Christ Church

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Fourth Sunday after Easter.

“Now I go my way to him that sent me”

The Passion and the Resurrection reveal the radical meaning of the life of God for us and with us. The purpose of the last three Sundays after Easter is to make visible the very nature of God as eternal life and love in the mutual relationship of God as Trinity. That is, we might say, the burden of these readings from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, read for centuries upon centuries on these Sundays. The task is to stay close to the images in order to begin to grasp the understanding which they convey to us.

Here Jesus tells us that “now I go my way to him that sent me.” It is a telling remark but, as he immediately says to the disciples, “none of you asks me, Where are you going?” The idea of the Scriptures and their proclamation in the liturgy is that our encounter with the words of Christ should awaken in us questions of inquiry. We are meant to be intellectually alert to what it means. We saw that last week as well when the disciples were perplexed and puzzled about what Jesus was saying. Here in this passage which actually precedes last week’s reading from John 16, Jesus is at pains to teach us about the radical meaning of his Passion and Resurrection. It opens out to us the radical life of God.

The Epistle reading from The Letter of James complements this teaching. It refers us to “the Father of lights,” “from whom every good gift and every perfect gift” comes to us. It mentions as well what was once a commonplace idea, perhaps now largely forgotten, of God as unchangeable and constant, an eternal presence. What derives from the eternal blessedness of God is by definition something good and perfect. To glimpse something of that is to be brought to birth – again the birthing imagery such as we saw last week – “brought to birth by the word of truth.” This helps us to understand how we come to life and live in the motions of God’s own life.

Once again, too, we find that, like the disciples, we are in sorrow at the words of Christ about his going from us. Here he explains what it means. In the context of the whole chapter in its sequence, the point is that we don’t always immediately get it. We hear but don’t fully understand; in part, because we are not asking or seeking for its meaning. This speaks, I think, to an important aspect of our humanity. We are intellectual and spiritual beings who are created for knowledge and love. Ultimately those essential aspects of our humanity find their truth and meaning in what Christ makes known to us; namely, the will of him that sent him.

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Sunday, May 5th, Fifth Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Thursday, May 9th, Ascension Day
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, May 12th, Sunday After Ascension Day
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, May 14th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, May 19th, Pentecost
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, May 26th, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The collect for today, The Fourth Sunday After Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:17-21
The Gospel: St. John 16:5-15

Artwork: Antonio Estruch i Bros, Last Supper, 1904. Oil on canvas, Sabadell Art Museum, Sabadell, Spain.

Your sorrow shall be turned into joy

In Chapel this week two different Scripture passages were read. At the Junior School and Grade 10 chapel services, a passage from Luke was read about the healing of the centurion’s servant. At the Grade 11 and Grade 12 services, a passage from John’s Gospel was read about the meaning of the resurrection seen in terms of the transition of sorrow into joy.

The first reading notes the interplay and interrelation of cultures out of which Christianity emerges. “Say the word,” the Centurion says to Jesus after having asked the elders of the Jews to ask Jesus to heal the slave “who was dear to him.” They had told Jesus that the Centurion is worthy because “he loves our nation” – the Jewish people – and has built a synagogue for them. But the Centurion himself runs out to say he is not worthy, just “say the word and let my servant be healed.” The Centurion is an officer in the Roman army who has charge of one hundred men. This reminds us of the world in which Jesus historically lived in the convergence of three important spiritual forces: Roman law and authority, Greek philosophy and intellectual culture, and Jewish religion and ethics. This is the context for the emergence of the Christian faith and world.

There is a sense not of opposition and hostility but of mutual respect that is at work here in the interplay of things Roman, Greek, and Jewish. “Say the word,” the Centurion says, and explains the whole concept of order. Commands are passed on down through the ranks. There is a sense of being part of an ordered whole, of a rational community. Jesus marvels at what he says. The Centurion sees in Jesus the power and truth of God as something for everyone, even for him and for his slave. His insight is into the power and nature of the divine word which alone creates and heals. This contrasts with our words which do not create and heal; at best, we are “secondary creators” (Aquinas) who respond to what has been given in the order and structure of creation. The Centurion has grasped this essential insight that occasions wonder on the part of Jesus. What he has grasped cannot be constrained to one culture or group.

The students of the School last Wednesday were all part of the Cadet Corps that marched down to Christ Church. They stepped up and into what was asked and expected of them in an exemplary fashion; a kind of miracle of education. Why? Because it means respect and honour and taking responsibility for what belongs to our life together. It was an illustration of the theme of the Church Parade: To Govern Is To Serve. A wonder indeed!

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“Be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be”

What things? Deceptions, “of wars and rumours of wars,” of “nation against nation,” of “earthquakes in divers places,” of “famines and troubles,” ultimately, what Mark sums up as “the beginnings of sorrows.” Sounds like the evening news or the endless dystopia of your social media ‘news’ feed. What has changed? It is a pretty sobering picture of the suffering and hardships of our disordered world.

And yet Mark is really the first Eastertide Saint who we commemorate invariably in the Easter Season, though this year the Annunciation was transferred from Monday in Holy Week to week of the Octave of Easter. In a way, that helped to emphasize the intimate and inescapable connection and interplay between Passion and Resurrection in terms of the meaning of the Incarnation which cannot be thought about apart from them. And so, too, with the Feast of St. Mark as the readings make rather clear. The Gospel might seem to be rather dark and threatening about the things that must needs be that are disturbing. Yet the Resurrection provides a way to face such things and to “be not troubled.”

The Resurrection changes everything. Mark’s Gospel in its so-called shorter ending concludes with the words “they were afraid.” This acknowledges the reality of the human condition but his gospel addresses it with a way to face such stark realities. They do not need to define us. We are more than though not less than the circumstances and situations of our world and day and even of our own experiences. In every way, the Resurrection points us to the joy of our life in Christ and focuses our thoughts on his Passion and Resurrection which becomes our life as the reading from Ephesians so clearly indicates. We are given a way to face things and be not troubled but to speak the truth in love, and grow up into him in all things. In other words, the Resurrection is about our life in Christ whose life in us signals the building up of the body in love. That body is the body of Christ, the Church. Our task is to heed the Collect taken from the Epistle that we not be “like children carried away with every blast of vain doctrine,” “tossed to and fro,” but rather “established in the truth” of the Gospel.

“And the gospel must first be published among all nations,” Mark concludes in the reading for his feast day. That requires it being published in the midst of the troubles of our world and day. That is our vocation and our joy.

“Be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Mark, April 25th, 2024

The collect for today, The Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast instructed thy holy Church with the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark: Give us grace, that, being not like children carried away with every blast of vain doctrine, we may be established in the truth of thy holy Gospel; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:11-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 13:1-10

The author of the second gospel, Saint Mark is generally identified with John Mark, the son of Mary, whose house in Jerusalem was a meeting place for the disciples (Acts 12:12,25). John Mark accompanied his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journey to Cyprus, but Mark’s early departure to Jerusalem caused a rift between Paul and Barnabas, following which Barnabas took Mark on the next mission to Cyprus while Paul and Silas traveled through Syria and Cilicia (Acts 15:37-41).

Paul later changed his mind about Mark, who helped him during his imprisonment in Rome (Col. 4:10). Just before his martyrdom, Paul urged Timothy: “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11).

Also, Peter affectionately calls Mark “my son” and says that Mark is with him at “Babylon”—almost certainly Rome—as he writes his first epistle (1 Pet. 5:13). This accords with church tradition that Mark’s Gospel represents the teaching of Peter.

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The collect for today, the Feast of Saint George (d. c. 304), Soldier, Martyr, Patron of England (source):

O God of hosts,
who didst so kindle the flame of love
in the heart of thy servant George
that he bore witness to the risen Lord
by his life and by his death:
grant us the same faith and power of love
that we, who rejoice in his triumphs,
may come to share with him the fullness of the resurrection;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 2 St. Timothy 2:8-10, 3:10-12
The Gospel: St. John 15:1-7

Artwork: Paris Bordone, St. George Killing the Dragon, 1525. Oil on panel, Pinacoteca Vaticana.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Third Sunday after Easter.

“Because I go to the Father”

In “Images of Pilgrimage,” the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse wisely advises that “we should stay close to the language of images themselves,” especially “the images of pilgrimage, of wilderness and paradise” that encompass, as he puts it, “the whole of revelation.” This speaks profoundly to our current distresses and confusions about language itself. We have lost the capacity perhaps to think the metaphors and images of Scripture and have defaulted to turning words into things; the reification of images that misconstrues the understanding of ourselves and the created order. The consequence is that there is no self or any nature, any created order. The post-modern despair of metaphysics is premised on the assumption that all we have are words but the words are endlessly empty of meaning.

Yet that sense of the emptiness of meaning, the crisis of meaninglessness in the contemporary world, paradoxically leads to assertions and claims about meaning and identity that are entirely arbitrary; it is all a power game about who controls the narratives. In a way it is an attempt to fill the vacuum that we ourselves have created but only by two contradictory assertions: first, that words create reality (they don’t); and second, that words are essentially meaningless (they aren’t), or, at the very least, there is an endless deferral of meaning (there isn’t despite changes in meaning).

God speaks the world and the world of things into being. We don’t. At best we are “secondary creators.” Certainly language either shapes and helps our understanding of things or distorts and hinders our understanding of the givenness of the world and ourselves in it. Words matter but not when they become things, mere commodities to be used and consumed. Not when they are used to control thought rather than enable our thinking.

The Eastertide readings are a profound treatise about thinking the images of revelation and thus of finding ourselves within the understanding which they offer. The recurring phrase in the last three Sundays after Easter is “because I go to the Father.” Taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse” of Jesus in John’s Gospel, it grounds the whole pilgrimage of the soul in the pilgrimage of the Son to the Father. Nowhere are we taught more clearly about the reality of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost than in these readings. It is what Jesus himself teaches and makes known in the face of our confusions and uncertainties. And, here, it is taught even through the realities of the human condition of suffering and tribulation. One cannot help but note the wonder of metaphor that opens us out to a larger understanding of our humanity which transcends the limits of human experience but without negating its different forms which belong to the created order.

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