Christ Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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