Author: CCW

“I lay down my life for the sheep”

In one succinct phrase we have the entire essence of the Christian Faith. It is nothing less than the total self-giving life of God in the sacrifice of Christ. To be more precise, it is the radical meaning of the Trinity. We are familiar, perhaps, too familiar with the image of Christ the Good Shepherd and often misunderstand it. It signals, to be sure, the care of God towards us, God for us, we might say. Yet that is entirely grounded in God himself. Our text follows immediately upon the revelatory words of Jesus about the deeper and truer meaning of the image of the Good Shepherd. He is, as he says about himself, “the good shepherd,” but beyond making a certain assertion and identity claim, he explains what it means in relation to us and what it is grounded upon.

“I am known of mine,” he says, but that is followed by the sentence in which our text is embedded. “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” Our knowing him is ultimately grounded in the knowing of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit; our knowing as grounded in God’s eternal knowing of us. For where there are two, there is a third, something which we see in the story on the Road to Emmaus where Jesus comes alongside the disciples in their perplexity and confusion, their unknowing, to bring them into an understanding. How? Through “interpret[ing] to them in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” That is what we have here too. He is interpreting to us the meaning of himself as the Good Shepherd. We are gathered into the spiritual relation of the persons of the Trinity, the divine communion of eternal and total self-giving love.

What that means for us is seen in the Epistle and Gospel for today as concentrated in the Collect. The Father has given his only Son “to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” What is revealed to us about the self-giving life of God himself through the sacrifice of Christ is meant to become our life; we are meant “most thankfully” to “receive that his inestimable benefit” and “daily [to] endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.”

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“Be not affrighted.”

Mark’s Gospel account of the Resurrection is one of two Gospel readings for Easter Day. Like John’s Gospel, it emphasizes the empty tomb, the first moment in the process of thinking about the Resurrection. In Mark’s case, it is about Mary Magdalene and another Mary coming to the tomb with the intent to honour and respect the dead. They come bearing burying spices only to discover that the one whom they seek, “Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified, is risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him.” Only then are they directed to go their way and to tell the other disciples and Peter that “he goeth before you into Galilee: there will ye see him.” There is something wonderfully concise in this short Gospel pericope.

Yet the short ending of Mark’s Gospel actually ends with the words which are not included in the Easter Day reading. He ends his Gospel, at least in its short form, with the words, “For they were afraid.”

This is different from “be not affrighted” or “be not amazed” (RSV). Amazement conveys a sense of wonder. That signals the idea of the unexpected that marks the beginning of the dawning awareness of the idea of the Resurrection and its radical meaning that changes everything, quite literally. But the short ending is quite suggestive about Mark and his gospel. It was Austin Farrer who best grasps its significance by linking the ending to Mark’s account of the Passion with the curious scene in the Garden when Christ is taken captive; it is the scene of the young man who ran away naked. Farrer suggests it was Mark himself.

As we have been suggesting, the Resurrection makes visible what is already present in the Passion, albeit in different modes of realization. To know one’s fears and to face them and acknowledge them goes a long way towards overcoming them. The greater amazement or wonder here is that the Resurrection speaks to our fears and uncertainties and provides a way to think things in a new and radical manner. It opens us out to a new way of thinking about death and suffering by recalling us to the greater wonder of essential life. That is Christ who wills to suffer for us and whose death and resurrection are the triumph of life over death. Life is absolutely prior and as such death is changed.

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“He showed unto them his hands and his side”

From Christ crucified and dead to the empty tomb, from the empty tomb to the marks of the Cross in the Crucified Christ. Quite a spectacle. We go from the intensity of the Passion on Palm Sunday to Easter to the wonder and mystery of the Resurrection on Easter to the Octave Day of Easter. Easter Week like Holy Week is one long liturgy: the beginnings of reflection and meditation on the Resurrection. Just as we have immersed ourselves in the Passion of Christ through the Scripture readings of Holy Week, especially through the four accounts of the Passion in the Gospels, so in Easter Week we immerse ourselves in readings that turn on the mystery of the Resurrection.

Holy Week and Easter Week are not polar opposites of one another, mere mood swings from sadness to gladness, as something psychological. First, you’re down, then you’re up (and of course vice versa! Where’s the good in that?). No Passion without the Resurrection, no Resurrection without the Passion. They are intimately and profoundly connected. The theological point is that the Resurrection makes visible what is hidden but present in the Passion; namely, the absolute self-giving life of God as sacrificial love. This is the meaning of the Trinity and belongs to the wonder and mystery of human redemption.

The readings of Easter Week point us towards the logic of the Resurrection, a logic or way of thinking that shows a constant and necessary emphasis on the Passion. The past (and the present and future) of human sin and evil are not eclipsed and negated but radically transformed in the triumph of life and goodness over death and evil. The point is that life is utterly prior and absolute; that life is the essential life of God made visible in the Crucified and Risen Christ.

The Resurrection speaks profoundly to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It belongs to a long tradition of reflection, philosophically and religiously, on the question of what it means to be human. The Resurrection is the strongest possible affirmation of our individuality understood not as autonomous selves, isolated and separated from one another, but as found in a community of reciprocal love and care as individuals committed to the good of one another. All as grounded in the self-giving life of God. That sensibility about human individuality has to do with our lives together as embodied beings. The logic of the Resurrection is that the body matters. It is not merely extraneous and indeterminate, endlessly malleable. There is no disembodied self.

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