Author: CCW

“The same day at evening … Jesus came and stood in the midst”

It is as if time has stopped and we are gathered with the disciples in the upper room on the day of Christ’s Resurrection but we are behind closed doors, huddled in fear and uncertainty. The Resurrection accounts all seek to show us how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. It comes to birth in us out of our fears and uncertainties, like Mary coming to the tomb in her early morning grief seeking the body of Christ only to encounter the Risen Christ, like the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus fleeing Jerusalem on this same day in fear and confusion only to have Jesus coming alongside them to engage them and teach them. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” T.S. Eliot asks in The Waste Land; the third is the truth that is always greater than ourselves.

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” Jesus says (Mt. 18.20). And that makes all the difference and changes everything. It changes our understanding of time. Here is the idea of kairos, time as rhythmic and circular, as gathered and concentrated into purpose and meaning as distinct from time as chronos, linear and extended, as a sequence and duration – one thing after another. This Gospel opens us out to the radical meaning of Christ in our midst.

Christ in the midst is a recurring image, especially in John’s Gospel both in terms of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. “They crucified him, and the two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst” (John. 19.18). “The same day at evening… came Jesus and stood in the midst” (John 20.19). As we have had occasion to remark, Easter is not the end of the story but its radical beginning, the radical beginning that has no ending because it is the awakening to the essential life of God which is always prior and yet always present; time is baptized and gathered into eternity. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever. His are the times and the seasons and the years,” as we heard at the blessing of the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil. The awakening to Jesus in the midst is what we contemplate both in the Passion and now in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the event that awakens us to the greater event that is God himself. In media res.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the Scripture text, “Thou art the man” into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Thou art the man”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“Christ is your life. Christ is all in all”

I know. You have heard it over and over again, perhaps even on Good Friday. We know the end of the story, it is commonly said, the happy, clappy ending of Christ’s Resurrection that risks eclipsing Good Friday and the Passion of Christ. We may think that Easter is mere wishful thinking, a kind of hope against the experience of reality, the reality of a world of misery and hurt, of violence and destruction. That it is an escape from reality.

We get it wrong. The Easter celebration of Christ’s Resurrection is not the end of the story but its radical beginning. Paul in Colossians states the deep truth about our life as “hid with Christ in God,” the one “who is [our] life.” But not just us – the few, the elite over and against the deplorables, the others, the ‘them’ whom we despise – no. “Christ is all in all.” His Resurrection reveals the radical truth of our humanity as found in God.

We get it wrong. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how to think it right. They show us how the idea of the Resurrection and its reality comes to birth in human souls. They show us the awakening to the radical beginning. What is that radical beginning? That God is life. “In the beginning God.” “In the beginning was the Word.” “In him was life and the life was the light of men.” “In the beginning” means “in the principle”; our life in that which ever abides. Christ’s Resurrection is not simply an event in time; it is eternity in our midst. It cannot be contained in a tomb let alone the tombs of our minds. The Resurrection is the great break-through moment about essential life that is greater than death, the light that is greater than darkness, the good that is greater than sin and evil.

Postmodernism in its various forms is profoundly anti-intellectual, profoundly anti-spiritual, profoundly negative because of its weddedness to a technocratic way of thinking against which it rails in vanity. Why? Because it is trapped in the very problem which it seeks to escape. Technology per se is not the problem. It is our fixation on it as the form of thinking and being that is the problem, the problem of our linear thinking, of calculative reasoning, as Heidegger puts it, that eclipses meditative thinking. The consequence is nothing less than a loss of our humanity. It is anti-life. The paradox is great. The gnosticism of existentialism that pits the individual in his or her subjective experience against an indifferent and hostile universe parallels the technocratic culture in its flight from that world premised upon an absolute conviction about the isolated self. It seeks to flee the world but forgets, as Neil Postman observes about the issues of technology, that “there is no escaping from ourselves.” Such an insight belongs to what he calls “the wisdom of the ages and the sages.” The Resurrection is the Christian form of that wisdom.

Holy week is about confronting ourselves. But that is only possible through the truth and power of God without which our lives are but pretense and nonsense, folly and narcissism, sin and evil. Holy week has made that perfectly clear to us, if we have the eyes and the hearts to hear and learn.

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