Day: April 20, 2025

Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the scripture text, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Holy Week and Easter at Christ Church 2025”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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Easter Day 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Christ’s first word from the Cross in Luke’s Account of the Passion and in the classical ordering of the seven last words of Christ crucified has carried us through Holy Week. It carries now into the joy and wonder of Easter. It is very much about the discovery of things which we did not know. “You have died,” Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle reading, “and your life is hid with Christ in God.” But what lives in us, he is saying, is nothing less than the life of Christ for “Christ is all in all.”

Like Mary Magdalene, we come to the tomb expecting a corpse, a dead body to be honoured and respected. There is something profoundly true in such an impulse but there is far more to Easter morning. The Gospel marks the beginning of the realization of the radical new life of the Resurrection. To respect and honour the dead already implies that we are more than our deaths and our experiences. Here in the Gospel reading from John, Mary discovers first the empty tomb and then runs to Simon Peter and the other disciple, John, to tell them that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” This sets Peter and John into motion. John, being younger, gets to the tomb first but does not enter until after Peter.

John tells us (about himself, it seems) that “he saw, and believed. For as yet they knew not the Scripture that he must rise again from the dead.” It will be through the witness of the Scriptures of the Hebrews that an understanding of the Resurrection will come.

We know and do not know but are shown the beginnings of a process of thinking our way into the mystery of the Resurrection, the mystery of life which is greater by definition than all of the forms of sin and evil, of suffering and death, of confusion and uncertainty. Here is the life upon which all things depend and without which our lives are empty and nothing. The Resurrection is not the ending so much as the radical beginning of our life in Christ. In a way, the idea of the Resurrection has been the hidden presence in Lent and Holy Week, the life that underlies all things. It has been present but hidden, known and unknown by us in the pageant of the Passion. Easter makes visible the radical meaning of the life of God. It is made known in Christ Jesus.

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