Author: CCW

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

The Resurrection appearances of Jesus are a profound illustration of how we are drawn to Christ and into the understanding of the meaning of his Resurrection. Perhaps no story illustrates the logic better than the Road to Emmaus account in Luke’s Gospel. The Risen Christ runs out after us who are running away in fear from Jerusalem. He comes alongside us in our fears and uncertainties. Where there are two there is always a third. Not expecting him because they are engrossed in the immediacy of their griefs and perplexities, Jesus draws out of them what they have experienced or rather what they think has happened. It is wonderfully Socratic. They essentially acknowledge their confusion and unknowing.

Only then does Jesus speak directly to them. “O foolish ones and slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not the Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” And then “beginning at Moses, and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” He himself provides the interpretation, the way of understanding the Resurrection, through the witness of “all the Scriptures,” meaning here the TANAKH, the acronym for the Torah, the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim), the categories which comprise the Hebrew Scriptures and which Christians later, starting in the late second century will call the Old Testament. At this point, there is simply the Scriptures. Luke makes that reference explicit later in the same last chapter of his Gospel, naming the Law of Moses (Torah), the prophets (Nevi’im) and the psalms, the latter are a central feature of the Ketuvim, the writings.

But the way of understanding is more than words spoken; it is also words enacted. It is in the breaking of the bread “while he sat at meat with them that their eyes were opened and they knew him.” Word and action, Word and Sacrament, The Word spoken and the Word in motion. They remember the Passover supper on the night of his betrayal. It crystallizes for them the way of understanding; he carried himself in his own hands, lifting up the bread and wine of the Passover as his body and blood even as he was lifted up before them on the Cross. The events of the past are drawn into the eternal presence of God with us.

No story illustrates the real power of education better. The teaching of Word spoken and Word in motion changes them from fear to courageous witness. The change in them is wonderfully expressed by Luke: “ Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?” The change within them leads to motion and action for them. “They rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem” and to the eleven disciples. They return to the place of their fears and confusion as witnesses to the radical truth of the Resurrection. As Luke so simply and yet so eloquently puts it, they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them them in the breaking of the bread.” Is this not exactly what we hope for ourselves in and through the Liturgy? The deepening of our faith into understanding changes us from fear to faith. Thus we are drawn into the mystery of Christ lifted up on the Cross and in the lifting of the veil of the Scriptures by Christ himself.

“And I, If I be lifted up will draw all unto me.”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Monday, 2024

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Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the scripture text, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” into a single pdf document. Click here to download “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

Χριστος Ανεστη! Αλληλουια, Αλληλουια! Αληθως ανεστη! Αλληλουια, Αλληλουια!
Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! He is Risen indeed, Alleluia, Alleluia!

And so it begins? Begins? Isn’t this the end of the rather gruesome spectacle of Christ Crucified and hanging dead on the Cross that we would rather not think about? Isn’t this supposed to be the happy, clappy ending to a tragic story? No. Christ’s Resurrection is radical new life and this day marks the new beginning which has actually carried us through the Passion of Christ. Here is the true meaning of Holy Week. The Resurrection is not some sort of add-on; a way of glossing over the ugliness and the despair that belongs to our culture of death now well along in its death throes; that of course is not exactly something new.

We get it all wrong if we think that Easter is the end of the story. It is only through the meaning of the Resurrection that the pageant of the Passion is even possible and thinkable. Heraclitus’s profound observation that we recalled on Palm Sunday bears repeating. “The way up and the way down are one and the same,” meaning that the way to the principle, to God, and the way from God is nothing less and nothing more than God in his own self-complete motion and life and that motion in us. What is new at Easter is the making known of that eternal truth and motion for us and in us. And to paraphrase Sophocles, “All that we see here is God,” All that we see in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ is God: God in himself and God in us. The radical meaning of the Resurrection is God, the root and source of all life.

Our Easter joys are about the triumph of life over death just as the pageant of Holy Week is the triumph of love over sin. As with Holy Week, so with Easter and Eastertide, we have to think two things together; a challenge, to be sure, to our usual, more linear ‘left-brain’ way of thinking. Sin and love, death and life, have to be considered in their interrelation.

The texts from John’s Gospel provided the interpretative matrix for our thinking the Passion; they now enable us to think the Resurrection. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth,” Jesus says, “will draw all unto me.” This complements what Jesus says earlier in John’s Gospel, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” Eternal life is the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. Here is the love that is stronger than death, as The Song of Songs so beautifully puts it. Here is the love that is life everlasting because here is the source and meaning of all life; the counter to all of the forms of the culture of death in the illusions of our technocratic control of nature and ourselves that deny and negate life itself. The death of death is radical new life. “I will draw all unto me,” Jesus says. “All” here means both everyone and everything. The Passion and the Resurrection are cosmic in scope for such is the redemption of all creation.

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“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

The Paschal Praeconium is an exultant proclamation of the Easter mystery of Christ’s Resurrection, a treatise on the radical meaning of Holy Week and Easter, a commentary on “the passover of the Lord.” Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. He is the passover, the Lamb of God who redeems our humanity precisely through his sacrifice and death. His sacrifice and death are the means of the making known of the eternal life of God.

Our shortened ‘country’ Vigil service celebrates the triumph of life over death by concentrating the elaborate forms of the traditional Easter Vigil into its essential moments: the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle symbolic of light overcoming darkness and life over death; the Paschal Praeconium with its tremendous reflection upon the dynamics of Christian salvation in its rehearsal of some of the dramatic moments that bring us to this mystery, a few of the Scriptural prophecies that illuminate like the Paschal Candle our understanding of the Resurrection, the renewal of our baptismal vows that connect us to the radical meaning of the Resurrection alive in us in our profession of faith, and the Lauds or praises of Easter morning in exultant praise of the Risen Christ. Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Eucharist.

We wait in hope upon the motions of God’s love and life coming to us in the overcoming of sin and death. Here is the proclamation of the death of death and the negation of the negation; the triumph of life over death but only through the realities of sin and death. The theology of the Praeconium is clear: O felix culpa, O blessed fault. God and God alone makes out of nothing even out of the nothingness of sin and evil. For they presuppose what they then deny: God and his creation without which we are nothing and worth nothing. But God is more and seeks our good in his everlasting love and life. This is the radical meaning of the Vigil and the occasion of all our joy. It sets before us the vision of our humanity and the whole of creation as grounded in the eternal life of God which conquers all sin and evil.

The Vigil for us signals the renewal and rebirth of our lives in Christ. This is part of the meaning of Christ drawing everyone and everything to himself. The Resurrection is not some magical conjuring act but the testament to the true life which is greater than sin and death and makes out of our sin and death the means of our way and our being with God in Christ. The Paschal Praeconium concentrates the meaning of this mystery for us in our lives in the body of Christ, the true meaning of the Church universal. For us in the renewal of our baptismal vows we are recalled to the pattern of death and resurrection in us, dying daily unto sin and living to God and for one another that we may live “with him evermore in the glory of his endless life.” Christ is Risen and that changes everything for everything has been drawn back to him.

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil 2024

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“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me”

It might seem to be the exact opposite of being lifted up. Christ lies in the grave, a borrowed grave at that, it seems, (but as Alan Carmichael quips, he is only borrowing it for the weekend!). Yet, not only does the Son of man have no place to lie his head, he has no place of his own to lie his body. This is the theological counter to the tendency to collapse God into the categories and assumptions of our world and agenda. Joseph Arimathea begs the body of Jesus from Pilate and “wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb” and secured it with a rock. Done and sealed, it might seem. But what about us on this Holy Saturday? Where are we? We are to be like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, waiting at the grave of Christ in mourning. Waiting for we quite don’t know what. Are we like closed tombs, dead in the face of death?

But Matthew also tells us about the fears of the chief priests and Pharisees that “his disciples might come by night and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead.” In other words, a conspiracy theory to which the Gospel already alludes and counters. It is the idea of the spiriting away of his body in order to claim the miracle of resurrection. It leads to securing the tomb and setting a watch.

But these forces set in motion for good and for ill conceal the greater motion that belongs to the quiet and peace of Holy Saturday morning. It has to do with the credal teaching of the Descent into Hell. Hidden from view and necessarily so, this is alluded to in the readings from Zechariah and from 1st Peter appointed for Mattins and Ante-Communion; today and Good Friday are the only two times when the Eucharist is not celebrated.

What is the meaning of the Descent into Hell? “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” Peter tells us the Epistle reading, and alludes to the story of Noah and the flood as symbolic of baptism; hence, death and life. Zechariah, too, reminds us of the covenant theme of Israel’s mission: “I will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” an image perhaps of the Hebrew Sheol, the place of the dead. The lesson at Mattins from 1st Peter reminds us of how Christ in his suffering for us has provided us with an example but also that “by his wounds [we] have been healed and have been returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of [our] souls.”

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