by CCW | 5 April 2026 10:00
“Christ is risen, Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia! Alleluia!” This is the great Easter proclamation. Easter resounds with the cries of Alleluias, which means “Praise the Lord” or “Praise Yahweh,” that is, God. It is a Hebrew word transliterated into Greek and subsequently into other languages such as English. What does it mean? Simply put, it is our acknowledgement of the radical truth of God as the source and end of all life, the life which is greater than sin and death, the good that is greater than evil and wickedness. Life is resurrection! The Resurrection of Christ witnesses to our resurrection, to our being alive to life itself, to our humanity alive in God. God is life!
Easter is not a happy-clappy add-on to an otherwise dismal and gruesome story. It is not a kind of feel-good illusion to hide from view what we would rather not see, a human construct of our own devising in the face of a sense of the fatal futility and meaninglessness of life. Quite the opposite. It makes visible what has been obscured and hidden yet present in all of the events of the Passion. The Crucified and Risen Christ reveals us to ourselves.
Simeon’s prophecy about Jesus and Mary has carried us through Holy Week to Easter in all our meditations on the Passion. The whole point is that the Passion is in the Resurrection and the Resurrection is in the Passion. The two are inseparably intertwined. “This child,” Simeon said to Mary, “is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against.” We have certainly seen and heard quite enough of the things spoken against Christ in mockery and insult, in false witness and lies, in animosity and cruel hatred by Jew and Gentile. Such is sin, the falling away from truth and goodness in all its forms. But we have also seen moments and hints of the rising again of those whose consciences have been convicted by what they have seen and heard, such as Peter’s tears of sorrow, the Penitent’s prayer on the Cross to Christ, the unnamed woman breaking open the alabaster jar of ointment of spikenard to anoint Jesus in anticipation of his death and burial, and so on. These moments have shown souls being pierced by sin and by love. We are in the story in the fullest sense.
Why? Because Christ wills to suffer all that our humanity in its sin and folly throws at him. In so doing, he makes all sin visible to us as the denial of the truth and goodness of God. But in so doing, he makes visible to us the divine love that is greater than all sin and evil. Thus Simeon’s prophecy about Jesus extends to his words to Mary: “a sword shall pierce through thy soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Through this text we have contemplated those “two vast spacious things,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, namely, “Sinne and Love.” We have beheld him whom we have pierced and that is the great good and blessing of Holy Week which culminates in his rising, his Resurrection from the dead.
We have gone from the cries of Hosanna, to the shouts of Crucify, from the cries of bitter sorrow to the greater cries of Alleluia. What do our cries of Alleluia mean? Simply the acknowledgement that the moving principle in the Passion and the forms of our witness to it is nothing less than the love of God made known in Christ Jesus. “Love never faileth.” Love lives and never dies. It is life, the life of God. “In him was life and the life was the light of men” (Jn. 1.4), the life and light that is love everlasting.
Pierced or moved inwardly by Christ’s Passion we are now pierced or moved inwardly and outwardly in our cries of Alleluia, cries that embrace the cries of Hosanna and Crucify and all the cries of the sorrows of our hearts. Our Alleluias proclaim the glory of God in the Risen Christ.
All the stories of the Easter Season show the idea of Resurrection coming to birth in our hearts and minds by way of the Passion. The one does not eclipse the other, rather they inform and shape each other. They show the process of rebirth in us to life and joy in God over and against sin and death. They affirm that we are more not less than our bodies and our experiences, more not less than what happens to us, even more and not less than our sins and follies. This is the meaning of life as love, and love as life, without which we remain dead in ourselves, dead to the living word, imprisoned in ourselves, buried in the graves of resentment and anger. But “you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God,” Paul proclaims. Christ is your life. This changes how we see ourselves and our world. It is not static but dynamic, a constant process of dying to ourselves and living to Christ.
The Resurrection is the most radical affirmation of the dignity of our humanity, of our human individuality, of our embodied being, and of the created order itself. It belongs to a long, long tradition of thinking about what it means to be human, about the relationship between soul and body, or spirit or matter, if you will, and about our life together in the body of Christ. It is the strongest possible affirmation of the goodness of the material world, a reaffirmation of the essential goodness of all creation as God-given. The Risen Christ is not a hologram, a star-trek AI fantasy of our technocratic illusions. It is not a gnostic flight from the world as if matter was evil or as if we were disembodied souls floating about in some sort of digital ether.
Christ’s Resurrection is the counter to pride and hubris in all its forms. God makes something out of the dust of our humanity. Not by worldly power and dominion but by the grace of divine humility. “God hath restored human nature even more wonderfully than he created it” (Anselm). We are made partakers of his divinity by God humbling himself to share our humanity through Jesus Christ. The Resurrection is the wondrous restoration of the dignity of our humanity in the face of the never-ending parade of the inhumanity of our world of death and destruction, of suffering and hatred. But only through the humility of God. “Humility is so powerful that even the all-conquering God did not conquer without it” (Ephrem the Syrian, c. 306-373).
The theology of glory is impossible apart from the theology of the cross. No Passion, no Resurrection. No Cross, no glory. The restoration is the transformation of sin into love, of death into life, through the Passion and the Resurrection. The marks of the crucifixion are not extinguished. They become the marks of love, the love that is life. That is the deep joy of our Easter Alleluias.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/04/05/sermon-for-easter-day-12/
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