Christ Church

“God has gone up with a merry noise”

The Psalms, more often than not, strike the right tone of approach to our liturgical observances. In this case, the high note of rejoicing and delight that belongs to the Feast of the Ascension is nicely captured by the words of the psalmist. “God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” (Psalm 47.5).

The Ascension of Christ, as Acts suggests, marks the fortieth day of Easter. It marks the end, in the sense of the completion, of the Easter season. One of the creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith, the Ascension is often overlooked, perhaps because it doesn’t fall on a Sunday, but on a Thursday. And yet, it provides some very important and powerful teaching about the priority of things spiritual into which is gathered all things material and physical. In other words, the world finds its meaning in God and not the other way around.

What is the Ascension about? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and thus it is our homecoming too. Jesus on Rogation Sunday just past told us: “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” There is the sense of ‘mission accomplished!’ And that mission concerns our good and the good of the world. In other words, the Ascension brings to a certain completion and fullness the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. The Son returns to the Father, not in flight from the world, as if matter or the physical world were inherently evil, but having accomplished the redemption of the world.

“God’s going up with a merry noise” is the lovely and exaltant metaphor that opens us out to the reality of God’s eternal life into which we are gathered. It is literally about our lives spiritually that embraces the physical and natural world without collapsing the spiritual into it. The Ascension signals the radical meaning of the redemption of the world and our humanity.

This is where the Ascension speaks so profoundly to our present-day concerns, fears, and worries. The Ascension means that the world and our humanity have an end in God, an end in God in the sense that the meaning and purpose of the world and the meaning and the purpose of our human lives is found in our relation to God in Jesus Christ. Against the perversity and folly of thinking that the world is just there for us to manipulate, exploit, or destroy, the Ascension reminds us that the world is God’s world. It exists for his will and purpose. And so do we. Ascension is about the sense that we have an end and a place with God. “I go to prepare a place for you,” as Jesus says. It is the counter to all of the forms of material determinism, to the “dialectical materialism” of Marxism and of capitalist consumer culture which reduces everything to material production and consumption. It changes how we see things.

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“Blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.”

Such is the hope for ourselves as we enter into the Passion of Christ. The joint commemoration of Benedict, the founder of Benedictine monasticism, along with Thomas Cranmer, the architect of The Book of Common Prayer, suggests the legacy of the Fathers for the continuing life of the Church. Benedict (480-547) was the founder of Benedictine monasticism which has shaped the European world. It was in the Benedictine monasteries that the writings of the Fathers were largely preserved and passed on as living presences and voices in the devotional and doctrinal life of the Church. What we have come to call ‘Anglicanism’ is itself an inheritor of that tradition with its attention to “the mind of the Fathers.” Diarmaid McCulloch observes that Gerlach Flicke’s iconic 16th century portrait of Cranmer (1545) captures the essential features of the English Reformation project: the reading of the Scriptures through the Fathers, principally, though not exclusively, Augustine. Augustine, however, is certainly the dominant and seminal figure for the shaping of Benedictine monasticism and its heirs.

The one, who founded the spiritual and intellectual traditions which remain with us, at least for those, who, as Jesus says, “have ears to hear,” complements the other who was an Archbishop and a martyr. Together they contribute to our Lenten reflections on reading with the Fathers especially with respect to Passiontide. I want to offer a few passages from Origen, Chrysostom, and Leo on the symbolic meaning of Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem which emphasize the centrality of the Passion. Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church (b. ? – d. 461) concentrates the doctrinal emphasis for us: “His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory.” That marks the character of our participation in the Passion through the pageant of Holy Week.

Origen (185-254) the great theologian and biblical exegete par excellence, commenting on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, states what becomes a common approach of the Fathers to the Scriptures. “It is,” he says, “worth while in such places in the Gospel to apply our minds to the meaning and purpose of the writers, and to consider why, after they had related the wonders and portents of the Saviour’s actions, they should also record these things which reveal nothing of this sort.” Something is to be learned even in the seemingly minor details of the Gospel narratives. As he says:

It is understandable that the Evangelists should commemorate the restoration of sight to the blind man, the healing of the paralytic, the raising of the dead, the cleansing of the lepers, in order that those who would read their writings might be strengthened in Jesus. But what purpose had they in mind in this place in which it is recounted, that, after Jesus had with His disciples drawn near to Jerusalem, and had come to Bethphage close to Mount Olivet, He sent two Disciples with the command that they should loose and bring to Him an ass that was tied, together with its colt [?]; He Who frequently made long journeys on foot, and did not refuse to complete His sojourn here on foot, as when He had come to Jerusalem, and passing through Samaria arrived at the well, and being weary from the road had sat down by it? And what did Jesus also mean when He bade them loose the ass that was tied, and the colt with her, telling them to answer any man who asked them: ‘Why do you loose him?’ to answer, ‘that the Lord hath need of them: and forthwith he will let them go?’”

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“The Lord is at hand”

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is the Advent refrain for the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. We wait upon the motions of God’s word coming to us but that waiting is about our active attention to God’s constant and eternal presence. His coming is really about our coming into a deeper understanding and meaning of our lives with the God who is always at hand, always near, and always with us. As we heard last Sunday in the thundering words of Luke’s apocalyptic gospel, “look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.” And on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, we will hear Paul’s words that “the Lord is at hand” even as that day will bring us to Christmas Eve and to the celebration of Christ’s holy nativity.

The kingdom of heaven, the Lord, your redemption. What does it mean to speak about these things that are “at hand,” that are “nigh”, or near us? Our Advent meditation tonight will focus on something of their meaning by way of Mark Frank, a seventeenth century Anglican preacher and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (1613-1664), in ways which, I hope, will deepen our understanding of the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. It is really all about his eternal being and presence into which we come.

He notes that the Lord is said to be at hand or near us in several ways. First and foremost, “he is at hand, or near us, by his Divine essence,” by virtue of being God. For God, as the traditions of mystical theology and philosophy suggest, is “like a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” As Mark Frank says, “He is everywhere; we therefore nowhere, but that he is near us,” drawing upon Paul’s observation that God is “not far from every one of us” since we have no being, no life apart from him. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17. 27,28).

This highlights the primacy of God with respect to all our thinking and being and recalls us to the mystery which embraces our very being. The mystical traditions of thought are all about a constant redire ad principia, a return to God as the principle of reality, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches. That mystery underlies all of the different forms of the kingdom of heaven, the Lord, and your redemption being at hand or nigh to us.

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Fr. David Curry delivered this Advent Quiet Day address and homily at St. George’s Round Church, Halifax, on 9 December 2023. Click here to download a pdf version of this post, complete with footnotes.

Waiting in the Wilderness: Poets & the Prophet Isaiah
Advent Quiet Day , St. George’s Halifax
9 December 2023
(Fr. David Curry)

Part One

Our Advent Quiet Day is a time of prayerful attention to what certain poets have to say about the mystery of God’s coming to us and our coming to God as informed in some fashion by Isaiah, the great prophet of Advent. My hope is that these texts will deepen our understanding and strengthen our wills. Some passages from Isaiah and a selection of poems are offered for your quiet meditation and reflection.

Advent is our waiting in the wilderness upon the motions of God coming to us. What is that waiting? It is our watching and wanting, our looking and desiring; in short, it is prayer. What is the wilderness? It is, as Isaiah will show us, very much about ourselves, the wilderness of our hearts which contributes to various other forms of wilderness. The simple point is that the wilderness is not a place without humans; it is about a kind of wildness within us, the wilderness of sin.

The images of the wilderness in Isaiah look back to the story of Creation and the Fall in Genesis but with a wonderful kind of poignancy that moves our hearts and minds. “Let me sing for my beloved,” Isaiah 5 begins, “a love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.”

What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you
what I shall do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold a cry!

The wilderness in us turns the paradise of God’s creation into a wilderness outside us, the waste land of T.S.Eliot’s poem by that name, itself shaped by the imagery of Isaiah. Yet the wilderness, too, is the place of prayer.

Prayer at once acknowledges what we want but as such do not have. Yet it assumes and anticipates that there is an ultimate good in which we participate now. Prayer is both human desire and divine gift, as Fr. Robert Crouse so concisely put it, the divine gift which alone redeems our desires without which they are incomplete and partial, essentially dead and empty. “My soul is athirst for God, yea, even the living God,” the psalmist reminds us. Our sojourning in the wilderness is about our desire for wholeness, “like as the hart desires the water-brooks.” Prayer and wilderness belong to our yearning for something absolute, for “here have we no continuing city” but “desire a better country, that is an heavenly,” as Hebrews puts it. We are, as it were, sojourners in the wilderness longing and seeking for the true homeland of the spirit.

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“They overcame him”

We are in the company of angels. How to think about angels? The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only useful if it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels.

Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them, sensibly as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.

The angels are pure intellectual beings. They have no bodies. They are beyond number. Unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world they occupy no space whatsoever. They are the pure thoughts of God, the intellectual principles that shape and “move our imaginations and strengthen the light of understanding,” as Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelic Doctor puts it. They are precisely about the truth and the nature of intellection, that more profound principle of thought upon which our more prosaic and linear ways of thinking ultimately depend. They remind us of a kind of unitive thinking as opposed to our divided thinking. When we reduce reason to a tool, to a means of problem-solving, we can at best only discover that we are the problem as in Oedipus Rex.

Intellection is the gathering of everything into unity. It is to see things as a whole and not simply in the division and dissolution of things; of the endlessness of ‘this and that’. Michaelmas presents a cosmic vision that complements the cosmic vision of Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis unfolds the pageant of creation not as a prosaic temporal affair but as an orderly and intellectual process in which one thing is distinguished from another within an ordered whole.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his seven Eastertide sermons (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Eastertide Meditations on the Seven Last Words of the Crucified In the Light of the Resurrection”.

Fr. David Curry has collected his three Lenten meditations (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Lenten Meditations on the Book of Homilies”.

“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? Whose words? Those questions take on a certain poignancy of meaning in the service of Tenebrae. The Latin for darkness or shadows the ancient services of Tenebrae were anticipatory of the three great holy days, the Triduum Sacrum, of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. The service of Mattins was sung solemnly the evening before each of those days. This reminds us that Holy Week is not simply a linear sequence of events but a cluster or crowd of events that belong to the credal understanding of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, events that are all interrelated doctrinally and which inform each other. The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ cannot be understood independently and in separation from each other.

Tenebrae in the modern practice anticipates the Mattins of Maundy Thursday but includes a number of psalms and canticles that point us to the Resurrection. It is essentially a psalm office. The Psalter is the Hymn and Prayer Book of the Jews and of Christians. Thus many of the words we are meant to hang upon in an attentive and serious way are the words of the psalms. That is intriguing and poignant because the psalms present us with a number of different voices: the voices of our humanity in its distresses and fears, its disorder and violence; the voice of God in judgment and compassion; and the voice of Christ both as suffering victim in his humanity and as seeking our good. The psalter, as Calvin observes, presents us with an anatomy of the soul. We are meant to learn things about ourselves in relation to the truth of God. We are, yet again, learning the great lessons of sin and love in their interrelation.

Thus Tenebrae draws us dramatically into the Passion through the power of the psalms and the canticles, scripture songs which comment on the things of the Passion and human redemption. We are meant to find ourselves, our own souls, in these psalm prayers and hymns at the same time as we are meant to find ourselves in the deep embrace of God’s love for us and for our good.

The psalms of Tenebrae complement the first Mattins lesson for Maundy Thursday from The Lamentations of Jeremiah understood as the voice of Christ addressing us from the Cross revealing to us our rejections of God’s Word and truth made visible in the crucified. Thus it is Christ speaking directly to us about our evil and our indifference. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.” Powerful words and images that reveal Christ as bearing our sins in his own body, words that convict us.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? The Nicene Creed says that “he suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.” By Scriptures, the Creed does not mean the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament but the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians have come to call the Old Testament. Luke’s text however is about the words of Christ. Holy Week sets before us the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and complexity. Yet the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures help us greatly in grasping the radical nature of his Passion, Death and Resurrection. They provide the ground for the credal witness to Christ crucified.

Thus on Tuesday in Holy Week at Matins we read the first servant song of Isaiah, a passage which is understood in reference to Christ in the Christian understanding and to Israel in the Jewish understanding. Christ unites both, we might say. He accomplishes or fulfills what belongs to the vocation of Israel as “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” even as Simeon identifies the child Christ in exactly the same language based upon exactly the same passage. And the redemptive nature of Christ’s work is also signaled here: opening the eyes of the blind, bringing out the prisoners from the dungeon and from the prison those who sit in darkness. These are the pilgrimage themes of illumination and purgation, of liberation from the prison of ourselves.

The reading from Wisdom tonight complements the first servant song from Isaiah and highlights the theme of Christ as the victim, the righteous one whose very being excites the wrath and envy of those who seek his destruction. For wherever the good is sought there too is the devil hard at work but always as a negative force, always as negating the goodness of being but as such reasoning blindly and foolishly. These texts throw light on the continuation of Jesus’s farewell discourse in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel.

Even more they complement and deepen our understanding of the continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark which is a pretty full picture of human evil and the miscarriage of justice, of human cruelty and abuse and mockery which culminates in the crucifixion and the word, the one word of the crucified in both Matthew and Mark. “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” We are meant to hang on that word of the one who hangs on the Cross and feels to the fullest possible extent the reality of sin and evil, feeling it more that we can imagine because of his greater goodness. We are meant to feel his sense of utter abandonment and alienation which is nothing less than what we have visited upon him in our abandonment and alienation from God.

What, then, is the good for us in the face of this awful spectacle of suffering and evil, of sin par excellence in several different registers? Simply this. The one word that comes out of the Centurion in seeing the crucified Christ. We are to hang upon the words of Christ that we might be able to say with the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” That is to profess what we proclaim in the Creed about the crucified Christ who “suffered and was buried, and the third day rose again from the dead.” But only if we hang upon his word of desolation and know ourselves as its cause and truth.

“All the people hung on his words”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2023

“All the people hung upon his words”

The readings at Morning and Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week complement in wonderful ways the Eucharistic readings. We hang upon the words of Hosea, the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. He bids us tonight to “take with you words and return to the Lord,” having reminded us this morning of God’s words to us in our disobedience and folly.

I am the Lord your God
From the land of Egypt;
You know no God but me,
And beside me there is no saviour.
It was I who knew you in the
Wilderness,
In the land of drought.

But in our prosperity, he says, we forget God. It is from Hosea that we have the lines from 1 Corinthians 15 used in the Burial Office about “Death being swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” But God does not forget us. In the awareness of our sins we learn the love of God. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them.” These passages contribute to the beginning of Christ’s farewell discourse in John’s Gospel (ch. 14) which is really about preparing the disciples for his passion & death, his resurrection and ascension; in short, the radical meaning of Christ’s going to the Father and about our learning the love of each for the other. The Passion teaches us the radical meaning of Christ as “the way, the truth and the life” through our being gathered into his love for the Father. That is the underlying principle of the Passion.

These office readings inform our understanding of “the beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark” framed by the broken alabaster box of ointment of spikenard poured out upon Christ’s head – a sign of love in repentance – and by the tears of Peter at his betrayal of Christ. The focus is on Christ in our midst bearing the faults and follies of our betrayals whether explicitly like Judas and Peter or through our weakness in not being able to watch even one hour with him in Gethsemane. The alabaster box that is broken open prepares us for the breaking of his heart and body on the Cross. This beginning of the Passion convicts us of the limitations and the outright betrayals of our love of God and one another but only to move us to contrition and tears of sorrow. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.”

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week
April 3rd, 2023