Category: Sermons

“He will guide you into all truth”

The opening sentence in the Epistle reading from St. James, however eloquently expressed, is really a religious and philosophical commonplace, even a cliché. But like all clichés there is something profoundly true in it. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” It highlights the idea that every good gift, indeed, every perfect gift comes to us from above, from God, who is constant and eternal in contrast to what is always changing, in contrast to the shadows of what is real.

This recalls Plato’s great dynamic image of the Cave where we are turned around by a process of education from our fixation on the shadows or images of things flickering on a wall to the physical things themselves, and then to the mathematical things that are conceptual and mental, and then to the pure forms of things without which we cannot say what anything really is, and, ultimately, to the realization of the Good which goes beyond both the different forms of knowing and being. The good is above or beyond. And as such it cannot be possessed by us as a thing; instead, it possesses us.

This association with Plato is not something accidental. It belongs to the dynamic of the emergence and crystallization of the Christian Faith out of the conflicts and convergences of Jewish religion, Greek philosophy, and Roman rule. The second sentence of the Epistle brings the opening commonplace to its focus for us. God “has brought us to birth by the word of truth.” That is the gift, the perfect gift, which comes down from above. It is about the idea of truth, the truth which governs our actions as grounded in God and not in the vagaries of our emotions and feelings. “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” Truth does not lie in our self-righteous affirmations of ourselves which are invariably judgments of others. What comes to us from God is the word implanted in us which can only be received in a spirit of gentleness, in mansuetudine Christi, the gentleness of Christ, we might say.

The Gospel readings for the last three Sundays of Eastertide are taken from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus is at pains to teach us through his Passion and Resurrection about God as essential life, the life of the Spirit which embraces and redeems the world and our humanity. The emphasis today is on the Holy Spirit, “the Spirit of truth,” who “will guide you into all truth,” the Holy Spirit who is the love knot or bond of the Father and the Son. It is Jesus who teaches us not only about the Resurrection but about God as Trinity. He teaches us about God the Father, about the Son, and about the Holy Spirit, the mysterium divinum of God himself.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

Jesus comes and goes, it seems, yet he is always in our midst. He is in our midst not as a static presence but in the dynamic of the true meaning of his life captured in the recurring refrain of Eastertide, “because I go to the Father.” That is the radical meaning, in its Christian form, of God as essential life. And while the Passion and the Resurrection open us out to the idea and the reality of God as essential life, they do so only because the joy of the Resurrection is greater than the sorrows of the Passion. Why? Because life and light are greater than death and darkness. The goodness of God and his creation is greater than all sin and evil by definition. It belongs to the good news of Easter to show how this understanding comes to birth in us.

The birthing image is a mothering image. Jesus explains the transformative nature of the radical meaning of the Resurrection by way of an analogy to child-birth. God in relation to us is like a mother; there are a number of mothering images in the Scriptures which signal the deep love of God for our humanity and our world in spite of ourselves.

God is not a reflection of ourselves in the endlessly divisive celebrations of diversity. That is the post-Christian religion of identity politics which endlessly divides us. Rather the wisdom of the Scriptures in the life of the Church is about the redemption of images which unite us and gather us into the essential life of God. We honour our natural derivations, the mothers who bore us, for instance, on this day in our secular culture, Mother’s Day. For there is none who is not born of woman. We honour our mothers best when we place them in the dynamic of God’s life. The image here is about the eternal motion of the Son to the Father. It is the motion of love and sacrifice which conveys joy and delight. It redeems us from ourselves by placing us in the life of God but not in a flight from the world.

We are confused about the images of revelation when we misconstrue them to become reflections of ourselves such as in the competing advocacy agendas of the culture of diversity. “There is,” as Paul so wonderfully puts it, “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ.” We are one in Christ in spite of differences of identity and not because of them. The Resurrection affirms the categories of creation; it does not negate them but neither does it reduce us to them. It seeks instead for us to know ourselves even as we are known in God. That is very different from seeking self-affirmation.

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“For ye were as sheep going astray”

The Collect for Easter 2 captures beautifully the deep truth of these Eastertide readings. Christ is both “a sacrifice for sin” and “an example of godly life”. They are two of the three tropes of the atonement, our being at one with God. Christ is the victor – the one who triumphs over sin and death – but Christ is the atoning sacrifice for us and Christ is the example for us in our lives. Today is also the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the Apostles, and those Apostles, the readings for which equally complement the idea of the interplay of the Passion and the Resurrection particularly in terms of the Farewell Discourse of Jesus. But the image of the Good Shepherd is especially rich and poignant.

The earliest images of the crucifixion depict Christ as King, robed in royal garments and wearing a crown of gold. It is known as the Christus Rex, Christ the King who “reigns and triumphs from the tree” as the great Passiontide hymn of Venantius Fortunatus says (Vexilla Regis prodeum, c. 569). But Christ is “a sacrifice for sin,” as the Collect puts it, the sacrificial victim, the one who bears our sins in his body on the Cross in his Passion. That then leads to the images of the crucifixion that emphasize Christ’s suffering on the Cross, Christ as sacrifice who identifies with human suffering, and as such he is “an example of godly life.” Christ the Victor, Christ the atoning Sacrifice, Christ the holy example. These three images of the doctrine of the atonement are inescapably united and intertwined, inseparable from each other, in all the various images of the crucifixion. But they also belong to the image of the Good Shepherd. The images of the crucifixion and Christ the Good Shepherd go together.

In their interrelation they provide a strong counter to the fragmentation of our world, which is the true meaning of the Babel of our times. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd offers a true and great corrective to our brokenness, our fragmentation and divisiveness because it is the great image of our being gathered to God. For it is at once an image of the Passion as well as the Resurrection. We forget this since the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is so familiar, so comforting, so common that we take it for granted. We forget its radical meaning which Peter’s Epistle, which is part of what was read at the Matins of Holy Saturday, already hints at and which the Gospel so completely shows.

What does it all mean? Simply this. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is at once an image of the Passion and the Resurrection that gathers us into the life of God. We overlook the significance of this story being read on the Second Sunday after Easter in conjunction with SS. Philip & James with its Gospel reading which highlights the Eastertide theme “because I go to the Father” and which connects to the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. It is inescapably a Resurrection image and story; that is its truth and its comfort. But it is centered inescapably on the Passion. “The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep,” Jesus tells us. In other words, the Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God who lays down his life for the sheep.

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

It is as if time has stopped and we are gathered with the disciples in the upper room on the day of Christ’s Resurrection but we are behind closed doors, huddled in fear and uncertainty. The Resurrection accounts all seek to show us how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. It comes to birth in us out of our fears and uncertainties, like Mary coming to the tomb in her early morning grief seeking the body of Christ only to encounter the Risen Christ, like the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus fleeing Jerusalem on this same day in fear and confusion only to have Jesus coming alongside them to engage them and teach them. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” T.S. Eliot asks in The Waste Land; the third is the truth that is always greater than ourselves.

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” Jesus says (Mt. 18.20). And that makes all the difference and changes everything. It changes our understanding of time. Here is the idea of kairos, time as rhythmic and circular, as gathered and concentrated into purpose and meaning as distinct from time as chronos, linear and extended, as a sequence and duration – one thing after another. This Gospel opens us out to the radical meaning of Christ in our midst.

Christ in the midst is a recurring image, especially in John’s Gospel both in terms of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. “They crucified him, and the two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst” (John. 19.18). “The same day at evening… came Jesus and stood in the midst” (John 20.19). As we have had occasion to remark, Easter is not the end of the story but its radical beginning, the radical beginning that has no ending because it is the awakening to the essential life of God which is always prior and yet always present; time is baptized and gathered into eternity. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever. His are the times and the seasons and the years,” as we heard at the blessing of the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil. The awakening to Jesus in the midst is what we contemplate both in the Passion and now in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the event that awakens us to the greater event that is God himself. In media res.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the Scripture text, “Thou art the man” into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Thou art the man”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“Christ is your life. Christ is all in all”

I know. You have heard it over and over again, perhaps even on Good Friday. We know the end of the story, it is commonly said, the happy, clappy ending of Christ’s Resurrection that risks eclipsing Good Friday and the Passion of Christ. We may think that Easter is mere wishful thinking, a kind of hope against the experience of reality, the reality of a world of misery and hurt, of violence and destruction. That it is an escape from reality.

We get it wrong. The Easter celebration of Christ’s Resurrection is not the end of the story but its radical beginning. Paul in Colossians states the deep truth about our life as “hid with Christ in God,” the one “who is [our] life.” But not just us – the few, the elite over and against the deplorables, the others, the ‘them’ whom we despise – no. “Christ is all in all.” His Resurrection reveals the radical truth of our humanity as found in God.

We get it wrong. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how to think it right. They show us how the idea of the Resurrection and its reality comes to birth in human souls. They show us the awakening to the radical beginning. What is that radical beginning? That God is life. “In the beginning God.” “In the beginning was the Word.” “In him was life and the life was the light of men.” “In the beginning” means “in the principle”; our life in that which ever abides. Christ’s Resurrection is not simply an event in time; it is eternity in our midst. It cannot be contained in a tomb let alone the tombs of our minds. The Resurrection is the great break-through moment about essential life that is greater than death, the light that is greater than darkness, the good that is greater than sin and evil.

Postmodernism in its various forms is profoundly anti-intellectual, profoundly anti-spiritual, profoundly negative because of its weddedness to a technocratic way of thinking against which it rails in vanity. Why? Because it is trapped in the very problem which it seeks to escape. Technology per se is not the problem. It is our fixation on it as the form of thinking and being that is the problem, the problem of our linear thinking, of calculative reasoning, as Heidegger puts it, that eclipses meditative thinking. The consequence is nothing less than a loss of our humanity. It is anti-life. The paradox is great. The gnosticism of existentialism that pits the individual in his or her subjective experience against an indifferent and hostile universe parallels the technocratic culture in its flight from that world premised upon an absolute conviction about the isolated self. It seeks to flee the world but forgets, as Neil Postman observes about the issues of technology, that “there is no escaping from ourselves.” Such an insight belongs to what he calls “the wisdom of the ages and the sages.” The Resurrection is the Christian form of that wisdom.

Holy week is about confronting ourselves. But that is only possible through the truth and power of God without which our lives are but pretense and nonsense, folly and narcissism, sin and evil. Holy week has made that perfectly clear to us, if we have the eyes and the hearts to hear and learn.

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Christ is risen!

There is something quite powerful and moving about the Easter Vigil. It complements the intensity of Holy Week which has immersed us in the Passion of Christ by gathering us into its deeper meaning.

Our little country vigil simplifies the rituals of the Easter Vigil. There is the lighting of the Paschal Candle. There is the singing of the great Paschal Praeconium, the wonderful and joyous song and prayer of the Easter proclamation of Christ’s victory over sin and death. There are the readings of some of the prophecies of Scripture that belong to our thinking about the Passion and its meaning as realized in the Resurrection. There is the renewal of our baptismal vows, our dying to sin and to ourselves in order to live to God. And, finally, there is the Lauds of Easter morning. Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Mass.

Vigils are about our watching and waiting. The Easter vigil is our watching and waiting upon God in the work of human redemption accomplished in Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The Paschal Praeconium proclaims and teaches us the deep theological meaning of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. This is the night which illuminates our understanding about God as essential life. “The night is come” in which Christ triumphs over the darkness of our world of sin and death. “The night is come” in which we are “delivered from the shadow of death” and are “renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” All that stands between God and the world, between God and man is overcome in Christ who reconciles all things to God.

Our watching and our waiting in the great Vigil of Easter is the highest activity of our humanity. We can only watch and wait upon God but in so doing we learn who we are as God’s children. That is the great blessing because it counters all of the false notions about what it means to be ourselves in our contemporary culture. We are not cosmic orphans cast adrift in an indifferent and unfeeling universe, cast out into a hostile world. We are not abstract autonomous individuals isolated and alone, trapped in ourselves. Nor are we merely bots, cogs in the machine of our technocratic culture. We are recalled to God’s creation and to our life with God, a life which connects us with the world and one another. We are quite literally freed to God and so to a free relation with one another in loving care and compassion. We discover the truth of ourselves in the body of Christ.

The joy of the Vigil is our rejoicing not in ourselves but in Christ. Christ is our life. “Rise heart; Thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delayes,” as George Herbert’s poem, Easter, puts it. Sing his praise always.

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2022

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“Thou art the man”

Nathan’s word convicts David of his sin. It leads to his confession. “I have sinned against the Lord.” Sin is death in contradiction to life. But life is greater than death. This is something which the quiet of Holy Saturday reveals as we gather at the tomb. The full meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross begins to be explored through our quiet watching at the tomb in the readings for this day. What we contemplate is Christ’s death as the means of God’s overcoming of all that separates us from God and from one another. Holy Saturday points to the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation. Such is the meaning of the creedal teaching known as the “descent into Hell.”

We are meant to see ourselves in our sins in Christ. As 1 Peter 3 puts it, “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.” The fuller extent of that mystery is that this is, in principle, universal, for all, because “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” the prison of death, picking up on the imagery of Zechariah at Matins. “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit” (Zech. 9.11). The Epistle points to this as a “figure” symbolising baptism. It is the transition from death to life “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” which we await.

The Gospel reading continues the Holy Week theme of persecution, namely of us as the persecutors of God in Christ. It is the attempt to seal the tomb against the thought – the conspiracy theory of us as persecutors – that ‘they’, the disciples, might come to steal the body and then say, “He is risen from the dead.” Such is the extent of the violence of persecution even in the vain attempt to kill the idea already present that there is something different, something unique, something compelling and transformative in Christ’s crucifixion and death, something greater than death.

Such is the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. As the second lesson, again from 1 Peter puts it, Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.” In going and preaching unto the spirits in prison, we have the idea of being gathered by God’s Word who is light and life. God, as Thomas Aquinas, puts it, is “the beginning and end of all creatures but especially rational creatures.” Such is the deeper meaning of Holy Week. Only God makes a way for us to him through death. But it means confronting ourselves as dead in our sins that we might become alive in Christ.

We watch and wait both now and at the vigil. We watch and wait expectantly upon God, the principle of all light and life. Our watching is our waiting upon that perfect union of God and man in Christ which makes us one with God and which is greater than sin and death.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2022

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