Category: Sermons

“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep”

The image of the shepherd, as Fr. Crouse puts it, is “everywhere a symbol of divine and human government,” the latter in imitation of the former. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is especially familiar to many Christians and to many others. It is frequently depicted in art and music down throughout the ages. There is something at once compelling and comforting about the image. Yet we forget, perhaps, its radical meaning and significance.

It is not by accident that it is read in the classical eucharistic lectionaries of the Western Church on the Second Sunday after Easter. It is read in the context of the resurrection and reveals its deeper meaning. Last week marked both the natural phenomenon of the solar eclipse and the end of Ramadan for the Islamic world. The fast of Ramadan ended with the Feast of Eid al-Fitr, much like Lent and Easter. Ramadan commemorates the giving of the Qur’an to Mohammed, a reminder about the various traditions of revelation in which God is made known. Easter, too, is about what is made known to us through the resurrection, the central doctrine of the Christian faith that opens us out to the radical nature of the divinity and the humanity of Christ and of the life of God as Trinity.

The Eastertide readings offer a kind of inverse of the eclipse. And so, too, with the readings for today. Simply put, the resurrection does not eclipse the passion; rather it makes visible what is hidden and present in the passion, namely, light in darkness, life in death. It makes wonderfully explicit an insight shared by a great number of religious and spiritual traditions about the primacy of the eternal life of God. In other words, the passion and resurrection of Christ witness to the powerful idea of the principle of life itself which is greater than sin and death, greater than suffering and evil which they, in fact, presuppose.

It means that we have to think the passion and the resurrection together. The Collect is very clear. God has given his “only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” Death and resurrection. The Epistle reading is from 1st Peter 2, part of the Mattins reading for Holy Saturday morning. It explicitly highlights Christ crucified, who “suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow his steps” and “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.” The reading ends, too, with an image of the shepherd and sheep. “For [we] were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” Such language reflects the double theme of divine and human governance symbolized repeatedly, albeit in different registers of intensity, in the Scriptures and in art and culture in terms of the shepherd, but most powerfully in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd.

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“This is the witness, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”

“The same day,” John tells us. What same day? The same day as Easter. It is as if time has slowed, as if we are simply in the moment and meaning of Easter Day. The same day but “at evening”; “there was evening and there was morning, one day,” Genesis tells us about the wonder of creation. Here is the greater wonder of redemption, the new creation through the Resurrection. Where are we?

We are caught up in the mystery of this same day, the eternal day symbolic of the sabbath of God in the radical meaning of God’s eternal life given and made known to us in Christ, as John says in the Epistle. That is what we are struggling to understand. We are very much, I think, especially in the confusions of our culture of fear and death, with the disciples on the evening of that one and same day. We are behind closed doors. It is a powerful symbol of our human uncertainties and fears. We are behind the closed doors of our minds; buried in ourselves, dead to life. Our minds are like tombs. It is an appropriate image for our culture of fear and death; closed in on ourselves.

Yet, what we are given to see is God opening our minds. How? By appearing in our midst. There is, first, as saw last week the witness of Mary Magdalene finding the empty tomb and running to Peter and John who confirm her finding but revealing their perplexity “for as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.” The second Gospel reading from Mark at Easter (BCP, p. 185) makes this same point: the women coming to the tomb, finding the stone rolled away and “a young man sitting on the right side” of the sepulchre, “clothed in a long white garment.” As Mark puts it, “they were affrighted” or amazed but are told “be not affrighted: ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified; he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.” It is evidence from absence, the witness of the empty tomb, which is not the same thing as absence of evidence. For there is also the witness of the young man or angel. “He” who was crucified, whose body you seek, “is risen,” they are told. Something has changed. It marks the beginning of the process of learning the radical meaning of the Resurrection. It changes everything but not by negating the realities of the Passion. The Crucifixion and the Resurrection have to be thought together.

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

It is finished. Done. Consummatum est. But are we? The pageant of the Passion in Holy Week has carried us through the accounts of the Passion from Matthew, through Mark and Luke, and now culminates with the Passion according to St. John on Good Friday. Christ is lifted up before us and we hear what is his last word from the Cross in John’s Gospel.

Yet it is the penultimate word of Christ from the Cross in terms of the ordering pattern of the seven last words as established by the native Peruvian priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, in Lima in the late 17th century; a pattern which subsequently shaped the Good Friday devotional traditions in both Reformed and Roman Catholic churches in Europe and paradoxically returned to influence devotional practices in the Americas. That pattern arises from the immersion in the Passion accounts and seeing in them an interior logic or motion.

Three of the Seven Last Words derive from Luke, another three by John, while Matthew and Mark both provide us with the heart-rending cry of desolation, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” Luke’s account gives us the first and last word as the beginning and end of Christ’s prayer to the Father: “Father, forgive them for what they do” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” This provides, as Fr. Bedoya understood, I think, a profound insight into God as Trinity and gathers into that relationship all the forms of human relationship in terms of penitence and loving care.

“Jesus remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom” is the prayer of the penitent thief crucified with Jesus that gives rise to Jesus’ second word in Luke’s account: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise;” itself an important feature of the radical meaning of human redemption understood in terms of the restoration of creation and our place in it. John’s first word is equally compelling because it speaks to us about the care of one another in the body of Christ. “Woman, behold thy son,” Jesus says to Mary and to the disciple, John, he says, “Behold thy mother.” It is the third word in the sequence of the Seven Last Words, the word in which Christ lifted up before us commends us to the care of one another, seeing one another in the familial intimacy of son and mother. It marks a kind of exchange in seeing ourselves and one another in Christ. Following the fourth word, Christ’s cry of dereliction which voices the radical meaning of sin as desolation and emptiness, the deeper meaning of our self-willed separation from God and the truth of his creation, we have the fifth word from the Cross which in John’s Passion is Christ’s second word. “I thirst,” and then his final word which is the sixth word in Fr. Bedoya’s sequence, “It is finished.”

It is the only word of the seven last words without any personal pronouns. It states a simple but profound spiritual truth about the meaning of the Passion as concentrated for us in the figure of Christ crucified as lifted up before us. It is a theological statement about redemption. What is finished?, we might ask. All that belongs to human redemption, all that the Son has come to accomplish by doing the will of the Father who sent him. That ‘all‘ is about the radical meaning of human sin and evil embraced in the Crucified who was made sin for us and in whom we see our sins made visible, even as the serpent was raised up in the wilderness by Moses. But that too is testament to the love of Christ who wills to bear our sins in his body, the body of his humanity.

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

“He carried himself in his own hands.” Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the most intense part of the Passion, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days. Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum meaning commandment and refers to Christ’s repeated statement in John’s Gospel, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another.” And as we have seen in the Office readings from St. John that commandment turns upon our keeping his words and abiding in his love. That love is the love of the Trinity.

But “a new commandment”? In what sense is it a new commandment? Do we not find the commandment to love God with the whole of our being in the Torah of the Jewish Scriptures as well as to love our neighbour? Yes, to be sure. Yet in the intensity of Holy Week and, especially on this holy night, those two commandments are uniquely concentrated for us in the figure of Jesus Christ. They are not just what we ought to do (but which of course we fail to do). They are radically fulfilled in Christ’s words and actions on this night understood precisely in anticipation of his Passion. What makes the new commandment new is the Cross in which God in Christ gives his life to us, for us, and in us. His sacrifice is his love lifted up before us already even before his being lifted up on the Cross. Hence the wonder of Augustine’s remark that “he carried himself in his own hands” in reference to the one of the central features of this day of many moving parts, the scene of Christ with the disciples in the Upper Room at the supper of the Passover. Take, eat; drink. This is my body; this is my blood.

The symbolism becomes increasingly clear. It is captured in Paul’s great statement that we proclaim in joy at Easter: “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.” Christ is the Passover, the Paschal Lamb who gives his life for us. The new commandment is his sacrificial love at work and moving in us. Such is service and sacrifice which Maundy Thursday illustrates in its various moments: the institution of the Eucharist, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the agony in Gethsemane, as well as the other events such as the liturgical stripping of the altar, the King’s touch, and the Royal Maundy or giving of alms. They all belong to the Passion and to the forms of our participation in his Passion. They are all about sacrifice and service.

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

Our Parish custom has been to pray the Service of Tenebrae on the Eve of Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae is the liturgy of anticipation. It is about praying the monastic services of Mattins and Lauds of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday on the preceding evenings. Tenebrae means shadows or darkness. It suggests the way in which the Passion is shadowed forth before us and enlightens us even in the shadows. The word comes from the responsories of Good Friday, Tenebrae factae sunt cum crucifixissent Jesum as derived from the accounts of the Crucifixion. “There was darkness when they crucified Jesus.”

The office or service of Tenebrae is a way of going in and through the Passion in part through the Psalms with their Antiphons. The Antiphons are scriptural passages that frame each Psalm and provide an interpretative matrix for its meaning and understanding in the context of the Passion. In other words, the Psalms are seen in the light of the Passion through the Antiphon even as the Passion is further illuminated by the Psalms. There is a kind of to and fro in this, a kind of back and forth between the images of the Hebrew Scriptures and those of the New Testament.

Of particular significance are the readings tonight from Lamentations with its haunting and convicting question “Was there ever grief like mine?” understood as said by Jesus himself. Read along with his high priestly prayer in John 17, they provide the theological principle for the whole Passion and Life of Christ. It is all part of the theology of the atonement, about our being made at one with God through Christ’s sacrifice understood as love.

George Herbert’s poem “Sacrifice” recounts the whole story of Christ as revealed in the Gospels by way of using the phrase from Lamentations as a recurring refrain. We will hear it again on Good Friday in the Reproaches. Tenebrae in every way anticipates and intensifies the Passion and its meaning for us.

Holy Week is unsettling and disturbing; everything is out of joint. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; / my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax,” as Psalm 22 so powerfully puts it. But this is us. We are bent out of shape, as it were, twisted and turned in upon ourselves and away from God, homo incurvatus in se.

But it is in this sense of darkness and disarray that we sense the transformation of images, the transformation of the nature of our relationship with God. It means going through the Passion in this intensely focussed and rigorous way, constantly exploring a great range of images that turn in one way or another upon the reality of our life with God. The challenge of the Holy Week liturgies is about accepting the rich confusion and complexity of things and finding that what holds everything together is God and God alone. Anticipating the Passion only serves to heighten its intensity and its meaning in us.

Tenebrae is one way in which we pray the Passion through the Psalms in particular and find ourselves in it, finding in the darkness and shadows of human experience something of the light of Christ.

Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae 2024

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