. As with Holy Week, so with Easter and Eastertide, we have to think two things together; a challenge, to be sure, to our usual, more linear ‘left-brain’ way of thinking. Sin and love, death and life, have to be considered in their interrelation.
The texts from John’s Gospel provided the interpretative matrix for our thinking the Passion; they now enable us to think the Resurrection. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth,” Jesus says, “will draw all unto me.” This complements what Jesus says earlier in John’s Gospel, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” Eternal life is the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. Here is the love that is stronger than death, as The Song of Songs so beautifully puts it. Here is the love that is life everlasting because here is the source and meaning of all life; the counter to all of the forms of the culture of death in the illusions of our technocratic control of nature and ourselves that deny and negate life itself. The death of death is radical new life. “I will draw all unto me,” Jesus says. “All” here means both everyone and everything. The Passion and the Resurrection are cosmic in scope for such is the redemption of all creation.
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Comments rss TrackbackMonday, April 1st, Monday in Easter Week
10:00am Holy Communion
Tuesday, April 2nd, Tuesday in Easter Week
7:00pm Holy Communion
Sunday, April 7th, Octave Day of Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Monday, April 8th, Eve of the Annunciation (transf.)
7:00pm Holy Communion
Tuesday, April 9th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Sunday, April 14th, Second Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
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Comments rss TrackbackThe collect for today, Easter-Day, 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 Epistle: Colossians 3:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 20:1-10
Artwork: Master of the Trebon Altarpiece, Resurrection of Christ, c. 1380. Tempera on wood, National Gallery Prague.
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Comments rss TrackbackThe Paschal Praeconium is an exultant proclamation of the Easter mystery of Christ’s Resurrection, a treatise on the radical meaning of Holy Week and Easter, a commentary on “the passover of the Lord.” Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. He is the passover, the Lamb of God who redeems our humanity precisely through his sacrifice and death. His sacrifice and death are the means of the making known of the eternal life of God.
Our shortened ‘country’ Vigil service celebrates the triumph of life over death by concentrating the elaborate forms of the traditional Easter Vigil into its essential moments: the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle symbolic of light overcoming darkness and life over death; the Paschal Praeconium with its tremendous reflection upon the dynamics of Christian salvation in its rehearsal of some of the dramatic moments that bring us to this mystery, a few of the Scriptural prophecies that illuminate like the Paschal Candle our understanding of the Resurrection, the renewal of our baptismal vows that connect us to the radical meaning of the Resurrection alive in us in our profession of faith, and the Lauds or praises of Easter morning in exultant praise of the Risen Christ. Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Eucharist.
We wait in hope upon the motions of God’s love and life coming to us in the overcoming of sin and death. Here is the proclamation of the death of death and the negation of the negation; the triumph of life over death but only through the realities of sin and death. The theology of the Praeconium is clear: O felix culpa, O blessed fault. God and God alone makes out of nothing even out of the nothingness of sin and evil. For they presuppose what they then deny: God and his creation without which we are nothing and worth nothing. But God is more and seeks our good in his everlasting love and life. This is the radical meaning of the Vigil and the occasion of all our joy. It sets before us the vision of our humanity and the whole of creation as grounded in the eternal life of God which conquers all sin and evil.
The Vigil for us signals the renewal and rebirth of our lives in Christ. This is part of the meaning of Christ drawing everyone and everything to himself. The Resurrection is not some magical conjuring act but the testament to the true life which is greater than sin and death and makes out of our sin and death the means of our way and our being with God in Christ. The Paschal Praeconium concentrates the meaning of this mystery for us in our lives in the body of Christ, the true meaning of the Church universal. For us in the renewal of our baptismal vows we are recalled to the pattern of death and resurrection in us, dying daily unto sin and living to God and for one another that we may live “with him evermore in the glory of his endless life.” Christ is Risen and that changes everything for everything has been drawn back to him.
Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil 2024
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Comments rss TrackbackIt might seem to be the exact opposite of being lifted up. Christ lies in the grave, a borrowed grave at that, it seems, (but as Alan Carmichael quips, he is only borrowing it for the weekend!). Yet, not only does the Son of man have no place to lie his head, he has no place of his own to lie his body. This is the theological counter to the tendency to collapse God into the categories and assumptions of our world and agenda. Joseph Arimathea begs the body of Jesus from Pilate and “wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb” and secured it with a rock. Done and sealed, it might seem. But what about us on this Holy Saturday? Where are we? We are to be like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, waiting at the grave of Christ in mourning. Waiting for we quite don’t know what. Are we like closed tombs, dead in the face of death?
But Matthew also tells us about the fears of the chief priests and Pharisees that “his disciples might come by night and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead.” In other words, a conspiracy theory to which the Gospel already alludes and counters. It is the idea of the spiriting away of his body in order to claim the miracle of resurrection. It leads to securing the tomb and setting a watch.
But these forces set in motion for good and for ill conceal the greater motion that belongs to the quiet and peace of Holy Saturday morning. It has to do with the credal teaching of the Descent into Hell. Hidden from view and necessarily so, this is alluded to in the readings from Zechariah and from 1st Peter appointed for Mattins and Ante-Communion; today and Good Friday are the only two times when the Eucharist is not celebrated.
What is the meaning of the Descent into Hell? “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” Peter tells us the Epistle reading, and alludes to the story of Noah and the flood as symbolic of baptism; hence, death and life. Zechariah, too, reminds us of the covenant theme of Israel’s mission: “I will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” an image perhaps of the Hebrew Sheol, the place of the dead. The lesson at Mattins from 1st Peter reminds us of how Christ in his suffering for us has provided us with an example but also that “by his wounds [we] have been healed and have been returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of [our] souls.”
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Comments rss TrackbackThe collect for today, Easter Even, or Holy Saturday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
GRANT, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that, through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:17-22
The Gospel: St. Matthew 27:57-66
Artwork: Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, c. 1435. Oil on panel, Prado, Madrid.
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Comments rss TrackbackIt is finished. Done. Consummatum est. But are we? The pageant of the Passion in Holy Week has carried us through the accounts of the Passion from Matthew, through Mark and Luke, and now culminates with the Passion according to St. John on Good Friday. Christ is lifted up before us and we hear what is his last word from the Cross in John’s Gospel.
Yet it is the penultimate word of Christ from the Cross in terms of the ordering pattern of the seven last words as established by the native Peruvian priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, in Lima in the late 17th century; a pattern which subsequently shaped the Good Friday devotional traditions in both Reformed and Roman Catholic churches in Europe and paradoxically returned to influence devotional practices in the Americas. That pattern arises from the immersion in the Passion accounts and seeing in them an interior logic or motion.
Three of the Seven Last Words derive from Luke, another three by John, while Matthew and Mark both provide us with the heart-rending cry of desolation, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” Luke’s account gives us the first and last word as the beginning and end of Christ’s prayer to the Father: “Father, forgive them for what they do” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” This provides, as Fr. Bedoya understood, I think, a profound insight into God as Trinity and gathers into that relationship all the forms of human relationship in terms of penitence and loving care.
“Jesus remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom” is the prayer of the penitent thief crucified with Jesus that gives rise to Jesus’ second word in Luke’s account: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise;” itself an important feature of the radical meaning of human redemption understood in terms of the restoration of creation and our place in it. John’s first word is equally compelling because it speaks to us about the care of one another in the body of Christ. “Woman, behold thy son,” Jesus says to Mary and to the disciple, John, he says, “Behold thy mother.” It is the third word in the sequence of the Seven Last Words, the word in which Christ lifted up before us commends us to the care of one another, seeing one another in the familial intimacy of son and mother. It marks a kind of exchange in seeing ourselves and one another in Christ. Following the fourth word, Christ’s cry of dereliction which voices the radical meaning of sin as desolation and emptiness, the deeper meaning of our self-willed separation from God and the truth of his creation, we have the fifth word from the Cross which in John’s Passion is Christ’s second word. “I thirst,” and then his final word which is the sixth word in Fr. Bedoya’s sequence, “It is finished.”
It is the only word of the seven last words without any personal pronouns. It states a simple but profound spiritual truth about the meaning of the Passion as concentrated for us in the figure of Christ crucified as lifted up before us. It is a theological statement about redemption. What is finished?, we might ask. All that belongs to human redemption, all that the Son has come to accomplish by doing the will of the Father who sent him. That ‘all‘ is about the radical meaning of human sin and evil embraced in the Crucified who was made sin for us and in whom we see our sins made visible, even as the serpent was raised up in the wilderness by Moses. But that too is testament to the love of Christ who wills to bear our sins in his body, the body of his humanity.
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Comments rss TrackbackThe collects for today, Good Friday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified: Receive our supplications and prayers, which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and ministry, may truly and godly serve thee; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Epistle: Hebrews 10:1-25
The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint John
The Gospel: St. John 18:33-19:37
Artwork: Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Crucifixion, c. 1595. Oil on copper, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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Comments rss Trackback“He carried himself in his own hands.” Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the most intense part of the Passion, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days. Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum meaning commandment and refers to Christ’s repeated statement in John’s Gospel, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another.” And as we have seen in the Office readings from St. John that commandment turns upon our keeping his words and abiding in his love. That love is the love of the Trinity.
But “a new commandment”? In what sense is it a new commandment? Do we not find the commandment to love God with the whole of our being in the Torah of the Jewish Scriptures as well as to love our neighbour? Yes, to be sure. Yet in the intensity of Holy Week and, especially on this holy night, those two commandments are uniquely concentrated for us in the figure of Jesus Christ. They are not just what we ought to do (but which of course we fail to do). They are radically fulfilled in Christ’s words and actions on this night understood precisely in anticipation of his Passion. What makes the new commandment new is the Cross in which God in Christ gives his life to us, for us, and in us. His sacrifice is his love lifted up before us already even before his being lifted up on the Cross. Hence the wonder of Augustine’s remark that “he carried himself in his own hands” in reference to the one of the central features of this day of many moving parts, the scene of Christ with the disciples in the Upper Room at the supper of the Passover. Take, eat; drink. This is my body; this is my blood.
The symbolism becomes increasingly clear. It is captured in Paul’s great statement that we proclaim in joy at Easter: “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.” Christ is the Passover, the Paschal Lamb who gives his life for us. The new commandment is his sacrificial love at work and moving in us. Such is service and sacrifice which Maundy Thursday illustrates in its various moments: the institution of the Eucharist, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the agony in Gethsemane, as well as the other events such as the liturgical stripping of the altar, the King’s touch, and the Royal Maundy or giving of alms. They all belong to the Passion and to the forms of our participation in his Passion. They are all about sacrifice and service.
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