In the name of the Risen Lord. Amen.
Eastertide
greetings to you all. I pray that you all are continuing to be safe and sane during
this difficult time. And while we can’t physically gather with one another, I
am so incredibly thankful that, through our prayers and with the aid of
technology, we can still gather as the faithful people of God and be connected
in this way. This morning, instead of primarily focusing on one of the
Scriptural texts that were read, I want to focus on a liturgical text – the Pascha
nostrum, which is the Latin title for “Christ our Passover.”
Right
below the “Sermon” heading in your online bulletin, you’ll find the full text
for easy reference. Or if you have a Prayer Book and that’s easier than
juggling screens, you can find it on page 83. At the beginning of our liturgy,
we sang a lovely paraphrase of this text to a well-known tune. But for this
sermon, it will be helpful to have the full text in our ears:
Alleluia. Christ our
Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast, not with
old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of
sincerity and truth. Alleluia.
This
hymn is composed of three passages of Scripture, taking key verses from 1
Corinthians 5, Romans 6, and 1 Corinthians 15. In the medieval Church, there
was a tradition of using similar verses before the start of the Easter Vigil
and when Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was putting together the first Book of
Common Prayer in 1549, he included this as an option to use in worship during
Eastertide. It’s a great text that puts together some of St. Paul’s most
powerful and instructive writing about the Resurrection. Furthermore, it’s a
great text that helps us sing the glory of the Resurrection in the season of
Easter.
The
first section comes from 1 Corinthians 5 and uses the language of the Passover
in the Exodus. You’ll recall that before the Hebrew people left Egypt and were
led safely across the Red Sea by God’s almighty hand, the people had a meal in
which the blood of the lamb that they were to eat was spread on the doorposts
of their homes. This act spared them as the plague of death that swept through
Egypt that night passed over their homes. This is how Christ’s Death and
Resurrection can be understood – as an Exodus from the grip of death and
liberation from the forces that hold us captive. The Passover sacrifice wasn’t
as much a sacrifice for sins, as much as it was about salvation from captivity
to forces bigger than us. And in this first part of the Pascha nostrum, that is
what we see – that just as God saved us from the plague of death in Egypt, God
saves us from the finality of the grave by the Resurrection.
And in the
Passover, because the people were leaving in the morning for the Red Sea, they
did not have time to make leavened bread; there was no time for the dough to
rise. This is why, even to this day, during the Passover celebration, faithful
Jews don’t eat any sort of bread, only matzah. Throughout Scripture and in Jesus’
teachings, leaven, or yeast, is seen as something to be wary of. In our
culture, we don’t use yeast as a metaphor for harmful things, but in the
context of St. Paul’s writing, it was. Leaven was seen as unnatural, as an
impurity, as not following God’s commandment.
St. Paul tells us that
we are to keep the feast, to celebrate God’s saving us from death with the unleavened
bread of sincerity and truth. The old ways are over and the new has come. Thus,
we are to live differently in light of the Resurrection and God’s victory over
death. In the passage from 1 Peter, we heard a similar sentiment: “By God’s
great mercy, he has given us a new birth into a living hope.” And as our
Collect puts it, “Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of
Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they process by their faith.” When
we sing the Pascha nostrum, it is a prayer that we be given the wisdom and
courage to come and see the difference that Christ’s Resurrection makes not only in our lives, but also in our deaths.
What makes us
Resurrection people is that Easter is not something that happened in isolation
to Jesus; through the gift of Baptism, we are incorporated into Christ’s Body
and share in his Resurrection. As the Bishop of Jerusalem, Cyril, said in a
sermon in 349, “You were led to the holy pool of divine baptism, as Christ was
carried from the cross to the sepulchre... [And as you descended into those
waters and ascended out of them], you died and were born; and that water of
salvation was at once your grave and your mother.” In the middle section of the
Pascha nostrum from Romans, this Paschal mystery is what is being proclaimed.
It’s
called the Paschal mystery because through the events of Jesus’ Passion,
Crucifixion, and Resurrection we are saved. We know that God creates out of
nothing, and our salvation also comes out of nothing that we bring to it. It’s why
birth is such a good metaphor because we are passive in our births. And so,
quite literally, salvation happens over our dead bodies. For the early
disciples, it was not only Jesus that died on Good Friday, but also their
hopes. But God raises Jesus Christ from the dead with no help from the disciples,
meaning that God will raise us to new life as well. This is the message of
grace, and why we sometimes call it a mystery. We reap all of the benefits of
the Resurrection even though we contribute nothing to it. Christ was raised
from the tomb long before any of us were born, and yet we are made alive to God
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
In
today’s Gospel text, we see how grace operates in our lives. Thomas was not
present when the other disciples encountered the Risen Jesus and he wanted to
have that same experience so that he, too, might be in a relationship with Jesus.
And what does Jesus do? He meets Thomas in that need. Jesus doesn’t give him a
list of things to do before seeing him, or demand an apology, or anything of the sort. No, Jesus meets us where we are. And because we were captive to the power
of Sin and Death, that is where Jesus went to meet us so that we might arise
with him.
This
union to Christ is what transforms us into Resurrection people, and this is
what the final section of the Pascha nostrum proclaims. The theological word
for this is “recapitulation.” In the movie The
Matrix, there’s a scene in which a character experiences déjà vu
– seeing the same black cat walk across a stairway. And this is immediately
troubling to everyone because such an experience means that the computer
simulation in which they are living has been edited. Well, recapitulation is
something similar – the story has been changed and for the forces of Sin and
Death, this is a signal that their demise has arrived.
The
story for us descendants of Adam is that we were all stuck with the consequences
of sinful disobedience to God, which is death. It was a problem we couldn’t
solve. We tried to get around death with philosophies, with pleasures, with
denials. But these things did not rob Death of its power over us. When it comes
to the grave, we were, literally, at a dead end. Just as Thomas was stuck in
his incapacity to believe, we are stuck in our incapacity to get around the finality
of death. Our limits are not God’s limits though. Thomas’ incapacity was met by
God’s abundant capacity and Thomas goes from “Unless I see… I will not believe”
to “My Lord and my God!” In the same way, in our incapacity and deadness, God
leads us to Resurrection life. God has rewritten the story by his Word. This is
what recapitulation means – the story does not end in death which plagues all
of us who are Adam’s descendants, rather it ends with new life in the new Adam,
Jesus Christ, who gives new life to all of Creation.
In
this passage, St. Paul says that Jesus is the “first fruits” and in John, Jesus
himself tells us that he is the vine and we are the branches. When we abide in
Jesus our joy is complete. This is what the opening Collect is getting at when
it has us to pray that we may show forth in our lives what we profess in our
faith; that our faith bears fruit in our lives. Baptism connects us to God, and
so our lives are meant to be full of relationships. Baptism declares that we
are loved, and so God intends that our lives be full of love. Baptism is about
dying with Christ and rising with him in glory, and so our lives are to be
lived not for ourselves but for God; and not in the fear of death, but rather in
the hope of the Resurrection.
Now
this fruitfulness is about not giving us a to-do list or anything of the sort.
The wonderful thing about the Pascha nostrum is that all of the action comes
from God. Jesus is the vine and he puts forth the first fruits of our salvation.
Fruit is intended to be sweet, a delight to the senses. Imagine – how might you
live if you knew that, no matter what, you would always have a community to
love and support you? That’s what God intends for us, the Body of Christ, to be.
Imagine how you might live if you knew that death is not the worst thing that
can happen to us? If you knew that all manner of things shall be well? If you
knew that you were forgiven by the almighty source of love that made all things?
Well, my friends,
we don’t have to wonder. This reality is what the Resurrection opens to us and
Jesus is the first fruit of that new reality, and we are intended to be the
bountiful harvest. Salvation is given to us that we might abide in the true
vine, that we might have life abundantly, that we might flourish in love. This
is why the Pascha nostrum begins and ends with the phrase “Alleluia,” which is
the Greek translation of a Hebrew word that means “praise God.” We praise God
for this new story that God has given to us in which light shines in the
darkness, the grave is robbed of its finality, sins are forgiven, and abundant
life is granted.
As we know from the beginning
of John’s telling of the Gospel, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…
and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.” It is the grace
of being saved from Death, the grace of being united to Jesus’ Resurrection, and
the grace of tasting the sweet fruit of our salvation that Easter gives us. May
our song of faith and thanksgiving ever be: Alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed
for us; therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia.
