Category: Sermons

“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away.”

There is a great fearfulness in our own age and culture. It goes beyond the ceaseless spectacle of a world of wars that is constantly before us in such things as the unrest in the Middle East or in the parade of natural catastrophes such as floods in Manitoba and fires in northern Alberta. It concerns the emptiness within the soul of a culture when it can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when it can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.

When we can no longer say what makes life worth living for, then there is certainly nothing worth dying for either. There is nothing to give your life to. There is only the emptiness within, a darkness inside, out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence, death and self-destruction that have become a regular feature of our world. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the meaninglessness of contemporary life. As the philosopher, Peter Kreeft, has noted, the fear for our culture is not the fear of death as it was for the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, nor is it the fear of Hell as it was for the mediaeval cultures – Christian, Jewish and Islamic; no, it is the fear of meaninglessness itself. There is no objective truth to which we should conform ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. This is our fearfulness, the fearfulness we have to confront and overcome.

We confront it in the Gospels. Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid”. Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear or on the road to Emmaus in flight from Jerusalem in fear.

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“I am the Good Shepherd”

The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is one of the great and most familiar images of care. At once a commonplace, it is altogether radical in its meaning. The root of care is cure. The care, we might say, is in the cure.

Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” What distinguishes good shepherds from bad is care. The Good Shepherd cares for the sheep. The meaning of that care is that he lays down his life for the sheep. There is sacrifice – the total giving of oneself for the good of another. It is what we have been privileged to see in Holy Week, on the one hand, contemplating the utter failure in and of ourselves to seek the good of one another and, on the other hand, contemplating the sacrificial love of Christ who alone accomplishes what belongs to our eternal good.

The Good Shepherd, and this is the great and wonderful paradox, is also the Lamb of God. His sacrifice is the cure for our sins but it also imparts his care for our lives. The pastoral ministry of the Church is rooted in this sense of care which is often called “the cure of souls.” It goes beyond the superficial and external matters of comfort and ease and convenience to address the distempers of our souls, the disenchantments of our hearts and the despair of our lives. There is no pastoral care without the naming of the cure and there is no cure without the acknowledgement of our need to be cured in the very root of our being. Once again, it belongs to the pageant of Holy Week to point this out to us. But it also belongs to the parade of Eastertide to show that sacrificial love is a living love. It belongs to the divine life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the divine love that has been made visible in the passion and crucifixion of Christ and in the wonder and triumph of Christ’s resurrection.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

Eastertide is the season of joy. The joy, of course, is not just for a season but actually underlies the true nature of our spiritual pilgrimage for the entire year and for the whole of our life. The joy is the joy of the resurrection. Every Sunday, in the Christian understanding of things, is a celebration of the resurrection. In some sense, Christians should not so much be “surprised by joy” as defined by joy.

The joy of the resurrection is not simply or primarily something emotional and psychological, a state of feeling or euphoria. It is something inward and spiritual. It has to do with our understanding of Christ’s death and resurrection. It is something that has to be taught in order to be felt, we might say. There is the constant necessity of being reminded, time and time again, about the victory of Christ over sin and death. The resurrection is the radical triumph of Christ over the very things that make human life tragic and meaningless. We have to think it and live its triumph.

The joy of the resurrection does not eclipse the realities of human suffering and death. Neither does it deny the realities of good and evil. Quite the contrary. The resurrection is about facing those realities and seeing them in a new light of understanding. That new light of understanding is our life with Christ and in Christ lived out in his body, the Church. It means that we look on sin and suffering and death differently. We are no longer to see them as ultimately defining and defeating. “Death be not proud,” as the poet, John Donne, puts it, because death no longer has anything to be puffed up about; indeed, “Death, thou shalt die.” Death has been changed by virtue of the resurrection.

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“The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep”

In our social culture today is Mother’s Day but in the culture of the Church it is Good Shepherd Sunday. The Eucharistic gospel which orders our reading and thinking about the Scriptures on The Second Sunday after Easter is the passage from John’s Gospel about Jesus as the Good Shepherd.

A familiar image, even too familiar, perhaps, Christ the Good Shepherd is almost a commonplace theme. And yet, we fail to appreciate its radical meaning.

It is not by accident that this Gospel is read in Eastertide, in the season of the Resurrection. That helps us to realize its radical intent. Christ the Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God. Christ the Good Shepherd “giveth his life for the sheep.” The image of Christ the Good Shepherd cannot be understood apart from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The Resurrection is about our freedom from sin and death but only through Christ’s death and resurrection.

Exodus is one of the Old Testament books which belong to our Eastertide thinking. It is about liberation. There is an important parallel between the Exodus and the Resurrection, between the liberation from captivity under Pharaoh’s bitter yoke and the greater liberation from sin and death. In both cases, there is the necessity of learning.

The lessons are not always easy. We are not always ready learners. Today, in the Exodus lesson we confront a certain aspect of ourselves. For an ancient story, what we confront here about ourselves seems positively contemporary. There is always time for whine in Canada, it seems, to use the old cliché!

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“The same day at evening … came Jesus and stood in the midst”

There is something quite intriguing and compelling, I think, about the accounts of the Resurrection presented to us in the Gospels. They show us how the idea of the Resurrection takes hold of the minds of the disciples and, by extension, our minds. Such is the living power of the Resurrection for each and every generation.

Today is the Octave Day of Easter. It is as if time has stopped and we are still in the moment of the great mystery of God’s great redemptive act, the act of the Resurrection. It is the same day as last Sunday. It is as if the liturgy has not stopped but has continued. That is the meaning of an octave, just like in music, where the first note and the eighth note are the same note except for the upward progression through the scale.

And so here we are in the mystery of the day of Resurrection, but it is the evening. Jesus comes and stands in the midst of the disciples. They are in fear and they are behind closed doors. There is the surprise and wonder of Christ’s sudden appearance. There is the greater surprise and wonder, I think, about what Christ says and does here. At the heart of it all is Christ in their midst.

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“Then opened he their understanding
that they might understand the Scriptures”

It is Luke’s recurring theme about the resurrection. It is about the opening of our minds through the understanding of the Scriptures. We saw that on the road to Emmaus. We see it here with Jesus “[standing] in the midst of his disciples.” Somehow we make sense of the resurrection through the interpretation of the Scriptures. Jesus is our exegete, our interpreter. This is itself a key insight into the Christian faith.

It is an astounding scene. We had, on Maundy Thursday, the institution of the Holy Communion at the last supper in the Upper Room. That intimate and intense event set in the context of the ancient Passover story takes on a whole new meaning through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Luke’s accounts of the resurrection convey a sacramental understanding that underscores the reality of human redemption.

“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself,” Jesus says to the disciples before going on to ask if they have any food and taking a piece of broiled fish and a bit of an honey-comb. What is it all about? It is all testimony to the mystery and the reality of the resurrection. Christ is risen, body and soul. The body is not nothing. Neither is it everything. There is a mystery. The mystery is about human redemption. The mystery is about the larger understanding of our humanity that is opened out to us through Jesus and especially through the interpretation of the Scriptures.

In other words, this meal, too, with Jesus is a learning moment. He teaches them and us about the meaning of his passion and death and about his rising to life again from the dead. The further message that flows out from those events is that “repentance unto forgiveness of sins [is to] be preached in his name unto all nations.” It begins with the disciples in Jerusalem but it continues to the ends of the world and to the end of time. This is the resurrection and its meaning for us. We live in the power of the resurrection. It is about new life and new hope. It is about repentance and forgiveness.

Such things are lived out in the body. They are realised in the every day aspects of our life. We live the resurrection through repentance and forgiveness. For it is Christ who lives in us. If we are the witnesses to these things then we must live what we proclaim. We can only do it in his body, the Church.

For here we wrestle with the understanding of the Scriptures. For here we encounter the Word audible and the Word visible. For here we are fed and nourished in our souls and bodies with the Word proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated. For here we learn what it means to be with Christ. If we will learn.

“Then opened he their understanding
that they might understand the Scriptures”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Tuesday, 2011

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“He was known of them in the breaking of the bread”

After the intensity of the Passion comes the rich wonder of the Resurrection. What is set before us are the scenes of the Resurrection. None is more dramatic than the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Jesus runs out after us.

It is his running after us, as it were, that teaches us so much about the truth of the Resurrection. In the story of the Road to Emmaus, Jesus runs out after us to be with us in Word and Sacrament. In a way, Luke provides us with a picture of the life and witness of the Church. What is altogether of moment in that picture is the presence of Christ – the living, running, risen Christ.

The Resurrection is not a static event. It sets everything in motion. The Church is the running miracle of God. After all, what else could possibly account for the Church, except the existence of God and the truth of the Resurrection? Certainly not ourselves.

What are we ourselves, you and me, and by extension every congregation of souls really, except by times rather dull and dreary, weary and pathetic, boring and not nearly so fascinating as we would like to think we are? Or to put it scripturally, are we not often enough, “foolish and slow of heart”? I mean to be provocative, not insulting, but I do hasten to add, “in ourselves”. I once overheard a conversation in which the subject was the church – not this church in particular, but church in general. The claim was that church is always boring. In a way, I’m afraid, it often is. Why? Well, to be honest we really only need to look at ourselves. Do you really think that you are all that exciting? It is really we who are rather boring, I am afraid.

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Christ is Risen. Alleluia, Alleluia!

The Church’s ancient proclamation captures something of 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. 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 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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Christ is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Who is risen? Jesus Christ is risen. Risen from what? Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Risen to what? Jesus Christ is risen to everlasting life never to die again: “in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” Risen for what? Jesus Christ is risen for us, for our justification, for the purpose of making us right with God, that we may be “alive unto God through Jesus Christ.” We have no life apart from him.

What, then, is the resurrection? The what, first and foremost, is who. Christ is risen. He can only be in us if we are in him. Christ is “the resurrection and the life.” It is what he told us beforehand though we failed to understand. It is what he told us because he who is “the resurrection and the life” is also “the resurrection and the life” for us.

And that is all the joy of this day and, indeed, our abiding joy. We behold the figure of his resurrection and see in it the shape of our own. No faith where there is no resurrection. No Christians where there is no resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. No church where the resurrection is not proclaimed and celebrated. For if he is not risen, then he is not alive and neither are we. If he is not risen, then we, too, shall simply cease to be as if we had never been at all. But “in Christ shall all be made alive.” There can be no holy abiding in him if he is not risen from the dead. And if we do not abide in him, then where shall we dwell? In the tomb? But the tomb is empty. To dwell there is to dwell where there is no meaning and life is not life but death.

But if we cling to our hurts and sorrows, our hatreds and animosities, our pretension and arrogance, our anger and despair; in short, to what Paul calls “the leaven of malice and wickedness,” then we are but the walking dead. We choose death and reject the hope of new life. Let go of it all. Choose life. Choose Christ.

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