Category: Sermons

“For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me.”

The comings and goings of God in the Scriptures reach their climax in the Ascension of Christ this Thursday, the fortieth day after Easter which marks the culmination of the Resurrection and Eastertide. Today, Easter 5 is also known as Rogation Sunday. It concentrates for us the meaning of these images of comings and goings. Theology consorts with images, especially the images of the Scriptures through which we are gathered into an understanding of our life as grounded in the dynamic of God’s life.

Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation that precede Ascension Day signal the larger dimensions of the Resurrection. It is at once cosmic and psychological: cosmic because it emphasizes the gathering of the whole of creation to God, and psychological because that gathering has very much to do with ourselves and our blessedness, coming to self-knowledge and awareness as both ‘hearers and doers of the word’ through which we glimpse a true image of ourselves, as the Epistle from James puts it. Otherwise we are deceivers of ourselves; beholding ourselves in a glass but then forgetting who we are. The whole purpose of the Resurrection is to make known who we are in the sight of God.

Christ’s Resurrection is not a flight from the world and our embodied being but their redemption. It makes visible what is hidden and present in the Passion just as the Nativity of Christ makes visible what is hidden yet present in the Annunciation. In each case there is the idea of our humanity as a microcosm of the world; we are a little world in which there is a recapitulation or gathering together of the elements of the world in us. This reminds us that we are intimately connected to everything in the created order. Thus Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation emphasize our connection to nature, to the world, and to our place in the world, particularly our parishes as the places where we dwell as sojourners in the land, the land in which we abide with God, via ad patriam, the way to our home with God signalled in Christ’s homecoming. His return to the Father is the exaltation of our humanity, and signals the hope that where he is there we may be also, that as he is so shall be also, that we shall be as Christ. Rogation Sunday is very much about ourselves and the world in which we are placed but as gathered to God through the comings and goings of Christ. The spring of nature’s year is a parable for the spring of our souls to God.

The overcoming of the world that ends the Gospel reading from John is not the negation of nature in a denial of creation – a kind of gnosticism – but the overcoming of the opposition between the world and God which belongs to the Fall. That is the meaning of redemption and thus marks the restoration of the truth of our relation to God and creation; in short, to our end with and in God. Such ideas speak powerfully to the confusions and disorders of our contemporary world which exhibit a profound sense of disconnect, not only of ourselves from nature and from God but also from ourselves. Rogation Sunday teaches that prayer is the real antidote to the forms of our disconnect. Why? Because in prayer we are gathered into the very life of God himself.

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“Of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”

The Resurrection makes visible the essential life of God as Trinity, the source and end of all life. The burden or purpose of these Eastertide Sundays is to bring that essential life more fully before us. The Resurrection is neither an add-on, a kind of holy extra, nor just one more detail, one thing after another in an endless list of things. It opens us out to the truth and life of God by gathering everything together. It looks back to the Passion and ahead to the Ascension but even more it opens out to us the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of our lives.

The reading from the Epistle of James complements the Gospel passage, once again from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus is speaking to the disciples prior to his Passion and Resurrection about himself and his mission; it is nothing less than a making known of the radical nature of the divine life which is the source and end of all life. It is a gift, something given, but given as that upon which all life depends; the truth and end of creation itself is found in the life of God. “Of his own will,” James says, “he brought us to birth by the word of truth,” highlighting our vocation to be “a kind of first-fruits of all his creation.” Wow. You are not nothing, at least not in the eyes of God. And what else matters?

In other words, the Resurrection makes visible the real truth and purpose of creation and of our humanity. It signals the restoration of the truth of our being as made in the image of God and of our humanity as “the abridgement of the world” (Andrewes). Our humanity is a microcosm of the world; there is a kind of recapitulation of all that belongs to creation in our humanity. But only as grounded in the total self-giving life of God as love. In Christ there is an abridgement of heaven and earth, of God and our humanity.

Today’s Gospel focuses on the motions of God himself and in relation to us. There is the paradox of the comings and goings of God which reveals the truth and presence of God with us. “I go my way to him that sent me,” Jesus tells the disciples, fully knowing their incomprehension and puzzlement but actually preparing them (and us) for what will be made clear in his Resurrection. Its radical meaning is precisely about his relation to the Father and to the Holy Spirit; the revealing to us of the all-sufficient life and love of God as the principle of reality and our lives. These ‘Eastertide’ passages from John’s Gospel, the so-called “farewell discourse” of Jesus, portends his Passion and Death and his Resurrection and Ascension as well as teaching us most fully about the Holy Spirit, the bond or “love-knot” of the Father and the Son (Andrewes).

Theologically, we are being lifted up into the mystery of God as Trinity through the comings and goings of God to and from the world and us. We are meant to learn about the abiding presence of God revealed in Christ’s sacrifice and its meaning for us as new birth and life. The emphasis on the coming of the Comforter, or Paraclete, meaning counsellor, as John alone uses the term in chapters 14, 15, and 16 of his Gospel, grounds all of the activities of God towards us in the life of God himself, the spiritual reality of God which is the ground of all life.

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“Because I go to the Father?”

It is a question, a question that arises out of the puzzlement of the disciples about what Jesus said. What does he mean? He says “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again, a little while and ye shall see me” and “because I go to the Father”. “We cannot tell what he means,” they say, about both these statements.

Perplexity and confusion, fear and uncertainty, sorrow and grief all belong to the mystery of the Resurrection. Yet the mystery of the Resurrection is really the mystery of God as essential life, always present, at once seen and unseen. The Resurrection accounts make visible what was hidden yet present in the Passion and what is hidden yet present in our lives. In a way, Jesus highlights the human problem about the forms of our knowing which are often reductive and limited, a failure to grasp the meaning of what is heard and seen. The stories of the Resurrection are all about the birth of the understanding in us. And how? Most powerfully through the person of Christ himself teaching us about the essential life of God upon which all our being and knowing depend. It is all about the understanding. “In him was life and the life was the light of our humanity,” as John makes clear. Life and light go together.

“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring theme of Eastertide. It signals the dynamic life of God as Trinity in the mutually indwelling motions of the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit into which dynamic life we are gathered; literally, born again, born anew. Born upward. This is the new life which restores us to fellowship with God and with one another in our daily lives. It is the underlying principle of how we act in the world, “submitting ourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” as Peter puts it. Note that this is “for the Lord’s sake,” not for our own immediate self-interest, not for sake of power and authority over others but because of the principle of the authority of God upon which all power and rule ultimately depend as forms of service. As Jesus said to Pilate in the Passion: you would have no power had it not been given you by God. All authority is from God. All wisdom belongs to God. God is life and light and love.

How do we come to know these spiritual truths? By the way in which God engages us through things heard and seen, through a kind of holy epistemology, we might say, the ways of knowing and living that belong to Word and Sacrament. We see this most explicitly in the story of the Road to Emmaus. But the logic of Word and Sacrament, understood as complementary and interdependent, is that we can learn from the visible things of our world the invisible things of God. But not by reducing God to ourselves. It is more about learning how to think upward; in short, to think analogically which is what we see in today’s Gospel.

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“I lay down my life for the sheep”

In one succinct phrase we have the entire essence of the Christian Faith. It is nothing less than the total self-giving life of God in the sacrifice of Christ. To be more precise, it is the radical meaning of the Trinity. We are familiar, perhaps, too familiar with the image of Christ the Good Shepherd and often misunderstand it. It signals, to be sure, the care of God towards us, God for us, we might say. Yet that is entirely grounded in God himself. Our text follows immediately upon the revelatory words of Jesus about the deeper and truer meaning of the image of the Good Shepherd. He is, as he says about himself, “the good shepherd,” but beyond making a certain assertion and identity claim, he explains what it means in relation to us and what it is grounded upon.

“I am known of mine,” he says, but that is followed by the sentence in which our text is embedded. “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” Our knowing him is ultimately grounded in the knowing of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit; our knowing as grounded in God’s eternal knowing of us. For where there are two, there is a third, something which we see in the story on the Road to Emmaus where Jesus comes alongside the disciples in their perplexity and confusion, their unknowing, to bring them into an understanding. How? Through “interpret[ing] to them in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” That is what we have here too. He is interpreting to us the meaning of himself as the Good Shepherd. We are gathered into the spiritual relation of the persons of the Trinity, the divine communion of eternal and total self-giving love.

What that means for us is seen in the Epistle and Gospel for today as concentrated in the Collect. The Father has given his only Son “to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” What is revealed to us about the self-giving life of God himself through the sacrifice of Christ is meant to become our life; we are meant “most thankfully” to “receive that his inestimable benefit” and “daily [to] endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.”

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“Be not affrighted.”

Mark’s Gospel account of the Resurrection is one of two Gospel readings for Easter Day. Like John’s Gospel, it emphasizes the empty tomb, the first moment in the process of thinking about the Resurrection. In Mark’s case, it is about Mary Magdalene and another Mary coming to the tomb with the intent to honour and respect the dead. They come bearing burying spices only to discover that the one whom they seek, “Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified, is risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him.” Only then are they directed to go their way and to tell the other disciples and Peter that “he goeth before you into Galilee: there will ye see him.” There is something wonderfully concise in this short Gospel pericope.

Yet the short ending of Mark’s Gospel actually ends with the words which are not included in the Easter Day reading. He ends his Gospel, at least in its short form, with the words, “For they were afraid.”

This is different from “be not affrighted” or “be not amazed” (RSV). Amazement conveys a sense of wonder. That signals the idea of the unexpected that marks the beginning of the dawning awareness of the idea of the Resurrection and its radical meaning that changes everything, quite literally. But the short ending is quite suggestive about Mark and his gospel. It was Austin Farrer who best grasps its significance by linking the ending to Mark’s account of the Passion with the curious scene in the Garden when Christ is taken captive; it is the scene of the young man who ran away naked. Farrer suggests it was Mark himself.

As we have been suggesting, the Resurrection makes visible what is already present in the Passion, albeit in different modes of realization. To know one’s fears and to face them and acknowledge them goes a long way towards overcoming them. The greater amazement or wonder here is that the Resurrection speaks to our fears and uncertainties and provides a way to think things in a new and radical manner. It opens us out to a new way of thinking about death and suffering by recalling us to the greater wonder of essential life. That is Christ who wills to suffer for us and whose death and resurrection are the triumph of life over death. Life is absolutely prior and as such death is changed.

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“He showed unto them his hands and his side”

From Christ crucified and dead to the empty tomb, from the empty tomb to the marks of the Cross in the Crucified Christ. Quite a spectacle. We go from the intensity of the Passion on Palm Sunday to Easter to the wonder and mystery of the Resurrection on Easter to the Octave Day of Easter. Easter Week like Holy Week is one long liturgy: the beginnings of reflection and meditation on the Resurrection. Just as we have immersed ourselves in the Passion of Christ through the Scripture readings of Holy Week, especially through the four accounts of the Passion in the Gospels, so in Easter Week we immerse ourselves in readings that turn on the mystery of the Resurrection.

Holy Week and Easter Week are not polar opposites of one another, mere mood swings from sadness to gladness, as something psychological. First, you’re down, then you’re up (and of course vice versa! Where’s the good in that?). No Passion without the Resurrection, no Resurrection without the Passion. They are intimately and profoundly connected. The theological point is that the Resurrection makes visible what is hidden but present in the Passion; namely, the absolute self-giving life of God as sacrificial love. This is the meaning of the Trinity and belongs to the wonder and mystery of human redemption.

The readings of Easter Week point us towards the logic of the Resurrection, a logic or way of thinking that shows a constant and necessary emphasis on the Passion. The past (and the present and future) of human sin and evil are not eclipsed and negated but radically transformed in the triumph of life and goodness over death and evil. The point is that life is utterly prior and absolute; that life is the essential life of God made visible in the Crucified and Risen Christ.

The Resurrection speaks profoundly to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It belongs to a long tradition of reflection, philosophically and religiously, on the question of what it means to be human. The Resurrection is the strongest possible affirmation of our individuality understood not as autonomous selves, isolated and separated from one another, but as found in a community of reciprocal love and care as individuals committed to the good of one another. All as grounded in the self-giving life of God. That sensibility about human individuality has to do with our lives together as embodied beings. The logic of the Resurrection is that the body matters. It is not merely extraneous and indeterminate, endlessly malleable. There is no disembodied self.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the scripture text, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Holy Week and Easter at Christ Church 2025”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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Easter Day 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Christ’s first word from the Cross in Luke’s Account of the Passion and in the classical ordering of the seven last words of Christ crucified has carried us through Holy Week. It carries now into the joy and wonder of Easter. It is very much about the discovery of things which we did not know. “You have died,” Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle reading, “and your life is hid with Christ in God.” But what lives in us, he is saying, is nothing less than the life of Christ for “Christ is all in all.”

Like Mary Magdalene, we come to the tomb expecting a corpse, a dead body to be honoured and respected. There is something profoundly true in such an impulse but there is far more to Easter morning. The Gospel marks the beginning of the realization of the radical new life of the Resurrection. To respect and honour the dead already implies that we are more than our deaths and our experiences. Here in the Gospel reading from John, Mary discovers first the empty tomb and then runs to Simon Peter and the other disciple, John, to tell them that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” This sets Peter and John into motion. John, being younger, gets to the tomb first but does not enter until after Peter.

John tells us (about himself, it seems) that “he saw, and believed. For as yet they knew not the Scripture that he must rise again from the dead.” It will be through the witness of the Scriptures of the Hebrews that an understanding of the Resurrection will come.

We know and do not know but are shown the beginnings of a process of thinking our way into the mystery of the Resurrection, the mystery of life which is greater by definition than all of the forms of sin and evil, of suffering and death, of confusion and uncertainty. Here is the life upon which all things depend and without which our lives are empty and nothing. The Resurrection is not the ending so much as the radical beginning of our life in Christ. In a way, the idea of the Resurrection has been the hidden presence in Lent and Holy Week, the life that underlies all things. It has been present but hidden, known and unknown by us in the pageant of the Passion. Easter makes visible the radical meaning of the life of God. It is made known in Christ Jesus.

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Easter Vigil: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Our little country Vigil, as I like to think of it, is a very truncated and shortened form of the much more complex and dramatic service of the Easter Vigil. Our service consists of the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle, the singing of the Exsultet or Praeconium, the Easter Proclamation, that is centuries old and sometimes attributed to Augustine, a reading of some of the ‘prophecies’ of the Old Testament interspersed with Scriptural canticles, the renewal of Baptismal vows, and ends with the Lauds of Easter morn.

At the heart of the Exsultet is the theological concept of Felix Culpa, ‘O happy fault.’ It highlights the profound idea that redemption is the far greater act of God than even creation because it signals the renewal and rebirth of our humanity and our world as accomplished by Christ’s sacrifice. It proclaims the potent idea that God and God alone can make something good and wonderful out of our sin and evil; hence O felix culpa.

At the Vigil we wait upon the motions of God coming to us as life and light that overcomes the darkness of death and evil. The signal note is joy and exultation at the new creation of our world and of ourselves as restored to fellowship with God. The Vigil celebrates the new and radical idea of Resurrection which changes death from being an end or terminus to death as a means or way, a transitus, as the gate or door through which we pass to something more and greater, everlasting life. It is not a renunciation of the past of sin and sorrow, of evil and death, but its radical transformation into grace and life, the grace and life which God seeks for our humanity. And if the Resurrection changes death, it also changes how we think about everything, about life and suffering, about good and evil. In every way it is about new life. The past is not eclipsed but transformed and so too for ourselves. We are “transformed by the renewing of our minds” on the things of God made manifest in the pageant of the Passion that issues in the parade of joy at Easter.

The Vigil teaches us that the forgiveness for which Christ prays on the Cross belongs to the essential life of God upon which all our thinking and being depends. As Joseph says to his brothers who had sought his life: “you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” Forgiveness leads to joy and gladness in the greater knowledge of God’s knowing love for our humanity. It leads to the Alleluias of Easter.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Fr. David Curry

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