Third Sunday after Easter
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
April 17, AD 2005
“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
Nowhere,
perhaps, is the idea of the Resurrection as radical new life more
profoundly and provocatively expressed than in this gospel story. We are
presented with such a compelling image, an image of transformation, an image
that somehow connects to our experiences, whether we are literally mothers
or not. All of us, surely, can relate to the experience of pain and
sorrow, suffering and disappointment in some way or another.
The wonderful
point of the gospel story is that such things are neither denied nor
ignored. In a way, it is the experiential reality of such
things in our lives that is being emphasized in order to underscore the
greater idea, the idea of transformation from the graves of our sorrows and
pains to the paths of joy and peace, the idea of the Resurrection itself.
“Because I
go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of the Easter season and that
refrain becomes the critical matrix through which to understand the
radical meaning of these readings on the third, fourth and fifth Sundays
after Easter. You see, the gospels that are read on these Sundays are
all taken from the 16th chapter of St. John’s Gospel,
a chapter which is known as the “farewell discourse” of Jesus, Jesus
bidding adieu, we might say, (literally, to God but yet more
profoundly to God as the Father) to his disciples and friends. Such
things are, of course, wonderfully and emotionally charged but how much more
so in this situation? Why? B ecause of the radical meaning of
Christ’s going from us is, ultimately, the condition of his being
with us. At the heart of that paradox lies the Resurrection.
In the farewell
discourse Jesus is talking about his going from them in a twofold sense: his
going from them in his passion and death for “where I am going you cannot
come”; and his going from them in his ultimate homecoming to the Father
in his Ascension, that “where I am you may be also”. He goes
“through the valley of the shadow of death” for us that he might open
out to us the true homeland of the spirit. But the wonder of it all is that
we live in that homeland of the spirit through the comings and goings of the
Son to the Father now in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, and in
holy lives of service and sacrifice.
The meaning of
all that is captured in the Easter mantra, “because I go to the Father”.
It signals the orientation of the Son – everything is ordered to God as
Father – and it signals an end, a telos, for us in our lives through
our identity with Christ, an identity which is forged in the crucible of his
passion, but in which we are privileged to participate through the power of
his resurrection in our baptisms into his death and resurrection for us
and in our continual nourishment and succour from the food of the altar of
his love in us. The further significance of this is expressed
in the image of the transformation of our sorrows into joy, “a joy”,
moreover, “that no man taketh from you.” The image is that of
the pain of childbirth giving place to the joy of motherhood, an image which
makes utterly trivial and banal the commonplaces of our culture about ‘no
pain, no gain’. Here is something far deeper, something far more
profound.
It signals a
freedom for us in our lives, in the struggles and hardships of our lives. It
signals a freedom to God. It signals that there is a joy and a
freedom to be found whatever the circumstances in which we find ourselves
,whether we are dying upon our beds or in anxiety and great fear for
ourselves and our children – whatever, quite literally. It
requires something from us, of course. It requires our actively
taking a hold of what is shown to us and what is provided for us; in
short, we have to will it.
But then, that
is the whole point upon which human dignity and human freedom
ultimately depend. The grace of God demands our active
acceptance and embrace of it. We cannot be passive and indifferent to
it. When we are, then we empty it of its meaning for us in our lives,
the very thing which the Gospel is at pains to show us. The grace of
the Resurrection is accomplished only in and through the pains of the
passion and that grace provides us with a whole new orientation on life and
whole new foundation for our lives socially, morally, economically and
politically. This is what the lesson from 1 Peter
is saying – that we are freed to the will of God while living “as
strangers and pilgrims” in the world.
The conditions
of the world are seen in a new light. We can live in the world
but as oriented to God in all that we are doing. Profoundly,
there is joy in and through the hardships of life. But we
have to will what has been accomplished for us. Here Jesus is
providing his disciples and friends with the lesson before the events
of his passion and death, his resurrection and ascension. But we, on the
other hand, are hearing after both his passion and his resurrection!
We are given to see the idea and its reality!
The
Resurrection is this utterly remarkable thing which changes our whole
outlook. It gives us a direction and a purpose that allows us to face
with compassion the sufferings and the pains of the world without being
merely victims, on the one hand, or without assuming that the world
is everything, on the other hand. It gives us a freedom in
relation to the practical affairs of our daily lives because it counters
our idolatry of the practical, an idolatry so prevalent in the
fearfulness and anxieties of our culture, itself a culture of disrespect
and a culture of death. The two are related. There
can only be a deep respect for the dignity of our humanity through the
overcoming of the deep fears of the culture of death.
“I will show
you fear in a handful of dust” as T.S. Eliot puts it, naming, in a
poetic way, one of the conditions of modernity in its uncertainties and
cynical despair of God. The fall out from such fearfulness appears in
the multitudinous parade of vanity and violence that has become so much a
part of our world and day, and so much, too, a part of our church in its sad
and willful rejection of the principles of the gospel that define our
catholic identity. The vanity of the much-vaunted autonomy of the
national churches has wreaked violence upon the integrity of the Communion.
At issue for
the North American church is precisely an idolatry of the practical
which has collapsed the things of the Gospel of Christ into the issues of
the day; in short, a church which chooses to define itself by the policy of
same-sex marriages, for instance, or some other immediate and pressing
issue, at the expense of the Scriptural and Creedal doctrines which would
free us from the deadening tyranny of our subjectivity; in short, the
doctrines which free us to the Father. “[Our] sorrow shall be
turned to joy” only when we enter into the radical meaning of the Son’s
going to the Father and realize that the affairs and conceits of our world
and day are not only nothing worth but also deadly and destructive when they
are divorced from the Gospel of Christ.
In the mercies
of the Risen Christ, however, there is always the hope that our sorrows and
pains, our sufferings and disappointments, even our betrayals and
wickednesses can become the occasion of redemption and joy, when like
Picarda in Dante’s Paradiso, we might say about our own
follies and foolishnesses, “yet gaily I forgive myself”, but only
“because I go to the Father”, only because “[our] sorrow has [indeed]
been turned into joy” by the crucified and risen Christ.
“Your sorrow shall be
turned into joy”
