Category: Sermons

“The same day at evening, being the first day of the week,
when the doors were shut …”

It is, I think, an arresting image. In a few simple words, John sets the scene. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week.” What day is that? The day of the Resurrection, Easter day. And yet we read this passage on the Octave Day of Easter, today, this morning actually, but how appropriate! Why? Because it is as if we are there, in that moment, still in the meaning of that day, the day of Resurrection. The idea of the octave, a concept belonging to the musical scale, applies to our lives theologically and spiritually, from the first note to the eighth note, the same note. Just so Easter Day and the Octave Day are, in a way, the same day. It is as if time is somehow suspended or better, as if we are in the eternal moment of Christ’s Resurrection. In a way, that is the meaning of every Sunday in the Christian understanding. Every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection.

But the real wonder of this image, at least for me, is in the idea of closed doors. The disciples were behind closed doors on that same day at evening and they were there in the same Upper Room “in the same night that he was betrayed” where Christ had identified himself with the bread and wine of the ancient Passover feast, the festival of Israel’s deliverance by God from Egyptian slavery. And they are there in fear, “for fear of the Jews,” John tells us in a phrase which might trouble us and certainly has had an ugly history in terms of how it has been used, namely, in blaming the Jews simply for Christ’s crucifixion and death. The whole story and, certainly the theological story for Christians, is that we are all implicated in the sequence of betrayals that contribute to the events of Good Friday. They are afraid for themselves because of what happened to Jesus. An inescapable feature of those events is Israel’s betrayal of God and the law but it is part of the larger story of humanity’s betrayal of the truth of God and our betrayal of ourselves.

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The ten sermons delivered by Fr. David Curry from Passion Sunday through Easter have been compiled into a single booklet entitled Judas’ Kiss: Passion and Resurrection at Christ Church 2013. Click here to download the pdf document.

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Christ is Risen. Alleluia, Alleluia!

The Church’s ancient proclamation captures the joy and the excitement of this day. But make no mistake, the Resurrection is not some sort of clap-happy event, a happy ending to an otherwise sad and bitter tale. No. The joy and the excitement of Easter are born out of the Passion and Death of Christ. No Passion, no Resurrection. No Good Friday, no Easter day. The intensity of the Passion gives rise to the joyfulness of the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is a bodily event. But it gives rise to a new understanding of everything. There is, we might say, a resurrection of the understanding. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is, as I am fond of saying, radical new life. Radical is the right word, actually. It refers to the root of things, the radix. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

The God who creates ex nihilo – out of nothing – recreates out of the greater nothingness of sin and death. The Cross has made visible that greater nothingness. The full force of sin and evil are revealed in the crucified Christ. The greater nothingness is the vanity of our wills as against everything that is good – against one another in the human community, against the good order of creation, and against God himself. But the Cross has also made visible the far greater love of God both for us and in itself.

If the message of Good Friday is that God is dead, then the message of Easter is that death is conquered, death is dead. “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more;/death hath no more dominion over him.” Christ is risen from the dead never to die again. The meaning of death itself is changed. The tomb is not only empty; it has become the womb of new life. The unending life of the Resurrection is accomplished in and through the darkness of death. Christ is Risen!

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“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

The kiss of Judas is the archetype of all betrayal. Holy Week in all of its intensity and drama has set before us the pageant of all our betrayals. What we contemplate is the Judas within each of us. How is this possible? Because of the love of God which is greater than our betrayals, because Truth has more power than all sin and evil. Betrayals, after all, are themselves an acknowledgment of a truth which we have denied. Even more, as we see in the pageant of the Passion, that truth is so much before us even in denial that we seek to destroy it. We kill God.

God is dead. That is the disturbing wonder of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And yet the death of God in Christ – for the death of God only has meaning through the Incarnation – accomplishes a strange marvel. There is the quiet peace of this holy day. It is the peace of Paradise. All the rage and spite, all the bitter agony and ugly violence of Good Friday is past and gone. We have, literally, done all that we could to annihilate God from the horizon of our minds. We have, literally, in the crucifixion of Christ done all that we could to deny the dignity of our humanity. It is not just  God who is dead in Christ; we are dead in ourselves and dead to God.

All our wild sin and evil has had its say. It all amounts to what it is. It is nothing. It is all a denial of what truly is, a denial of God and creation, a denial of all that is true and good about ourselves as well. “Nothing is but what is not,” indeed, to adapt Shakespeare’s phrase from Macbeth. And yet, there is the peace of Holy Saturday, the sense of paradise. Why? Precisely because the fury and folly of sin and evil has done its worst; there is, literally, nothing more that we can do by way of sin and destruction.

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“Christ our Lord became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”

“While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Such is the mystery of this day, the double mystery of our disobedience and Christ’s obedience, his obedience unto death, a death that is somehow a blessing for us. How shall we think about Good Friday? The Scriptures unveil the great spectacles of obedience and disobedience that help us to ponder the deep mystery of human redemption in the passion and death of Christ. We ponder the mystery of Christ crucified.

The words of the Crucified challenge and confront us in our complacency and our cynicism and in our folly and our despair. These words which illumine so much of our understanding of the Scriptures and human life are also illumined by the whole pageant of God’s Word written.

The stories of Isaac and Absalom are the stories of obedience and disobedience that provide an interpretative framework for our reflection together on the mystery of human redemption.

The story of the Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac belongs historically and traditionally to the sorrowful and serious theological considerations of Good Friday. A most disturbing story, think how troubled Søren Kierkegaard was by this story, for example, it nonetheless helps us to think about Christ’s crucifixion. In Genesis, God puts Abraham to the test, to an almost unbelievable and utterly disturbing test, bidding him sacrifice his only son, the son whom he loves, the son of God’s promise to him and Sarah, the son through whom “all your descendants shall be named” and “through whom all nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

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“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

It has been our mantra, the interpretative text for our Holy Week meditations. It speaks profoundly to this day, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy Days of Christ’s Passion. In our Anglican tradition, we immerse ourselves in the reading of all of the accounts of the Passion. Luke’s Passion is read on the Wednesday and the Thursday of Holy Week. It is from Luke that we get this defining word of betrayal.

Maundy Thursday is a day of complexity and confusion. Maundy is the Englishing of the Latin mandatum, meaning commandment. The novum mandatum, the new commandment, is Jesus’ word to us at the Last Supper, on the night in which he was betrayed. What is the new commandment? That we should love one another as he has loved us. The Passion of Christ signals to us exactly what that means. It means sacrifice and service.

Those two concepts mark the solemn ceremonies of this day. Christ institutes the Holy Communion, identifying himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover celebration and thereby inaugurating the new covenant that will be realized through his death and resurrection. He inaugurates this new reality in the face of our betrayals and he also insists on washing the feet of the disciples. It signals the servant ministry of the Gospel. “I am among you as one that serves.”

Sacrifice and service. And yet, betrayals.

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“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

Tenebrae means shadows or darkness. Part of the intensity of Holy Week is captured in an ancient tradition of the solemn recitation of the psalms and lessons of the Mattin services of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, sung on the evenings before each of those days. Less common, perhaps, in our time, Tenebrae now happens, if at all, on the Wednesday evening. The readings are those of the Mattins of Maundy Thursday while the psalms and canticles anticipate the whole drama of human redemption. Christ’s Passion and Resurrection are the central events of salvation; they illumine each other. Tenebrae helps us to appreciate something of the weight and the intensity of Holy Week and Easter.

The darkness is the deep darkness of spiritual betrayal, captured most profoundly in  the figure of Judas. Luke’s account of the Passion is read on the Wednesday in Holy Week and on Maundy Thursday. It is Luke who gives us these poignant and yet heart-rending words of Jesus to Judas, the question that in its scope and meaning catches us all. “Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

The kiss is followed by Christ’s capture; it is a scene of violence. They have come out against him with swords and staves. In the melee, one of the servants of the high priest has his ear cut off but Jesus intervenes to prevent more violence and “touch[es] his ear and healed him.” Such things deliberately signal the contrast between human violence and destruction and divine grace and healing. In a way, Luke’s account accentuates this contrast. Judas’ betrayal, too, is seen to include all of us. We are all implicated, in one way or another, in the betrayals of Christ. Jesus’ words to Judas and his captors in the maelstrom of the confusion of his captivity are his words to us. They convict us of our neglect, read ‘betrayal’ of his teaching, our betrayal of the Word made flesh, we might say, whose words are meant to take flesh in us. We betray the words of his teaching and we betray the Word who is Christ.

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“Judas, betrayest thou the son of man with a kiss?”

Holy Week is the spectacle of all our betrayals. In a way, all betrayal is an aspect of the archetype of all betrayal, the betrayal of Judas. It is the intimacy of a kiss that heightens the sense of the enormity of sin and its betrayal of the goodness of God.

We read the Passion of St. Mark on Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week. The Passion of St. Matthew has already been read on Palm Sunday. The beginning of the Passion of St. Mark is intriguing and to my mind, quite beautiful and compelling. The passage begins with the pouring out of the ointment of spikenard from the alabaster box upon the head of Jesus. It ends with the outpouring of the tears of Peter. In between are the various scenes of betrayal: Judas Iscariot going to the chief priests to betray him; Jesus’ at table with the twelve predicting that “one of you which eateth with me shall betray me”; the falling asleep of the James and John and Simon Peter while Christ wrestles with the Father’s will in Gethsemane; the actual betrayal and capture of Christ; the false witnesses against Christ before the high priest and the council of the elders; and, of course, Peter’s threefold betrayal of Christ. Betrayals are us.

The frame of the story here is most instructive. What the unnamed woman has done is portrayed, too, as a kind of betrayal. Pouring out the ointment is seen as a waste “for it might have been sold for more than three hundred pieces of silver, and have been given to the poor.” Her anointing of Christ is seen as a betrayal of what is owed to the poor. We have obligations and duties, responsibilities and commitments to one another, to be sure, and especially towards the poor, but the point of the Gospel is not the eradication of poverty – an utopian dream – but to do always what you can, “for ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good.” There is more than money, dare I say, that the poor and, indeed, all of us need. The church must be more than another agency for worldly improvement.

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“We have become a spectacle to the world”

“We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, St. Paul tells us (1 Cor. 4.9). We have become a spectacle, but what kind of spectacle? A spectacle of what? we might ask, a spectacle of ourselves in our pride and vanity, in the celebration of our brokenness and woundedness, or the spectacle of Christ at once convicting us of our betrayals of his love and redeeming us by his love?

By ‘we’, I mean the Church or at least what claims to be the Church in its many manifestations. St. Paul’s challenge to the Corinthians is equally his challenge to us about what kind of spectacle we have become. The question is a constant challenge; one which is critically before us in the events of Holy Week. We are to see ourselves in the spectacle of sin and love, the spectacle of our betrayals. We are very much on display in these events, caught in the conflicting storms of the emotions of our hearts. We are not spectators of others so much as we are spectators of ourselves as betrayers of Christ. This reality of our humanity is strikingly, poignantly and painfully present to us in our liturgy. We who cry “Hosanna to the King” then cry “Crucify, Crucify Him”! If we have hearts, then we cannot help but be convicted by the terror and the tyranny of our betrayals.

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