Author: CCW

“All the people hung upon his words”

Have we hung upon his words? It is our constant challenge. Only so can we find meaning and purpose for our lives. It is really all about the words of Christ, the Word and Son of the Father alive in us if ever we will truly live.

Out of the crucible of the Passion comes the Resurrection! “Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen, indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!” It is the great word for this day and this season. Even more it is the word that alone enables us to hang upon his words, the words of Scripture in all their fullness of meaning and purpose. We have gone through the pageant of the Passion in Holy Week but the accounts of the Passion, indeed the Gospels themselves, only come to be written in the light of the Resurrection. How really could it be otherwise?

Something changed. The Resurrection is radical new life. It does not mean the eclipse of the past of sin and folly, of suffering and death, but a whole new way of thinking about our humanity and our lives with one another. There can be no going back to some imaginary paradise. We can really only think of the paradise of Creation through the realization of our separation from it. We cannot go back to paradise because that would mean no longer knowing ourselves or God. It would mean forsaking our self-consciousness, the very awareness of ourselves as selves.

No. The good news is the Fall of our humanity is the necessary event by which we awaken to ourselves. The greater good news is that God, too, falls into our humanity and world to redeem us from ourselves and return us to him but without the loss or denial of our self-awareness and our individuality. And perhaps nowhere is that better signified for us on this Easter day than in the baptism of Hazel Elizabeth Robinson, the daughter of a daughter of the Parish. Baptism is about the radical new life of the Resurrection for her individually. She is incorporated into the life and death of Jesus Christ. She is made the child of God, a member of Christ and his body the Church. How?

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

This is the night. The night of watching and waiting upon the truth and power of God’s love, a love which is greater than the darkness of human sin and death. Holy Saturday seems to be the quietest and the most peaceful of all of the days of the year. And yet there is the wonderful action of God which marks this night. We watch and wait once again by hanging upon the words of Scripture. We watch and wait in expectancy for God’s great creative action, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The point is very simple. Christ dies but love lives and triumphs over death. All of the Scripture readings at the Vigil underscore this essential insight and truth. We are reminded that the goodness of God is and must always be greater than every form of evil. The Resurrection is Creation renewed by being recalled to the truth of God in love and forgiveness.

The divine desire to be reconciled with his sinful creation means the redemption of all sinners. It requires that we hang upon his words, listening to the great Paschal Praeconium, the Easter Proclamation, listening to the Prophecies of Scripture that speak of God’s triumph over sin and evil, and then renewing our baptismal vows by which God has reconciled himself to each of us in his love for us. Then there is the simple joy of rejoicing in Christ’s redemption of our humanity. We end the vigil with the lauds, the praises of Easter morning, the resurrection alive in us.

How? By hanging upon the words of Scripture that testify to the Resurrection. Dr. Johnson once said that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind. Well, our hanging upon his words concentrates our minds wonderfully upon the reality of divine love. It makes us alive, restored and renewed in love. Such is the wonder and the power of the Vigil. Our hanging upon his words opens us out to the Risen Christ.

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2014

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

Christ no longer hangs upon the Cross. It might seem then that we no longer hang upon his words. He is dead and buried. That would seem to be the meaning of this day. And yet there is something more, something quite wonderful and powerful about Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday is the day of the greatest peace and the deepest silence. It recalls us to the Jewish Sabbath, to God’s resting on the seventh day after the labours of creation, as if God needed a rest! On Holy Saturday, Christ rests in the tomb. And everything seems at peace since all that stands between God and man has been overcome on the Cross of Good Friday. We have heard Jesus’ last words, “it is finished,” and “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” There is, it seems, only peace and silence. It may remind us of paradise. And yet, there is something else that makes Holy Saturday more than paradise restored and makes it more than the Sabbath rest of God.

The Scripture readings speak of an activity that underlies all of the peace and silence of this day. We gather at the tomb of Jesus. It is the aftermath of the cruel events of the Passion and yet the Scripture readings speak of something else. “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” Peter tells us in a passage that echoes the first lesson at Matins from Zechariah, a passage, too, that signals the prophetic basis for Christ’s Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem as a king “humble and riding on an ass and on a colt the foal of an ass.”  “Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” an image of Sheol or Hades, of Hell, Zechariah proclaims.

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

Nowhere does this text have greater application than on this day we call Good Friday. It is all the business of this day for us to hang not just upon the words of the Passion of Christ but, more specifically, upon the very words of Christ on the Cross. We hang upon the words of the one who hangs there for us and for our salvation. What we see and hear from Christ crucified is altogether for our good, our joy and our salvation.

There can be no Easter joy without the Passion. Christ’s words on the Cross reveal the ultimate triumph of love over sin and death. The seven last words of Christ on the Cross are taken from the four evangelists in their accounts of the Passion. Traditionally the last words of Christ begin and end with an address to the Father: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Everything, we might say, is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Spirit. Christ is the Word and Son of the Father; the uttered being of the Father who has come to do the will of him who sent him, to redeem our wayward humanity by calling us home to God. There is the forgiveness of sins; there is the final movement of the Son’s love towards the Father. We are embraced in this divine love.

The old spiritual has it exactly right: he’s got the whole world in his hands. Such is the nature of redemption. God seeks our good. “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Love trumps all and triumphs over all our sins and follies. This is what makes this day Good Friday.

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

This is Luke’s word to us, too. And on this day especially, it is our challenge to hang upon the words of him who hangs upon the Cross for us and for our salvation. Only so can this day be in any sense Good Friday.

“He borrowed a body so that he might borrow a death,” Athanasius famously observes. He borrowed, too, a tomb, it seems, which becomes the womb of new life, the radical new life of the Resurrection.

Luke gives us three of the seven words of Christ from the Cross. In the traditional understanding, the words of the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father from St. Luke: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” and, as we just heard, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And, as Luke tells us, “having said this, he breathed his last.” Christ dies. Then, and only then, are we left with the intriguing picture of “all the multitudes” having “assembled to see the sight” and “return[ing] home beating their breasts.” The sight of Christ crucified and the words of the Crucified are meant to affect us, indeed, to convict us and move us to acts of contrition and confession, even “beating our breasts.”

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

Holy Week reaches a crescendo of intensity in the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of the Passion: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Out of that disturbing and passionate intensity comes the radical reality of new life, the life of the Resurrection. We cannot think the one without the other. And we cannot think about either without hanging upon the words of Christ, especially in the pageant of his Passion.

The words par excellence, perhaps, that the Christian Church hangs upon, and certainly most frequently, are the words of the institution of Holy Communion, the words of Christ in the Upper Room on the night that he was betrayed, this night, this very night. “Take eat, this is my Body which is given for you”; “Drink ye all, of this; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant.” These words so familiar to us from the service of Holy Communion are at the heart of the Passion and derive from the accounts of the Passion and from Paul. They are the words of Christ to the disciples on the eve of his Passion; words which signify so much of the Passion and its deeper meaning and which signal the form of our continuing and constant participation in his Passion and Resurrection.

The Church has hung on these words because they define the being of the Church as the body of Christ. They express the meaning of our incorporation into the life of Christ, the Christ whose sacrifice is the radical overcoming of sin and death, the Christ who gathers us into his eternal thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. “A new commandment, I give unto you,” Jesus says, the phrase defines the meaning of this day, Maundy Thursday. Maundy derives from the Latin, mandatum, which means commandment. The Passion is about the love of God for us, the love which commands us to love as he has loved, and provides for us the means of our living in his love. Only so can his love begin to be realised in our lives.

Sin and love are the great lessons of Holy Week, to be sure, but it is through the sacramental life of the Church that we constantly participate in the life of God, in his constant triumph over sin and death, and in the constant reality of his love in itself and for us.

(more…)

Print this entry