“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”
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.
The radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection for us is that we are more though not less than our bodies, more though not less than the circumstances and confusions of human experience, more though not less than the contradictions and follies of our sinfulness. But only through the lifting up of the Son of man, only through our contemplation of our fallenness, because that presupposes the principle of life and goodness.
The paradox is that only in knowing ourselves as sinners can we know our redemption in God. God makes out of our sin and death the way to himself for us. Death is not the terminus but the transitus, not the end but the way to what is everlasting and always, the life of God, now and forever. God is not the projection of our thoughts, a creation of our imaginations; God is not made in our image; we are made in his image. Christ’s Resurrection is the strongest affirmation of creation, on the one hand, and of human life and individuality, on the other hand. Here is the joy that makes possible the pageant of the Passion. Here is the underlying movement of the whole of Holy Week. Easter brings us to the radical beginning of our life in God in and through all of the moments of our lives.
What is set before us in the Scripture readings and proclamations of Easter is all about Christ lifted up on the Cross and now lifted out of the grave. His Resurrection signals what he ever is, the eternal Son of the Father in the bond of their mutual love. This is the radical meaning of life which is by definition greater than death and sin. Just as the lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness of the Exodus by Moses meant that the people of Israel beheld their sins made visible to them and thus were healed, so in the Passion we “have looked upon him whom we have pierced,” as lifted up before us. In so doing, we contemplate something greater than the parade of our disordered loves and lives. Homo incurvatus in se, humanity twisted or curved in upon itself is the meaning of sin.
Christ’s Resurrection is the real beginning of the life-long project of our being untwisted and becoming who we are in Christ. He is our life and our salvation. That untwisting of our twisted selves means death and resurrection in us; dying to ourselves and living to God without whom we cannot live for and with one another. It is just that radical because it is about the source and principle of all life in us. “We are because God is. And we are what we are because God is what God is,” as Rowan Williams puts it.
Marvellous to say, that miracle of life itself, greater than sin and death, has been made visible to us this morning in the baptism of Lainey May Beverly Morash. Her baptism is a wonderful Easter witness to Christ’s Resurrection and a strong reminder of our spiritual identity in Christ’s death and life through the sacrament of Holy Baptism. No doubt many of you are like her and her sister, Isabelle, who was baptised at Easter last year; that is to say, you have no memory of your own baptisms as infants. It is through the baptisms of others that we are reminded of who we are in Christ: “a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven,” as the Catechism says. It reveals the Trinitarian nature of our incorporation into the life of God.
The challenge of the Easter message belongs to the truth of the Church’s mission and life: to be what we see and proclaim. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above,” where Christ is, for “Christ is all in all,” as the Epistle says. The Gospel shows us the beginning of the transformation of that new life in us by Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb early in the morning and finding it empty. That discovery sets her in motion to Simon Peter and the other disciple, John. They both run to the sepulchre but John, who gets there first, does not immediately enter. But Peter does. Only then does John enter. “For,” as he tells us in his Gospel “as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.” In short, we see the beginnings of an understanding of the meaning of the Resurrection revealed through the Scriptures. It is a wonderful illustration of faith seeking understanding. That too is an essential part of our life in Christ. It means to learn the resurrection as the radical life of God lifted up before us in Christ Crucified and now lifted up before us in the lessons of the Resurrection.
We began in joy on Palm Sunday and we begin again in joy today but our joys are deepened and enlarged by having gone through the pageant of the Passion and discovering the radical meaning of God’s love that issues forth in Resurrection.
This is all our Easter joy and the meaning of our Easter proclamation. Christ is Risen, Alleluia! Alleluia! He is Risen, indeed, Alleluia! Alleluia!
“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me.”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2024