Christ Church

“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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