by CCW | 11 May 2025 10:00
It is a question, a question that arises out of the puzzlement of the disciples about what Jesus said. What does he mean? He says “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again, a little while and ye shall see me” and “because I go to the Father”. “We cannot tell what he means,” they say, about both these statements.
Perplexity and confusion, fear and uncertainty, sorrow and grief all belong to the mystery of the Resurrection. Yet the mystery of the Resurrection is really the mystery of God as essential life, always present, at once seen and unseen. The Resurrection accounts make visible what was hidden yet present in the Passion and what is hidden yet present in our lives. In a way, Jesus highlights the human problem about the forms of our knowing which are often reductive and limited, a failure to grasp the meaning of what is heard and seen. The stories of the Resurrection are all about the birth of the understanding in us. And how? Most powerfully through the person of Christ himself teaching us about the essential life of God upon which all our being and knowing depend. It is all about the understanding. “In him was life and the life was the light of our humanity,” as John makes clear. Life and light go together.
“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring theme of Eastertide. It signals the dynamic life of God as Trinity in the mutually indwelling motions of the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit into which dynamic life we are gathered; literally, born again, born anew. Born upward. This is the new life which restores us to fellowship with God and with one another in our daily lives. It is the underlying principle of how we act in the world, “submitting ourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” as Peter puts it. Note that this is “for the Lord’s sake,” not for our own immediate self-interest, not for sake of power and authority over others but because of the principle of the authority of God upon which all power and rule ultimately depend as forms of service. As Jesus said to Pilate in the Passion: you would have no power had it not been given you by God. All authority is from God. All wisdom belongs to God. God is life and light and love.
How do we come to know these spiritual truths? By the way in which God engages us through things heard and seen, through a kind of holy epistemology, we might say, the ways of knowing and living that belong to Word and Sacrament. We see this most explicitly in the story of the Road to Emmaus. But the logic of Word and Sacrament, understood as complementary and interdependent, is that we can learn from the visible things of our world the invisible things of God. But not by reducing God to ourselves. It is more about learning how to think upward; in short, to think analogically which is what we see in today’s Gospel.
The analogy is about childbirth as providing a way of thinking about the meaning of the Resurrection. The Resurrection cannot be understood apart from the Passion just as the joy at the birth of a child is inseparable from the pains of childbirth, the reality of motherhood, we might say. But it is motherhood as a metaphor and image for life and for all of the forms of human suffering; motherhood as a parable of the Resurrection for all of us in the vagaries of human experience. Such things belong to human redemption and to the restoration of our humanity through the Resurrection.
Sorrow and pain give way to joy and gladness but not simply in the endless to and fro, the ups and downs, the yin and yang, the vacillations of human life considered in its own terms. Our sorrow, Jesus says, shall be turned into joy, but a joy that “no one taketh from you”. Something lasting, something eternal is realized for us in and through the realities of human suffering.
Thus the phrase “because I go the Father” is explicated for us by reference to the realities of human life and human suffering imaged in terms of what belongs explicitly to mothers. In a kind of Providence, we have this reading and image on what is Mother’s Day in our secular culture. The motherhood reference is a way of learning by analogy: learning something of the total self-giving life of God as Trinity through the experience of child-birth. In the logic of the Resurrection, the things of this world are made the vehicles of our being gathered into the eternal life of God. It is about redemptive suffering as revealing what belongs to the ultimate truth and dignity of our humanity as found in the will of God and in us as the servants of God. That service is not servile obsequience, but the dignity of freedom, the freedom that is nothing less than the grace of God’s goodness moving in us, “whose service is perfect freedom,” as the Collect for Peace at Morning Prayer puts it. It is the freedom which belongs to self-giving love which is the life of God in its truth and fullness.
Theology is really about learning how to stay with the images and enter into their meaning and purpose for our understanding of our life with God. It is one of the challenges of our times and the counter to the various determinisms and forms of reductive thinking that do not do justice to the end or purpose of our humanity. We are ordered by God, Thomas Aquinas argues, to an end that exceeds our reason and one in which we participate but only through learning how to think the understanding conveyed to us in the dynamic of the images of revelation. Here childbirth becomes an image of Resurrection, a parable of radical new birth and new life.
The Resurrection opens us out to the life of joy and gladness even in the face of sorrow and pain, of suffering and death; a joy that has no end. It makes visible what all life and death and the whole range of human experience depend upon and desire, namely, the essential life of God in whom we discover purpose and meaning and thus joy and delight. In the logic of the Resurrection, we are awakened to our life in Christ which joins us together in care and support for one another. That life in Christ is the motions of his love towards the Father. It is what belongs to Christ as mother, the Church Catholic as Mother.
The whole meaning of Christ is summed up in a phrase, “because I go to the Father,” explicated by way of the metaphor and image of child-birth. Christ’s words here complement John’s opening words in the Prologue to his Gospel. For Christ is the Word and Son who is always in motion towards God and always is God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” It is all a way of thinking upward, thinking analogically.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 3, 2025
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/05/11/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-after-easter-14/
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