Category: Sermons

“The spirit of truth will guide you into all truth”

Along with the repeated mantra “because I go to the Father”, the Gospel readings on these three last Sundays of the Easter season open us out to the power and truth of the Holy Spirit, “the spirit of truth”. Christ’s going to the Father is the condition of the coming of the Spirit. These spiritual movements speak to the fears and uncertainties of our own age and culture, fears and uncertainties which raise important questions about our humanity and about our lives together.

What are our fears and uncertainties? In one way, they are legion but in another way they come down to felt sense of an emptiness within the soul of a culture when we can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when we can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.

If there is nothing to live for, then we are the proverbial ‘walking dead’. Zombie Apocalypse is us! There is nothing to give your life to. Yet our lives are primarily about relationships and connections with and for one another. This is precisely where the Eastertide Gospels come so prominently into play. They provide a kind of counter to our current fears and worries about the empty darkness of our world and day, the emptiness within out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence witnessed so frequently in our schools, our cities, our streets, and our world; acts which destroy all relationships. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the nothingness within our souls and our culture, resulting in the active nihilism of terrorism. Added to that are the paralyzing fears of our uncertainties about what we can and should do, throwing up our hands in despair, as it were, retreating into the ghettoes of a kind of passive nihilism. The fearfulness that we have to confront and overcome in every way is our fearfulness. How will we confront it? How will it be overcome? Only in Christ.

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

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“What is this that he saith, A little while? We cannot tell what he saith”

Perplexity and wonder are among the dominant features of the Easter season. It is all about the perplexity and the wonder of the Resurrection, the new reality which challenges all of our preconceptions and attitudes. The various accounts of the Resurrection are all about the changes and transformations in our understanding of what it means to be human and about how we think the things of the past as well as the things of our present experiences. It happens through the encounters with the Risen Christ, on the one hand, and through what Jesus teaches prior to the events of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, on the other hand.

The Gospels for the last three Sundays of the Easter Season are all taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse’ of Jesus in John’s Gospel. They are the very profound ideas which Jesus sets before the disciples about which they are puzzled and uncertain. Jesus is preparing them for two mysteries which they do not and cannot understand before they happen. The two mysteries are Christ’s Crucifixion and his Resurrection and Ascension. The latter go together; the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, its fuller meaning, we might say, insofar as it marks his “go[ing] to the Father”. The great Eastertide refrain is precisely “because I go to the Father”. This is the meaning of his Crucifixion and his Resurrection which culminates in the Ascension.

What this means is shown in these remarkable Gospel passages. We read them in the light of the Resurrection and as illuminating the meaning of the Resurrection for us. The aspect of not-knowing is very much part of the human drama of our life with God. Our unknowing is part of the fallen condition of our humanity. The Resurrection is something which we have to be taught, something which we have to grow up into an understanding of its meaning. It means seeing everything in a new light.

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“I am the Good Shepherd”

This Sunday presents us with one of the great and most familiar images of care, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. It is at once commonplace and yet altogether radical in its meaning. The root of care is cure. The care, we might say, is in the cure.

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

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

Jesus, as today’s Collect so marvelously puts it, is “both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life”. He is the sacrifice for sin. He is the cure, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. He stands in the face of the destroyer of the sheep – ultimately our sins are his destroyer even as our sins diminish and destroy us. He is the shepherd who wills to be struck, not so that the sheep may be scattered, but so that through his being struck and our being scattered, he may gather us to himself. He gathers us through his care for us. He cares for us through his cure for us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word captures the truth of our humanity. It signals the virtue of humility, the virtue of an honest deference to what is absolutely prior, namely, the word of God. This is what defines Mary and, in turn, defines the Church.

The Annunciation is ordinarily celebrated on March 25^th, nine months before Christ’s birth from Mary in Bethlehem on December 25^th. For centuries March 25^th has marked the beginning of the Christian new year; time itself being measured by the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. Her Annunciation is his conception in Mary, the beginning of his incarnate life. Her Annunciation marks the beginning of the intimate engagement of God with our humanity. Christ becomes human through Mary, through Mary’s great ‘yes’ to God.

This year, 2016, the 25^th of March coincided with Good Friday as it has at various times, such as in 1608. Then it occasioned a poem by John Donne on the paradox of Christ’s coming to us through Mary and Christ’s going from us into death through the Crucifixion, what he called in a marvelous economy of language “the abridgement of Christ’s story” in the conjunction of the Angel’s Ave and Christ’s Consummatum Est. There is something wonderful in the overlap between the Annunciation and Good Friday. It underscores a fundamental and necessary Christian insight; namely, the intimate connection between Christmas and Easter, between the Incarnation and Redemption. The interplay of theological concepts is an integral feature of orthodox thinking; the abridgement of Christ’s story, the story of human redemption.

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“Jesus came and stood in the midst”

“April is the cruellest month,” the poet, T.S. Eliot, notes in The Wasteland. He must have had a Maritime spring in mind, a kind of April’s Fools Day joke that never ends! And yet there is a counter to the misery and the cruelty of the Maritime spring in April. It is the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is not a static event. It is the dynamic truth “that God hath given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”. We behold the Risen Christ. We are set in motion by what we see. The Church does not simply stand upon the doctrine of the Resurrection; the Resurrection is the running life of the Church. It means that there are always breakthroughs in our understanding; resurrections of the understanding, we might say. They belong to the dynamic reality of the Resurrection.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more dramatically illustrated than on The Octave Day of Easter. “On the same day at evening, being the first day of the week”, John tells us, the disciples were huddled together in fear behind closed doors. The Octave Day places us in that endless day, the day of Easter, to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day”, the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive to his presence or dead in ourselves.

“Jesus came and stood in the midst”. They were behind closed doors. They were in fear and great anxiety, not unlike many of us today, perhaps. The world of their hopes and expectations had been utterly shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to be knit together into something new and strange. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.

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

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“One thing is needful”

Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! He is Risen, Indeed. Alleluia, Alleluia! Such is the ancient Easter greeting for this day and this season. It is a joyous proclamation. But what does it mean? It celebrates a whole new way of looking at life and reality, to be sure, and yet one which is mystifying and perplexing to our prosaic and ordinary views on life. How so? Because it challenges all of our ancient and modern assumptions. That it does so is the radical good news of the Resurrection.

What it proclaims, quite simply, is that death isn’t everything. It isn’t the end of the story of you. Or to put it in another way, we are more than our experiences, more than our complaints, more than our sufferings and more than our deaths. We are even more than the things which make us tiresome and boring to others not to mention ourselves! We are more than our dying and death. “As dying, we live”. The Resurrection is radical new life because it changes death and therefore changes how we live. The radical idea is about our living for God and for one another. The radical idea is that God makes something more and greater out of our sin and evil; the ultimate triumph of the goodness and love of God.

We don’t want to hear about sin and evil, to be sure. And yet that is a necessary part of the good news of the Resurrection. Christ’s Resurrection is the overcoming of sin and death. His Crucifixion marks the triumph of good over evil in the very face and experience of evil. How we may ask? It is the lesson of Good Friday where in the crucifixion all sin – sin in its fullest array and force – is gathered into the greater love of the Son for the Father. But what does it mean for you and me? It means a new sense of who we are. For if we are just our thoughts, words and deeds, if we are just our actions, then we are nothing. Dead in our sins and nothing more.

The Resurrection is the strongest possible affirmation of human dignity and freedom. We are freed to God. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. The highest and the greatest good of our humanity, individually and collectively speaking is found in our communion with God. Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection are the two inseparably related concepts that overcome the separation between man and God and unite us to God. The love that creates is the love that recreates and restores. The Resurrection is God’s great second act after Creation. Redemption is Creation restored in and through the negativity of sin and death. Such is the grace of God.

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“One thing is needful”

Christ is risen. Alleluia, Alleluia! The one thing needful is the proclamation of the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, “early when it was yet dark,” John tells us. She “seeth the stone taken away.” And so it begins. She runs to tell the others, apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the apostles, as the Fathers put it. She says “to Simon Peter and to the other disciple” that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” He is not there. Who has taken him? Who are ‘they’ that “have taken [him] away”? Confronting something that counters her expectation, she suspects a conspiracy, it seems. Don’t we all? Simon Peter and “that other disciple” run and see. They, too, find only an empty tomb. And so it continues. It is the Resurrection. An intriguing and perhaps interesting idea?

Perhaps we feel the same way that the British travel writer, Alexander Kinglake, felt about seeing churches in England and wanting to inscribe upon their lintels the caveat, “interesting, if true.” Is that where we are with the Resurrection, “interesting, if true”?

If so, why are we here? Because the idea of the Resurrection has a strong hold on us, the hold of truth. It has changed the world, quite literally, one would have to say, and that, at least, is true historically speaking from the standpoint of social, political and cultural developments. The rise and spread of Christianity, its struggles and contests, first, with Jewish and ancient pagan culture, Greek and Roman, then, its conflicts and disputes with Islam, as well as its internal debates and arguments between east and west, Greek and Latin, Catholic and Protestant, and, then, with the rise of modernity and even modern science with all of its ambiguities and uncertainties that comprise our post-modern experience; how could one possibly think to explain any of that story apart from the Resurrection? It is the central defining truth of the Christian Faith, whether one believes it or not. That much can and must be said and cannot be gainsaid whether you are Muslim, Jewish, Christian or atheist in terms of our cultural history. We are here because we cannot not think it, even if our world and culture has forgotten and rejected it.

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“One thing is needful”

We do not just meet at the tomb of Christ on Holy Saturday to mourn and honour his death and the meaning of human redemption. We also meet expectantly, waiting upon God and his gracious acts. In a way, it is the radical meaning of our lives in faith. It is always about waiting upon God and finding the truth of our being and doing in him. Nowhere, perhaps, is that more joyously and wondrously seen than at the great Vigil of Easter.

The mystery of Easter is the triumph of good over evil, of light over darkness, of grace over sin. God’s great second act is the Resurrection, a second creation that overcomes the waywardness of our sins. Out of sin and evil, God creates a greater good. It is Christ’s Resurrection, the fruit of his Passion. It changes everything. The one thing needful is to rejoice in Christ’s Resurrection.

The great Paschal Praeconium exults in the wonder of the Resurrection. An ancient hymn and prayer, probably going back to the fifth century, sometimes attributed to Augustine, sometimes to Ambrose, it rejoices in the triumph of God’s grace and goodness over all sin and evil. It is sung in the light of the Easter Candle, itself symbolic of the Resurrection of Christ and of his life and light in us. The Paschal Praeconium is the great Easter Proclamation. What is that proclamation? “Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!” “The Lord is Risen Indeed. Alleluia, Alleluia!” What does it mean? Joy, an unsurpassing joy borne out of our griefs and sorrows, not just for what we have suffered but for what we do and have done. We celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death whereby we are united to God. “O night, wherein heaven and earth are joined, and mankind partaketh with the Godhead”. The love that creates now recreates. Nothing can hold back the power of the goodness of God who acts out of his own love and gathers all things into his love.

Creation and Redemption are closely joined. We forget that at our peril. And so the prophecies of the Vigil remind us of the significant moments from the story of creation through the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage to the Law and the prophets that contribute to our understanding of Christ’s Passion and that compel us to contemplate the wonder of his Resurrection. Nothing signals more profoundly the true nature of our humanity. We are more than our sins and our sufferings, more than our dying and our deaths. We are made for God. Thus the Resurrection is the greatest possible affirmation of human personality and individuality, the greatest possible affirmation of our souls and bodies as belonging to our spiritual identity in Christ. We are more though not less than our physical bodies. Our whole being finds its truth in Christ and his Resurrection.

That is why the Vigil entails the renewal of our baptismal vows. We are reminded of our essential spiritual identity in Christ which is realised through his Death and Resurrection and through our being incorporated into his Death and Resurrection. Only so can we be in Christ and Christ in us. We live not for ourselves but for Christ and for Christ in one another. It is ultimately what we celebrate in the great Mass of Easter. Christ, we learn from Mary in Bethany, is the one thing needful. To attend to his grace for us in our deepest joy.

“One thing is needful”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2016

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“One thing is needful”

There is a certain quality of peace and quiet about Holy Saturday. All of the fuss and bother, all of the rage and spite, all of the agony and pain of the preceding days is past and gone. Christ is dead and buried. We meet at the tomb of Christ. Why? What is the one thing needful? To contemplate the meaning of Christ’s death.

The point is that his death and therefore all deaths are not meaningless. His suffering on the cross and therefore our sufferings too are not meaningless. Something has been accomplished. “It is finished”, he says, in John’s Gospel before “bow[ing] his head and [giving] up his spirit”. What has been accomplished? What is finished? All that belongs to the reconciliation between God and man. All that belongs to human redemption.

What does that mean? It means that there is something more than the reality of our separation from God that accounts for suffering and death. God has done something in and through the humanity of Christ. There is atonement. The scriptures constantly call our attention to the idea of Christ dying for us. And through the eyes of John our attention is constantly drawn to his dying for us as belonging to his living for the Father. “I have come to do the will of him who sent me”. What is that will? To achieve our peace. To overcome our sin. To open us out to more than death.

The idea of reconciliation requires the recognition of separation. Sin and suffering, sin and death are all interconnected. We suffer as a result of our own sins. We suffer because of the sins of others. We suffer because it is the condition of our humanity. In the humanity of Christ, God suffers for us to redeem us. What is that redemption? The revelation of the absolute goodness of God which is far greater than all and any form of evil. Holy Week reveals to us the absolute goodness of God which seeks our good out of the very nature of the divine goodness itself. What Holy Saturday shows us is the fullest extent of the divine will to be reconciled with his sinful creation.

As with everything about Holy Week, we are meant to learn this. The Passion of Christ is about his sufferings for us. In some sense, his sufferings are our sufferings as a result of our separation from the truth and goodness of God. All sin is about that separation. The cross is the overcoming of it. It establishes a kind of peace and harmony, a restoration of Paradise, if you will. Something of its fuller meaning is signalled in the readings at Morning Prayer that illumine the Epistle and Gospel for Holy Saturday. Together they recall us to the creedal doctrine of the Descent into Hell.

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