Christ Church

“The night is come”

“The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium proclaims exultantly. This night marks the beginning of something new, a new creation, not through the destruction but by the renewing of creation. What is new is what the great Easter proclamation, known as the Paschal Preconium, signals. Resurrection. That is the new creation. That is God’s great work of making something out of nothing, indeed, out of the greater nothingness of human sin and evil.

How can there be a greater nothing? Only as a figure of speech, it might seem, and yet in another way, that is exactly the great joy of the Vigil and of Easter. We wait expectantly for God’s great second act; such is the Resurrection. Sin and evil seek to unmake the creation and even, folly of all follies, to unmask and dismiss God from every human horizon. Sin and evil try to make creation and God nothing. God takes human sin and evil, and out of its greater nothingness, out of its vanity and folly, makes a new creation. There is Resurrection not by a denial of the past of the Passion and Death of Christ but by its transformation. God makes something out of the suffering and death that we have caused. “The night is come.”

“The night is come” when we can shout with exceeding great joy that Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! What that means is signalled in the liturgy of the Vigil. It means that death has been completely changed, overcome; it has undergone a radical make-over. Death is no longer the terminus ad quem, the end of the road, the end to which all must succumb; death has been transformed into a transitus, a means to greater end. We pray that our “corrupt affections,” our sins being “buried with Christ,” “we may pass to our joyful resurrection”  “through the grave and gate of death.” The grave cannot hold him and God seeks something more for us. We only live when we live in him.

“The night is come” that out-nights all other nights including the love-duet between Lorenzo and Jessica in the Merchant of Venice, each seeking to gain an advantage over the other in references to the ancient stories of love and its powers. “The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium says “wherein thou dividest the sea and madest the children of Israel to pass over as on dry land”,  the night, too, in which the people of Israel are led and guided by a pillar of light. The imagery recalls God’s deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery in the Exodus. So this night builds upon that story and its importance for the understanding of Israel. Christ’s Resurrection is framed in terms of God’s deliverance of the ancient people of Israel from death and slavery and extends it to the whole of humanity.

“The night is come,” then, when “all that believe in Christ upon the face of the earth” are “delivered from the shadow of death” and “are renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection and its universal extent.

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“Christ hath once suffered for sins … that he might bring us to God”

The quiet of Holy Saturday is the peace of paradise. All has been accomplished. All of the horror and noise of Good Friday is past. Christ is dead. The fury and rage of our disordered humanity in all its evil force is spent. There is a kind of stillness to Holy Saturday and to our service of Matins and Ante-communion. All is at rest, it seems, at least in terms of the destructiveness of our humanity in the vain folly of trying to kill God.

Yet God has let us have our way with him. Christ is crucified and now lies buried. We meet at his tomb and while all is quiet there are some disquieting rumours. The human spirit in its confusion is never quiet, it seems. There are rumours and talk of conspiracies about stealing Christ’s body and claiming that he is still alive. The Gospels do not hide from view the variety of opinions already in circulation about the mystery of the resurrection. But apart from the restlessness and inconstancy, folly and gullibility of our world, there is something else which is also stirring on Holy Saturday. We wait at the tomb of Christ in the sorrow of mourners. We wait in the quiet stillness of the morning.

But already something else is happening. The readings from 1 Peter hint at the deeper meaning of Holy Saturday. They hint at the creedal principle of the descent into hell, of Christ going and preaching to the spirits in prison, as Peter puts it, drawing upon the imagery of Zechariah about release and liberation. This will ultimately have its visual representation in the icon of the Resurrection in the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy which depicts Christ bringing Adam and Eve up out of the prison house of Sheol, of Hades, of Hell, of death.

1 Peter points us to the further dimensions of the theory of the atonement. God seeks to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation past, present, and future. Such is the radical nature of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. He suffered for our sins to bring us to God. The reconciling love of God in the sacrifice of Christ has a long reach both backwards and forwards since it seeks to gather all time back into itself without which time has no meaning.

We rest while God in his unceasing activity seeks the good of the whole of our humanity. That should in like manner challenge us about our dealings with one another. It would seem, however, that even in the quiet stillness of Holy Saturday, stones will not be able to contain or constrain the love of God in Jesus Christ

“Christ hath once suffered for sins … that he might bring us to God”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, April 11th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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“It is finished”

Yes. “It is finished.” And yet, in another way it is never finished. What is finished? All that belongs to the reconciliation of God and man through Christ’s atoning sacrifice. What is never finished? That reconciliation in us is a life-long project; it is only finished in us when we are finished and gathered to Christ. Here we are a work in process. The process is about our continuing efforts to realize who we are in Christ in our lives. Our justification, the truth of our being, is fully and perfectly in Christ; not so in us. For us there is the constant struggle to realize in ourselves the reconciliation between God and man in Christ.

Central to that constant struggle is what belongs to the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, namely our contemplation of the Cross and our hearing, as it were, the lamentations of Christ, his words to us about the meaning of sin and grace, the “reproaches.” Our Solemn Liturgy has four parts: first, the liturgy of the Word beginning with the general confession but no absolution, the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p. 173), the Good Friday Collects, Psalm 22, a Lesson from Isaiah 50. 4-10, the Salvator Mundi, the Epistle reading from Hebrews, and then the Passion according to St. John; second, the Solemn Intercessions; third, the Reproaches of Christ to us in the words of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in which we contemplate our betrayals of God’s love; and fourth, our communion with the dead Christ. On Good Friday, there is no absolution nor any celebration of the Holy Eucharist; there is only communion through what was consecrated and kept from Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday, we identify with Christ in his death for us.

All pretty somber and serious, and rightly so. In the context of our suffering world where there have been and continue to be an escalating number of deaths through the Covid-19 outbreak, the Good Friday service allows us to place our suffering world, and the deaths of so many, in the sufferings of Christ. He suffers even unto death, Why? That love may accomplish what belongs to the truth of our humanity as reconciled with God.

“It is finished,” Jesus says. It is the last word of Christ on the Cross in John’s Gospel. It signals a kind of end, a sense of accomplishment, of purpose realized. It signals atonement. All that belongs to the reconciliation of God and man is accomplished. Such is the divine love which seeks our good, our salvation, our completeness. Yet, in another sense, love is never finished. Divine love is ever active and never static. God is actus purus, pure act, as the theologians say. Love is ever in motion. That eternal motion is about the constant love of the Son for the Father in the bond of their mutual and indwelling love, the love of the Trinity.

And that love is what we seek to realize more and more in our lives even as we know only too well that our sins constantly beset us. There is no end, it seems, to our sins. But the good news of Good Friday which makes this day “Good Friday” is that nothing, absolutely “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.” Knowing that means striving to live it in our lives with one another. Such a striving is for God in us. It is “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” What makes that prayer so powerful is Christ’s word to us on the Cross. “It is finished.” It is all there in him and so we can seek it for us in our lives. That is our constant challenge: to realize in ourselves what has been accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice. Such is the cross in our lives. We seek to bear witness to what he has done for us.

“It is finished”

Fr. David Curry
Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, April 10th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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Christ Crucified: Good Friday Meditations 2020
Fr David Curry

Introduction:  “We preach Christ crucified.” (1 Corinthians 1.23)

Paul’s words go to the heart of the Christian religion. Like it or not, the Christian Faith is  religio crucis, the religion of the cross. What does that mean? It means that the mystery of the Cross is the mystery of love. We easily forget this and even reject it. The great English mystery writer, P.D. James, in her rather unusual novel, The Children of Men, acutely observes that the contemporary churches at the end of the last century had “moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism” which leads in turn to the virtual abolition of “the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross.” To some, if not many, “the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.”

Yet the Cross for all of its disturbing qualities is the essential symbol of the Christian religion. It sets Christianity apart from other world religions and yet, more importantly, connects with them in terms of  the realities of the human experience. This is especially true with respect to suffering. The Cross symbolizes redemptive suffering. It is crucial to how we think about suffering and to the forms of our engagement with other world religions including the culture and religion of secular atheism. The Cross speaks to our present distresses, to our fears and worries about all the forms of suffering in our global world, not the least of which are our current concerns about Covid-19.

Preaching Christ crucified has always been central to Christian witness and practice. The traditions of Lent, of Holy Week and Easter belong to a deep and profound reflection upon the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which the Christian Faith is represented artistically and aesthetically. It may surprise you to know that the practice of preaching or meditating upon the Seven Last Words of Christ, something deeply embedded in the modern Protestant and Catholic imaginary since the eighteenth century, was actually a service devised in the Americas, in Lima, Peru, by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, just after the devastations of the terrible earthquakes of 1678 and 1687. The devotion inspired eighteenth century composers such as Haydn in Europe.

The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross complement the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, though not in any systematic sense. The words from the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father. Both the Our Father and the Cross are essential to the Christian understanding. Simone Weil, the 20th century passionate philosopher of attention and an activist devoted to the poor and the suffering, says that “the Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change … taking place in the soul.” The theologian Anthony Boers observes the intimate connection between the Our Father and the Seven Last Words of Christ. Both “ably condense and collapse into one set of short passages the essentials of our faith.”

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