Category: Sermons

He brought us to birth by the word of truth

Another birthing image, another image of new life in Christ. Eastertide grounds us in the life of the risen Christ. That is not something static but dynamic. We are set in motion, caught up in the motions of God towards us and with us, drawn into the motions of the Son to the Father. And all through the Spirit of truth whom Christ and the Father send to us. “He will guide you into all truth,” Jesus says. The Spirit of truth is also known as the Paraclete, the Comforter, the one who strengthens us in our life with God.

The Easter season abounds with this sense of an orientation and a direction. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.” And in the last three Sundays of the Easter Season, everything that belongs to human experience and human hopes and expectations is gathered into the motion of the Son to the Father captured in the phrase “because I go to my Father.” Again, it is entirely dynamic.

We live in the motions of the Son’s love for the Father through the Spirit, the bond of their love and power. What is being opened out to us is the reality of the life of the Spirit. The resurrection appearances are not just some sort of show and tell. They reveal the greater and more radical truth of our humanity as found in and with God. That is captured for us in the image of the Son’s going to the Father. In today’s Gospel, that fundamental sense of orientation and direction is understood in terms of righteousness.

The Spirit, Christ says, “reprove[s] the world of righteousness.” What does that mean? It signals the contrast between the world of human sin and folly, our unrighteousness, on the one hand, and God’s absolute justice, the divine righteousness, on the other hand. That is found in the Son’s relation to the Father in the Spirit. True justice or righteousness is not found in ourselves but in our relation to God. In these lessons from John’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching us about the Holy Spirit, about the nature of the divine life of God as Trinity. The Resurrection points us to the Ascension, to the homeland of the Spirit. It is all about a kind of orientation of our hearts and minds in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father.

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“Speak the truth in love”

Mark is the Eastertide Saint par excellence; his commemoration always falls within the orbit of the Easter Season. As such he belongs to our Eastertide reflections on the radical nature of Christ’s Resurrection.

That this is paradoxical is perhaps not surprising. The so-called short ending of his Gospel, referring to the earliest texts that we have, ends not with the Resurrection but with the statement that “they were afraid.” The longer ending takes us somewhat further towards the Resurrection and its power at work in us.“They were afraid,” however, captures perfectly the condition of our awareness of being broken hearted, our awareness of our lack and insufficiency. Yet, to know our insufficiency is to know our brokenness at the same time as to be looking to our wholeness.

The longer version belongs to the Canonical Scriptures, to be sure, to the texts that are received as authoritative, and yet, the fact of the shorter version remains intriguing and suggestive. In so many ways, it belongs just as firmly and fully to the accounts of the Resurrection as the final ending. Consider it an ending within that ending.

The paradoxes mount up but in ways that belong to the greater paradox of the Resurrection itself, the paradox of dying in order to live. That is the fundamental pattern of Christian life which provides us with a way to face our brokenness and our incompleteness. In facing such things we are in principle open to the one in whom alone we find our wholeness. It means confronting our fears and our anxieties without being defined by them. It means not conforming to the expectations of the world but to the greater work of God with us and in us. The building up of the body of Christ is not about church buildings per se but about what they exist for. They exist only to remind us of our life in Christ.

This is why the Epistle reading from Ephesians is read on The Feast of St. Mark. It speaks to us about the truth of our lives in the love of Christ which alone is the principle“for the building up of the body of Christ.” Speaking the truth in love, as Paul suggests, equally belongs to our being witnesses to the Gospel of Christ even in the face of persecution and worldly troubles of whatever sort, whether it be political or natural catastrophes.

The challenge of The Feast of St. Mark is signalled in the Collect which draws upon both the Epistle and the Gospel readings. We are to stand firm “in the truth of [his] holy Gospel” and not give in to “every blast of vain doctrine”; in short, to be established in truth with love even when everything seems to be falling down around us. To speak the truth in love is to let Christ rule in us. The simple honesty of Mark’s Gospel allows us to face our fears and yet remain firm in our witness, holding fast to “the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark.”

“Speak the truth in love”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Mark, 2018

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“Because I go to the Father”

How do we know what is wanted to be known? More to the point, how do we know what God wants us to know? The Easter Season presents us with some remarkable lessons about who we are in Christ. They are the teachings of Christ about the nature of our radical life with God and in God without which we have no life. At the heart of that teaching is the Resurrection.

We find our healing and our wholeness in Christ. All of the stories of the Resurrection reveal ourselves in ourselves as the community of the broken hearted. Only in facing our brokenness and recognizing our unknowing can we begin to be taught and come to understand what God seeks for us, namely, our wholeness. It happens in the face of our brokenness and not in spite of it or in denial of it. Only so can we begin to be made whole. The education here concerns the whole person; in short, matters of character.

Sorrow and grief, loss and suffering, dying and death are not denied. They provide the necessary occasion in which our wholeness is proclaimed and realized. This is a recurring feature of the Easter Season. The last three Sundays of the Easter Season present us with Gospel readings from what is sometimes known as “the farewell discourse of Jesus” in John’s Gospel, particularly John 16, in which there is the repeated refrain of the Easter season. It is the phrase “because I go to the Father.” Jesus is the teacher who prepares the disciples here for what is to come in terms of his death and resurrection. He speaks directly about suffering and sorrow and about joy. “Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

What is our sorrow? Our sense of separation from Christ: “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again a little while and ye shall see me,” Jesus says. This puzzles the disciples and us but reading these passages now in the light of Easter we see exactly what they mean. Sorrow is turned into joy through the triumph of life over death. Jesus uses an image, the image of childbirth, to convey the radical meaning of the Resurrection.

“A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a child is born into the world.” There will be sorrow and suffering “but your sorrow shall be turned to joy.”

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“For 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; we have turned every one to his own way,” Isaiah remarks in a powerful passage that belongs to our Good Friday considerations and indeed to the General Confession in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer: “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But as Good Friday also makes clear “the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The idea of sheep and shepherd takes on a whole new meaning and complexity in the image of Christ as the Lamb of God. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” as John the Baptist says in John’s Gospel. And in an even profounder image, John the Divine in his Revelation proclaims that “worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing,” a passage that serves as the Eastertide Offertory sentence.

The liturgy underscores the image of lamb in the Agnus Dei , which means “lamb of God,” as part of our communion devotion, recalling us to Christ as the “Lamb of God,” “that takest away the sin of the world” whose mercy and peace we seek in the receiving of the sacrament of Holy Communion. The point, too, is taken up in the repeated refrains for mercy in the Gloria which emphasizes Christ as the “Lord, the only-begotten Son,” “the Lamb of God, the Son of the Father, that takest away the sin of the world” and who “sittest at the right hand of God the Father.”

All of these Scriptural references that inform our liturgy contribute to our understanding of one of the most familiar of all Christian images, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The deeper point is that the Good Shepherd is also the lamb of God, the Son of God who is for us “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as today’s Collect puts it. Something has been done for us and something happens in us that revolve around the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd “who giveth his life for the sheep.” We are the sheep, lost and astray, “but [we] are returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls” by Christ the Lamb of God whose sacrifice “takes away the sin of the world.”

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

This text has carried us through Holy Week and Easter beginning with Palm Sunday . March 25th was Palm Sunday but that date is The Feast of the Annunciation , a feast of great significance for our understanding of the Christian Faith. It marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary through her ‘yes’ to God in response to the Angelic Salutation: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee” and that she “shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son, and shalt call his name Jesus.”

Nine months later, we celebrate Christ’s nativity, his birth at Bethlehem. But the conjunction of the Annunciation with Christ’s Passion is immensely significant and reminds us of the inescapable connection between Christmas and Easter , for his “Christmas Day and Good Friday are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day,” as John Donne notes, even as we have noted that Easter Day and The Octave Day of Easter , yesterday, are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day, the day of Resurrection.

But why the Annunciation on the Tuesday after Easter Week? Because the Passion and the Resurrection take utter priority. The Annunciation is for the sake of the Passion and the Resurrection; the meaning of the Incarnation is fully realised in the events that belong to the redemption of our humanity. As Luther, the father of Protestantism, and as Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, both understand, it is per Mariam ad Jesum , through Mary to Jesus. “Mary,” says Luther, “does not want us to come to Mary but through her to Jesus Christ.”

This brings us to the critical and important role of Mary in the work of human redemption. In contrast to Jesus as “just as man” in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, Mary is at once just a woman and more than just a woman. She is the very exemplar and embodiment of our humanity considered in and of itself in its truth and purity. Why? And How? Why? Because of the logic of salvation. Christ cannot be the redeemer of humanity, wounded and broken as a result of sin, if he himself is a sinner. He becomes sin for us only by becoming fully human through the body he assumes from Mary. He does so to free us from all sin and all death. He is “like us in all respects save sin.” Sin after all is privative, a negative; it makes us less than ourselves. She, by extension, too, is understand in a number of theological traditions to be without sin for the sake of Christ’s pure humanity without which he cannot be our redeemer.

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“The same day at evening”

Time, it seems, has stopped. We rest in the morning and the evening of the new Sabbath of the Day of Resurrection, it seems, with Mary coming early in the morning on the first day of the week to the tomb and finding it empty. She runs and tells Simon Peter and John and they both run and find that what she said is indeed true. Now, it is “the same day at evening.” Yet, we are behind closed doors.

It is a powerful image. Like the disciples, we too are behind closed doors out of fear. Our culture is very much the culture of closed doors, the culture of the various ghettoes of our minds, like so many gated communities, as it were. We hear only what we want to hear and see only what we want to see. But the more serious point is our fearfulness, our uncertainties and our anxieties.

We are behind the closed doors of our minds because we are uncertain about ourselves, about our world, and about the very idea of truth. This shows itself in a myriad of ways: from the increasing intolerance about diverse opinions about identity politics to the increasing fragility of ourselves as a self. It means a loss of confidence in being able to think and proclaim what belongs to the Christian faith and to the ways in which it engages the world. Yet the Resurrection breaks open the closed doors of our minds and our souls.

The Gospel for the Octave Day of Easter places us imaginatively on “the same day at evening” to counter all of our fears and uncertainties. Something happens behind closed doors that belongs to the Easter message of Resurrection. It changes everything. It changes us. Such is the Resurrection. It gives us a new perspective and a new understanding about ourselves. We are freed to God and are set in motion.

What is that motion? In today’s Gospel, it is about “the forgiveness of sins”proclaimed by the Apostolic Church. On “the same day at evening,” Christ breathes on the disciples and signals to them and us what his word and action means. “Receive ye the Holy Ghost,” he says.“Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” It is called the power of the keys.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Once again, we are presented with a lesson from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, often attributed to St. Luke. Once again a Gospel reading from The Gospel according to St. Luke. Once again, the word of Resurrection is being shown to us and we are being opened out to its meaning. And once again suffering and death are inescapably made an essential part of the teaching of the Resurrection along with repentance and forgiveness.

“To you is the word of this salvation sent,” Paul says to a group of Hebrews in the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia. The message of Resurrection arises in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures, among “the sons of the family of Abraham.” As Luke puts it, too, the idea of the Resurrection comes to us through “the open[ing of] their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.” Yet all of this builds upon the story of Christ on the road to Emmaus, upon the tangible realities of Christ being with us.

“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and blood, as ye see me have.” And in addition he asks “have ye here any food? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and of an honey-comb.” It is all part of the testimony to the reality of the Resurrection that “he took it, and did eat before them.” It is the Risen Christ who teaches us about the resurrection and its radical meaning.

It does not mean the annihilation of nature but its transformation and perfection. The body and the physical world are not everything; they are not self-sufficient and self-explanatory, but neither are they nothing. Here Jesus uses both the Scriptures and the things of the natural world to teach us the meaning of our humanity in God. He speaks to our fears and worries, to our anxieties and our uncertainties. He confirms his presence with us in simple ways, even through such simple things as “a piece of broiled fish and of an honey-comb.” This is part of the power of these Gospel stories.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The word for Easter is Resurrection. But how do we know about the Resurrection? How do we begin to understand what is meant by the Resurrection? Few Gospel stories illumine our understanding better than Luke’s famous story of Christ on the Road to Emmaus. “He was known of them in the breaking of the bread.”

“Him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly, Luke tells in the Lesson from Acts, rehearsing features of the life of Christ and especially the events of the Passion and then the Resurrection, or rather the making known of his Resurrection. The Risen Christ is made known “unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us,”Luke suggests, “who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead,”the very things which his Gospel account, too, will emphasize. The Resurrection, it seems, can only be known by way of testimony, by way of witnesses, by way of a reflection on extraordinary things. Thus Luke’s Gospel shows the Risen Christ running out after us, as it were, and inserting himself into our conversation about our perplexities and confusions, drawing out of us, in good Socratic fashion the nature of our own uncertainties and, then, providing a way to make sense of it all. So in the story of the Road to Emmaus, we have two disciples fleeing Jerusalem in fear because of the events of the crucifixion, “talk[ing] together of all these things that had happened.”Jesus joins them but is not recognized by them; after all, they aren’t expecting him given the events of the crucifixion and its aftermath.

He gets them to explain their perplexities about the crucifixion itself and then the report of the women and the other disciples, and even the vision of angels about the empty tomb. “Foolish one, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken,” Jesus says to them, “ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”Note, once again, that conjunction of suffering and glory. With that compelling introduction, “he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”It becomes a repeated trope by Luke, namely, the idea of Christ “opening to us the Scriptures”and “opening their understanding”to provide us a way of thinking the radical nature of the Resurrection.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his nine Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the Scripture text “Be it unto me according to thy word”, into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Be it unto me according to thy word”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

What is that word? It is all Resurrection. “Christ is risen, Alleluia, Alleluia. The Lord is risen, indeed, Alleluia, Alleluia.”This is the Easter word and the ancient greeting of Christians. It is the great proclamation of the Church about the wonder and the mystery of God in the work of human redemption. Death is not everything; it is nothing. Death is changed. God makes something out of human sin and wickedness, even out of death. Such is new life, the radical new life of the Resurrection.

The tomb has become the womb of new life. We are provided with an entirely new way to think about human life; it is life with God, now and evermore. The word of Resurrection resounds in the liturgy of Easter beginning with the Easter Anthems. And resurrection and rebirth, new life and new beginnings are seen visually and actually in the baptism of Jen and David Appleby on this day. They are the visible reminders to us of our life in Christ. Their baptisms immediately recall us to our own.

Word and Sacrament. Easter is a word derived fromEastra, an ancient pagan Germanic Goddess of Spring. Other cultures speak of the Pascha, referring to the Passover and, indeed, the new Passover of Christ. The Easter Day anthems help us to understand something of the radical meaning of the Resurrection. “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.”The consequence of that for us is made clear in the Epistle, itself a proclamation. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.”That means we have to die to ourselves and our old ways, “cast[ing] off the old self with its evil deeds, and put[ting] on the new.”There is, in short, an new orientation and direction for our lives, a new birth for all, a new way of looking at things.

The challenge of Easter Day is quite simple. We are dead in ourselves. We live only in Christ. It is all about getting out of the tombs of our minds and our lives to be alive in Christ. How? Through the Gospel encounter with a new and transforming reality. It begins with the empty tomb with the puzzlement and perplexity of expectations shattered. It begins with confusion and uncertainty out of which will come a new understanding. Mary Magdalene comes early to the tomb, alone, only to find the first wonder, “the stone taken away from the sepulchre.”This sets her motion to tell the other disciples, Simon Peter and “the other disciple whom Jesus loved,”, John. “So they ran both together.”John outruns Peter but only stoops down and looks in; he does not enter. Peter enters first and then John follows. Then suddenly, beyond the moving of the stone, they find that there is no body but only the linen clothes lying. It is for them and for us a complete mystery.

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