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.
That radical meaning is wonderfully proclaimed and made visible for us in the baptisms this morning of three young children: Summer-lily, Sonny, and Zander. They are signs to all of us of our own baptisms. Their baptisms are a kind of renewal for us of our baptismal vows through their vows made audible by their godparents and parents. New life is granted to them. What is that new life? It is not simply something added on but makes explicit what all life depends upon, namely God as the author of all life and being. That is something made known. We are reminded not only of creation but our recreation. We are reminded that life is a gift but not one which is to be unknown or simply taken for granted by us. It is to be entered into knowingly and intentionally.
That is the importance of the baptismal vows, of our saying ‘no’ to what contradicts all life and God as the source of all life and our saying ‘yes’ to the essentials of the Christian Faith. These children are, like us, to grow up into an understanding of the radical meaning of life bestowed upon them sacramentally through Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The water of washing, the water of life, and the water of death all converge in the meaning of the sacrament: the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, an invisible reality made visible to us. For them, as for us, it is something which is given into which we are to grow into intellectually and spiritually. It is about growing up into Christ, his life in them and he in us.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” Jesus says. Suffer here means to allow or let but it also reminds us of suffering in terms of the things that happen to us. Beyond that and as revealed in the events of Holy Week especially, we are reminded of the Passion of Christ which is very much about what he wills to suffer for us. His sacrifice is the complete and total out-pouring of life, the self-giving nature of life and love. That is what these children are born into today through the sacramental action of the Church. They are born into the life of God which is the beginning and end of all life and something which we as humans come to know self-consciously. Ultimately, they are set upon a journey that seeks to bring them to knowing even as they are known in the mercies and love of Christ. “Seek those things that are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things; for you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”
“As dying, we live,” Paul reminds us. Baptism is the very pattern of our Christian lives, the pattern of dying to ourselves and living towards God and one another. In so many ways, it is the antidote to the confusions and conflicts of our contemporary world, the counter to the utilitarian individualism which seeks only selfish, self-interest. What’s in it for me, financially or socially? And equally it is the counter to the expressive individualism which seeks self-fulfilment and self-satisfaction at the expense of all others. For both, the good that belongs to our life together in a community of reciprocal love and service is absent and largely unknown. In so many ways it is about what we know and do not know, and, certainly, our not-knowing what we do.
Easter celebrates the radical new life that comes to birth in human souls and sets us upon the path of learning to live in that self-giving love that is the life and death of Christ Jesus. His Resurrection is not an add-on but the making explicit of the principle of life itself hidden and obscured from view by sin and death but nonetheless present. Without it we are nothing. Easter recalls us in wonderful and powerful ways to our life in Christ and to the constant renewing of ourselves in that life. This is the joy that has no end, the joy of our incorporation into the mystery of salvation, the joy that shouts and sings in all our alleluias. Out of the forgiveness of sins comes the radical new life of Christ alive in us. Χριστος Ανεστη! Αλληλουια! Αλληλουια! Αληθως ανεστη! Αλληλουια! Αλληλουια!
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2025