Christ Church

Christ is risen!

There is something quite powerful and moving about the Easter Vigil. It complements the intensity of Holy Week which has immersed us in the Passion of Christ by gathering us into its deeper meaning.

Our little country vigil simplifies the rituals of the Easter Vigil. There is the lighting of the Paschal Candle. There is the singing of the great Paschal Praeconium, the wonderful and joyous song and prayer of the Easter proclamation of Christ’s victory over sin and death. There are the readings of some of the prophecies of Scripture that belong to our thinking about the Passion and its meaning as realized in the Resurrection. There is the renewal of our baptismal vows, our dying to sin and to ourselves in order to live to God. And, finally, there is the Lauds of Easter morning. Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Mass.

Vigils are about our watching and waiting. The Easter vigil is our watching and waiting upon God in the work of human redemption accomplished in Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The Paschal Praeconium proclaims and teaches us the deep theological meaning of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. This is the night which illuminates our understanding about God as essential life. “The night is come” in which Christ triumphs over the darkness of our world of sin and death. “The night is come” in which we are “delivered from the shadow of death” and are “renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” All that stands between God and the world, between God and man is overcome in Christ who reconciles all things to God.

Our watching and our waiting in the great Vigil of Easter is the highest activity of our humanity. We can only watch and wait upon God but in so doing we learn who we are as God’s children. That is the great blessing because it counters all of the false notions about what it means to be ourselves in our contemporary culture. We are not cosmic orphans cast adrift in an indifferent and unfeeling universe, cast out into a hostile world. We are not abstract autonomous individuals isolated and alone, trapped in ourselves. Nor are we merely bots, cogs in the machine of our technocratic culture. We are recalled to God’s creation and to our life with God, a life which connects us with the world and one another. We are quite literally freed to God and so to a free relation with one another in loving care and compassion. We discover the truth of ourselves in the body of Christ.

The joy of the Vigil is our rejoicing not in ourselves but in Christ. Christ is our life. “Rise heart; Thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delayes,” as George Herbert’s poem, Easter, puts it. Sing his praise always.

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2022

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“Thou art the man”

Nathan’s word convicts David of his sin. It leads to his confession. “I have sinned against the Lord.” Sin is death in contradiction to life. But life is greater than death. This is something which the quiet of Holy Saturday reveals as we gather at the tomb. The full meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross begins to be explored through our quiet watching at the tomb in the readings for this day. What we contemplate is Christ’s death as the means of God’s overcoming of all that separates us from God and from one another. Holy Saturday points to the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation. Such is the meaning of the creedal teaching known as the “descent into Hell.”

We are meant to see ourselves in our sins in Christ. As 1 Peter 3 puts it, “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.” The fuller extent of that mystery is that this is, in principle, universal, for all, because “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” the prison of death, picking up on the imagery of Zechariah at Matins. “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit” (Zech. 9.11). The Epistle points to this as a “figure” symbolising baptism. It is the transition from death to life “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” which we await.

The Gospel reading continues the Holy Week theme of persecution, namely of us as the persecutors of God in Christ. It is the attempt to seal the tomb against the thought – the conspiracy theory of us as persecutors – that ‘they’, the disciples, might come to steal the body and then say, “He is risen from the dead.” Such is the extent of the violence of persecution even in the vain attempt to kill the idea already present that there is something different, something unique, something compelling and transformative in Christ’s crucifixion and death, something greater than death.

Such is the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. As the second lesson, again from 1 Peter puts it, Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.” In going and preaching unto the spirits in prison, we have the idea of being gathered by God’s Word who is light and life. God, as Thomas Aquinas, puts it, is “the beginning and end of all creatures but especially rational creatures.” Such is the deeper meaning of Holy Week. Only God makes a way for us to him through death. But it means confronting ourselves as dead in our sins that we might become alive in Christ.

We watch and wait both now and at the vigil. We watch and wait expectantly upon God, the principle of all light and life. Our watching is our waiting upon that perfect union of God and man in Christ which makes us one with God and which is greater than sin and death.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2022

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“Thou art the man”

We have used Nathan’s words as the interpretative text for the Passion of Christ throughout Holy Week. “Thou art the man,” Nathan says to David even as Pontius Pilate says to us, Ecce Homo, “Behold the man,” pointing to Christ wearing a crown of thorns and a purple robe, being scourged, mocked, reviled and scorned before being handed over to the madness of crowds to be crucified. We behold ourselves in beholding Christ. “They shall look on him whom they pierced,” as John’s account of the Passion (Jn. 19.37) concludes recalling Zechariah (12.10). The ‘they’ are ‘we’. We are not the victims but the persecutors who confront our evil in the crucified Christ, the one whom we have pierced and nailed to the cross. We behold our sins made visible in him. Why? To be convicted in our hearts of our sin by beholding in Christ the love which bears our sins. Only so can they be overcome. “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.”

The scapegoat mechanism of blaming others for our sufferings and fears is completely inverted. We are not the persecuted but the persecutors. The scapegoat is the Lamb of God. “Behold the Lamb of God.” “Behold the man.” Behold ourselves at once as sinners and as redeemed in Christ but only if we can say with David “I have sinned against the Lord.” For that is the good of Good Friday, the good of our atonement.

“It is finished” is the sixth word from the cross in the tradition of the preaching on the seven last words of Christ. This devotion was established in Peru by the Jesuits in the 17th century after several devastating earthquakes in Lima and from there carried back to Europe. It has shaped some of the great choral works of the Baroque period; for instance, Haydn’s Seven Last Words. The third, fifth and sixth words of Christ come from John’s Gospel which is read along with the lesson from Hebrews on Good Friday. Here is the love that is “the propitiation for our sins,” that is to say, the atoning sacrifice which makes us one with God and with one another. It means beholding the crucified and beholding our sins in him. “Thou art the man” is about confronting ourselves in the one whom we behold on the cross. “It is finished” refers to the overcoming of all sin that separates us from God and from one another.

It also means beholding ourselves in one another. Thus the third word from the cross bids Mary, his mother, to “behold thy son” in John, the beloved disciple, and bids John to “behold thy mother.” In other words, Mary is to see him in John, and John is to see her as his mother in Christ. It is a form of love, a form of mutual indwelling or coinherence grounded in the eternal coinherence of God as Trinity. Beholding one another in loving care means beholding one another in Christ. He gives John to her and he gives her to John. It captures wonderfully the unity of the love of God and the love of man in Christ. It is the meaning of Christ’s atonement. Our being one with God through Christ’s sacrifice unites us to one another in loving service.

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“Thou art the man”

“A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another,” Jesus says. But what is new about that? Haven’t we heard the commandment “to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” from Deuteronomy (6.5) to which Mark has added “and with all your mind”? Haven’t we heard from Leviticus (19.18) “to love your neighbour as yourself? How then is this a new commandment?

Because of the service and sacrifice of Christ which gives a new meaning to our lives and our loves. They are intensified in the Passion of Christ. What is given a more intense meaning is the depth of human sin, on the one hand, and the greater love of God towards us precisely in our sins, on the other hand. The new commandment to love is about service and sacrifice undertaken in a myriad of ways as the rites and ceremonies of Maundy Thursday indicate.

The washing of feet, the institution of the Holy Eucharist, the stripping of the altar, the going to Gethsemane in prayer and vigil, the traditions of the Sovereign giving alms to the poor, are among those rites and ceremonies. In a way, they are all about opening us out to a new and deeper understanding about the love of God and the love of man because they are concentrated in Christ, true God and true man.

Holy Week immerses us in the Passion of Christ. The rites and rituals of this day serve to bring us to ourselves as sinners and as beloved of God. We confront ourselves in order to find ourselves in the deep love of Christ for our humanity. “Thou art the man,” our Holy Week text, takes on a fuller significance in the Triduum Sacrum.

Perhaps no ritual is more intriguing than the Judas Cup ceremony instituted by the monks of Durham Cathedral in northern England in the 14th century. Following Holy Communion, a large cup or bowl called a mazer was placed before the monks. As Douglas Davies explains, “it was once called the Judas cup because the face of Judas was worked into its bowl so that when the monks drank from it they could see, as it were, the face of Judas looking at them and, in a sense, mirroring their own face.”

We are meant to confront ourselves as the betrayers and the persecutors of Christ. To see ourselves in all of the events of the Passion is the purpose of this week. It is profoundly counter-culture because it is not about pointing fingers of blame at others or about wallowing in the competing forms of victimhood. It is about confronting ourselves as the persecutors and betrayers of God, the principle of all truth and goodness.

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“Thou art the man”

Luke’s account of the Passion has a certain literary quality and a certain inner intensity to it. It takes us into the heart of Christ, on the one hand, and reveals to us our hearts, on the other hand. With Luke we see Christ’s interrogation of Peter at the last supper, itself a scene in which Luke provides a deeper understanding of the new covenant that his Passion and Resurrection accomplish. The interrogation of Peter serves to highlight the more dramatic form of Peter’s betrayal at the end of today’s Gospel reading.

With Luke we feel something of the intensity of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, the real struggle of the will of man with the will of God, “nevertheless not my will but thine be done.” The prayer of Christ is pictured in its intensity with the graphic image of his sweat being “as it were, great drops of blood.” The heart of Christ is opened to view.

But our hearts too are on display in the kiss of Judas – our betrayals of Christ, graphically signalled in Christ’s gentle but firm and haunting words, “Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?” Our hearts are on display in the smiting with a sword of the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear – our violence in the intensity of the moment which is immediately countered by Christ’s word and act, “suffer ye thus far” and “he touched his ear, and healed him.” The contrast is powerful and telling between the disorders and violence of our words and deeds and the gentleness of Christ’s words and deeds.

The drama reaches a crescendo in Luke’s account of Peter’s betrayal and most especially in terms of how Peter confronts himself in his betrayal. In a masterly and almost painterly touch, Luke tells us that after Peter’s third betrayal not only does the cock crow but “the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.” With Luke, it is the look that convicts Peter; “and Peter remembered the word of the Lord.”

What is that look? In keeping with the inner intensity of Luke’s portrayal of the agony of Christ and the gentleness of Christ, it is a look of compassion and love. Such a look convicts us far more than words of angry condemnation, far more than looks of judgement. “Thou art the man,” Christ’s look says to Peter, a look that recalls us to the truth which we have betrayed. In so doing, we are being recalled to the truth of ourselves as found in Christ’s love. It is over and against our sins but is accomplished through our encounter with ourselves. “Thou art the man,” indeed.

Such is the light of Christ which illumines us even in the shadows and the darkness of our sins. And such too is the meaning of Tenebrae in the intensity of the Psalms. They call us to account. They call us to Christ.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week, Tenebrae, 2022

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