Category: Sermons

And when he is come, he will reprove the world

It is a remarkable phrase that Jesus uses about the coming of “the Comforter, the Spirit of truth” who “will guide [us] into all truth.” What does it mean to “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement”? The word runs a gamut of meanings from ‘convince’ and ‘refute’ to ‘examine’ and ‘question’, from ‘put to shame’ to ‘accuse.’ To reprove is about a kind of critical assessment of something that is not ethical. It implies a kind of judgement upon the world. Things are not quite as they should be nor even as we would like them to be. An understatement, to be sure!

We would all like Covid-19 to go away, perhaps even more for the fear of it to go away and never come again. And yet the language of the Epistle and Gospel for today is about the comings and goings of God which is somehow expedient, good or beneficial for us, whatever the times or circumstances.

Every good and perfect gift comes down from above, “from the Father of lights,” James tells us, while Jesus in the Gospel talks about going his way to the one that sent him, going to the Father, which means going away from the disciples such that they shall “see [him] no more” and “sorrow hath filled [their] hearts.” Yet that is said to be expedient or good for us because only so can the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, be sent unto us. What, we may ask, is going on in these readings? A confusion of motions, comings down and goings up? The comings and goings of God, the Son to the Father, and the Spirit as sent by the Son? What does it mean?

It all belongs to the radical meaning of Christ’s Death and Resurrection and to our participation in the divine life through these motions. The way up and the way down are one and the same. The ascent of our souls to God as the true end and desire of our being and God’s descent to us both in Christ’s Incarnation and in the coming down of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, are really one and the same, differentiated in time but united in the eternity of God. Time, as Plato famously said, is but the moving image of eternity (Timaeus).  These Eastertide readings offer a wonderful commentary, perhaps, on that philosophical insight. It is simply and profoundly about how we are embraced and participate in the divine life. Our comings and goings are gathered up into the comings and goings of God to us and with us but, more importantly, as belonging to the comings and goings of God himself, so to speak, since we can only speak in these human ways. The mystery of Easter gathers us into the eternal dynamic of the love of God.

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“Your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you”

Really? Do we really believe this? It lies at the heart of the Christian understanding. “You now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice.” Death and Resurrection are the fundamental pattern of Christian life. That pattern marks the rhythm of the liturgy and of our lives of service and sacrifice. It is really all about dying to live, dying to ourselves and living for one another. It is only possible through our being alive to God, to Christ in us.

The lessons of the Resurrection are quite profound and poignant. They are all about the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples and by extension in us of the truth and power of the Resurrection. It changes our understanding and outlook. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how we come to learn the things which matter most. And far from being a flight from the past, they reveal the redemption of the past and show us the power of memory.

Jesus makes himself known on the Road to Emmaus not just in the opening of our understanding about his Passion through the Scriptures but “in the breaking of the bread.” Jesus tells us Mary Magdalene not to touch him but “go and tell” the disciples about his mission and ours in his going to “my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Yet in the same chapter he tells Thomas to touch and see and so believe. Jesus proclaims peace and forgiveness behind closed doors to all of us huddled in our fears about Covid-19, our fears, I am afraid, of one another and our world, our modern fears of death and uncertainty. Jesus bids us “come and have breakfast” at a barbecue on a beach – Oh, don’t we wish!

All of these encounters have this point in common. They are all about what Christ teaches. They are all about the radical presence of God with us, not as collapsed into the world, but as raising us and our world into its real truth and meaning in God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (Jn.1.4).  The recurring theme is signalled here in today’s Gospel when Jesus says, “I will see you again.”

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Ye were as sheep going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd
and Bishop of your souls

“All we like sheep have gone astray,” the sentence from Isaiah (53.6) for Morning Prayer on Good Friday reminds us (BCP, p. 1). “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,” the General Confession bids us pray (BCP, p. 4 & 19). Such are the ways of our being “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.” God “governs us as masters of ourselves,” Aquinas notes, but that presupposes a deep awareness on our part about human sinfulness. We can only be masters of ourselves through divine governance, the one who rules us as the Shepherd of our souls, the one who returns us to the radical truth of ourselves and of our humanity precisely because we have erred and strayed and are lost to ourselves.

Such is the significance of the Gospel of Christ as the Good Shepherd. We have a far too sentimental and emotional attachment to this concept, I fear, and often fail to recognise its radical meaning. Yet it is there before our eyes and speaks to the darkness and the dangers of our current world whether it is Covid-19 or the rampage of mindless madness in the mass shooting in Nova Scotia which we are suffering through with broken hearts. It speaks to the darkness of our hearts and minds.

We can’t possibly grasp its significance without realising how deeply embedded it is in the Christian understanding of the Resurrection, on the one hand, and in the transformation of images in the Hebrew Scriptures, on the other hand. The Second Sunday in Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd belongs inescapably to the doctrine of the Resurrection, to the fruit of the Passion of Christ, to the radical meaning of God’s love for our wounded and broken humanity, and so to our province of the broken-hearted.

Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd. He tells us that the Good Shepherd gives his life for the sheep. Such is sacrifice, such is love, God’s love for us. “Herein is love,” for God’s love for us is the ground of our love towards one another. But the background images from the Hebrew Scriptures are needed for a fuller understanding. Principal among those is the 23rd Psalm, the Shepherd’s Psalm. “The Lord shepherds me” or “the Lord is my Shepherd” or “the Lord rules me,” Dominus regit me, as the name of one of the familiar hymn tunes puts it. As Aquinas notes, “he who shepherds, rules.” The real rule and governance in our lives is Christ the Good Shepherd. It is one of the dominant images of Resurrection love.

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Jesus came and stood in the midst

It was, we are told, “the same day at evening,” meaning Easter. It is as if time stopped and yet even that doesn’t quite capture the wonder and the mystery of the Passion and the Resurrection. It is more like being in the eternal now of God, in the moment which gives time its meaning and without which time and our lives have no meaning. That is the power of the readings for the Octave Day of Easter. They speak profoundly to our current crisis. The world, it seems, has stopped. There is not the same hustle and bustle of frantic and busy lives. Every day has a certain quiet but anxious sameness to it. And like the disciples in John’s Gospel we, too, are behind closed doors. Like the disciples, we, too, are perhaps in fear and worry about our suffering world and about ourselves.

Yet the Epistle reading from 1 John (5. 4-12) makes the extraordinary statement that “whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world.” What is born of God is faith, he says. “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” As he explains, it has altogether to do with Christ’s sacrifice by which “God has given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son.”

The Resurrection changes everything because it changes how we think and feel about ourselves and our world. When we are in fear and anger about the world and about being cut off and isolated from one another, then those things define us. We grant them a total power over us. That is to be defined by the world of suffering and death. What is our faith? It is simply that Christ is in the midst with us. “Jesus came and stood in the midst.” That changes everything, if we will let it. At least that is what the Gospel shows.

It is a powerful image that signals the radical truth and nature of God. God’s love is present in the midst of the sufferings of the world. That has been the stark meaning of the Passion of Christ that now carries over into the Resurrection. We have seen over and over again how Christ is in the midst of everything: in the midst of the crowd shouting “hosannas” in joy and then crying, “let him be crucified,” in hostility. Such are the contradictions of our hearts and our world. He is crucified between two thieves. Such are the cruelties and enmities in our hearts and our world. The whole of the Passion has been about his being in the midst of the chaos and confusion of our wounded and fallen world. He suffers for us and with us. Why? One word. Love. The one thing that doesn’t die. Love is forever. That is faith, a deep insight and trust in God as love. Such is the Resurrection, too.

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Jesus himself stood in the midst of his disciples

God, we have suggested, is in the midst of the sufferings of our world and day. Never more so, than in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ which shows us exactly that. What is of the greatest interest with respect to the essential Christian teaching of the Resurrection is that it is something which we learn from Christ. He comes into our midst. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” That statement from 1 John 4.10 which we heard/ read in the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p.173) reverberates throughout Eastertide. Divine love conquers sin and evil. It is the life of the Resurrection in us but it has to be learned.

That is the point of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples. It is about opening their understanding to see the principle and truth of reality in their very midst. It is a demonstration of the ultimate ‘lordship’ of Christ and it bears witness to Christ as true God and true man. The Lucan Gospel for Easter Tuesday is poignant and touching,  even if touch is now persona non grata in our world.  Yet there are ways of being touched by words, a kind of transmutation of the sensible into the intelligible.

Christ comes into our midst but the initial reaction is one of terror and fright even after Jesus’ first word of peace. “Peace be unto you.” They thought they were seeing a ghost. One of the important teachings of the Resurrection is that it requires us to think about the body in a new way or, perhaps, we might say, just to think about the body. For as something thinkable then it is already more than though not less than physical and material. Thinking after all is a kind of act of de-sensing; it removes things  from simply the tangible. It is an act of abstraction, a necessary and critical feature of what it means to be human.

This is the power of Jesus’ response to their reaction. “Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” Thoughts that are negative and sceptical. “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and see;” Jesus says, “ for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” This is a strong testimony to the reality of the Resurrection. The humanity of Christ is not a chimera, a mere appearance. It is very real and yet its reality is more though not less than what we see and imagine. Why? Because of the way in which we are wedded to the world and to ourselves. We struggle to learn how to think about ourselves and our own bodies in their deeper truth as grounded in God’s will and purpose. We are more, not less than our bodies.

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“And they rose up … and returned to Jerusalem”

They were running away from Jerusalem in fear and perplexity about the events of the crucifixion, about everything, we might say “concerning Jesus of Nazareth”. The Resurrection changes everything. It literally turns us around. They rose up and returned to Jerusalem. How and why? Because Christ runs out after us.

The Passion of Christ is God’s suffering with us in our suffering world, God in the midst of our confusions, our sins, our fears, our tempers; in short, our evil and unloveliness. The whole of the Passion is about Christ in the midst. He is even crucified between two thieves. The Resurrection is the same. It is about Christ in the midst, making himself known in the radical truth of his being with the Father.

Easter Monday presents us with one of the classic stories of the Resurrection, the story of the Road to Emmaus. Two unnamed disciples are fleeing Jerusalem. Jesus runs out after them and “himself drew near, and went with them,” unrecognized by them. They were not, after all, expecting him. They were, after all, consumed and preoccupied in their confusions and uncertainties, not altogether unlike us in the face of Covid-19, clinging to our ‘technologies’, worshipping them in our idolatry even as they are at the heart of the problem of globalization, itself a technocratic artifice.

Jesus draws near and enters into their conversation. Why? To draw out of them precisely their confusion and perplexity. The two unnamed disciples give us a very complete account of the crucifixion, its immediate aftermath, their dashed hopes and expectations about Jesus, and their bewilderment about the empty tomb, about the testimony of angels, and even about the witness of the women! “We trusted,” they say, “that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” His crucifixion and death they were not expecting and cannot understand. The paradox is wonderful. It is precisely through his Passion and Death that Christ redeems Israel, the greater Israel, we may say, of our humanity, for such is the greater vocation and meaning of Israel.

“Foolish ones and slow of heart,” Jesus says to them and proceeds to unpack the radical meaning of his Passion and Death. He opens out to them  “in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” In a way, it is very much about how we read, how we think and understand God and his dealing with us. In a way, God has to break us in order to make us, to make us new. “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” as the poet/ preacher John Donne says, evoking the extravagant language of violence and even rape. It is not enough, it seems, for God simply to “knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend,” the gentler forms of some of the more sentimental biblical images of God’s care. No. “Break, blow, burn, and make me new,” the poet demands of God. For only so might we be able to stand. And if that were not troubling enough, he cries out “imprison me, for I except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Extravagant language, indeed, and yet language that complements the wonder of the story of the Road to Emmaus. Why?

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“The night is come”

“The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium proclaims exultantly. This night marks the beginning of something new, a new creation, not through the destruction but by the renewing of creation. What is new is what the great Easter proclamation, known as the Paschal Preconium, signals. Resurrection. That is the new creation. That is God’s great work of making something out of nothing, indeed, out of the greater nothingness of human sin and evil.

How can there be a greater nothing? Only as a figure of speech, it might seem, and yet in another way, that is exactly the great joy of the Vigil and of Easter. We wait expectantly for God’s great second act; such is the Resurrection. Sin and evil seek to unmake the creation and even, folly of all follies, to unmask and dismiss God from every human horizon. Sin and evil try to make creation and God nothing. God takes human sin and evil, and out of its greater nothingness, out of its vanity and folly, makes a new creation. There is Resurrection not by a denial of the past of the Passion and Death of Christ but by its transformation. God makes something out of the suffering and death that we have caused. “The night is come.”

“The night is come” when we can shout with exceeding great joy that Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! What that means is signalled in the liturgy of the Vigil. It means that death has been completely changed, overcome; it has undergone a radical make-over. Death is no longer the terminus ad quem, the end of the road, the end to which all must succumb; death has been transformed into a transitus, a means to greater end. We pray that our “corrupt affections,” our sins being “buried with Christ,” “we may pass to our joyful resurrection”  “through the grave and gate of death.” The grave cannot hold him and God seeks something more for us. We only live when we live in him.

“The night is come” that out-nights all other nights including the love-duet between Lorenzo and Jessica in the Merchant of Venice, each seeking to gain an advantage over the other in references to the ancient stories of love and its powers. “The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium says “wherein thou dividest the sea and madest the children of Israel to pass over as on dry land”,  the night, too, in which the people of Israel are led and guided by a pillar of light. The imagery recalls God’s deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery in the Exodus. So this night builds upon that story and its importance for the understanding of Israel. Christ’s Resurrection is framed in terms of God’s deliverance of the ancient people of Israel from death and slavery and extends it to the whole of humanity.

“The night is come,” then, when “all that believe in Christ upon the face of the earth” are “delivered from the shadow of death” and “are renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection and its universal extent.

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“Christ hath once suffered for sins … that he might bring us to God”

The quiet of Holy Saturday is the peace of paradise. All has been accomplished. All of the horror and noise of Good Friday is past. Christ is dead. The fury and rage of our disordered humanity in all its evil force is spent. There is a kind of stillness to Holy Saturday and to our service of Matins and Ante-communion. All is at rest, it seems, at least in terms of the destructiveness of our humanity in the vain folly of trying to kill God.

Yet God has let us have our way with him. Christ is crucified and now lies buried. We meet at his tomb and while all is quiet there are some disquieting rumours. The human spirit in its confusion is never quiet, it seems. There are rumours and talk of conspiracies about stealing Christ’s body and claiming that he is still alive. The Gospels do not hide from view the variety of opinions already in circulation about the mystery of the resurrection. But apart from the restlessness and inconstancy, folly and gullibility of our world, there is something else which is also stirring on Holy Saturday. We wait at the tomb of Christ in the sorrow of mourners. We wait in the quiet stillness of the morning.

But already something else is happening. The readings from 1 Peter hint at the deeper meaning of Holy Saturday. They hint at the creedal principle of the descent into hell, of Christ going and preaching to the spirits in prison, as Peter puts it, drawing upon the imagery of Zechariah about release and liberation. This will ultimately have its visual representation in the icon of the Resurrection in the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy which depicts Christ bringing Adam and Eve up out of the prison house of Sheol, of Hades, of Hell, of death.

1 Peter points us to the further dimensions of the theory of the atonement. God seeks to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation past, present, and future. Such is the radical nature of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. He suffered for our sins to bring us to God. The reconciling love of God in the sacrifice of Christ has a long reach both backwards and forwards since it seeks to gather all time back into itself without which time has no meaning.

We rest while God in his unceasing activity seeks the good of the whole of our humanity. That should in like manner challenge us about our dealings with one another. It would seem, however, that even in the quiet stillness of Holy Saturday, stones will not be able to contain or constrain the love of God in Jesus Christ

“Christ hath once suffered for sins … that he might bring us to God”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, April 11th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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“It is finished”

Yes. “It is finished.” And yet, in another way it is never finished. What is finished? All that belongs to the reconciliation of God and man through Christ’s atoning sacrifice. What is never finished? That reconciliation in us is a life-long project; it is only finished in us when we are finished and gathered to Christ. Here we are a work in process. The process is about our continuing efforts to realize who we are in Christ in our lives. Our justification, the truth of our being, is fully and perfectly in Christ; not so in us. For us there is the constant struggle to realize in ourselves the reconciliation between God and man in Christ.

Central to that constant struggle is what belongs to the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, namely our contemplation of the Cross and our hearing, as it were, the lamentations of Christ, his words to us about the meaning of sin and grace, the “reproaches.” Our Solemn Liturgy has four parts: first, the liturgy of the Word beginning with the general confession but no absolution, the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p. 173), the Good Friday Collects, Psalm 22, a Lesson from Isaiah 50. 4-10, the Salvator Mundi, the Epistle reading from Hebrews, and then the Passion according to St. John; second, the Solemn Intercessions; third, the Reproaches of Christ to us in the words of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in which we contemplate our betrayals of God’s love; and fourth, our communion with the dead Christ. On Good Friday, there is no absolution nor any celebration of the Holy Eucharist; there is only communion through what was consecrated and kept from Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday, we identify with Christ in his death for us.

All pretty somber and serious, and rightly so. In the context of our suffering world where there have been and continue to be an escalating number of deaths through the Covid-19 outbreak, the Good Friday service allows us to place our suffering world, and the deaths of so many, in the sufferings of Christ. He suffers even unto death, Why? That love may accomplish what belongs to the truth of our humanity as reconciled with God.

“It is finished,” Jesus says. It is the last word of Christ on the Cross in John’s Gospel. It signals a kind of end, a sense of accomplishment, of purpose realized. It signals atonement. All that belongs to the reconciliation of God and man is accomplished. Such is the divine love which seeks our good, our salvation, our completeness. Yet, in another sense, love is never finished. Divine love is ever active and never static. God is actus purus, pure act, as the theologians say. Love is ever in motion. That eternal motion is about the constant love of the Son for the Father in the bond of their mutual and indwelling love, the love of the Trinity.

And that love is what we seek to realize more and more in our lives even as we know only too well that our sins constantly beset us. There is no end, it seems, to our sins. But the good news of Good Friday which makes this day “Good Friday” is that nothing, absolutely “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.” Knowing that means striving to live it in our lives with one another. Such a striving is for God in us. It is “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” What makes that prayer so powerful is Christ’s word to us on the Cross. “It is finished.” It is all there in him and so we can seek it for us in our lives. That is our constant challenge: to realize in ourselves what has been accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice. Such is the cross in our lives. We seek to bear witness to what he has done for us.

“It is finished”

Fr. David Curry
Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, April 10th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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