Mark 11:1 – 11a Psalm 118:19 – 29
Isaiah 45:21 – 25 Psalm 22:1 – 11 Philippians 2:5 – 11 Mark 14:32 – 15:47
Who doesn’t love a parade?!!
And we’ve just had a glorious one: Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord Hosanna in the highest heaven!
Where was Jesus coming from, with all his talk about suffering and death and taking up one’s cross?
Why were we anxious about returning to Jerusalem, as though we were walking into our deaths?
Look at this greeting!
Whether we’re part of the crowds because we’re a follower of Jesus, or because we’ve simply gotten caught up in the excitement and love a parade, it’s a glorious day! Perhaps the kingdom really IS coming – we may yet get to sit one on his right and one on his left!
(And yet, as we know, the people on Jesus’ right and on his left wind up being, not favored disciples, but robbers, bandits, criminals, revolutionaries – sinners like you and me.)
Palm Sunday is a day of contrasts.
We enter in triumph: Jesus is king, and all will be right with the world!
We exit in despair: our expectations are casualties of Sanhedrin power and Roman control. The nails of the crucifixion pierce our hope, and never-ending darkness descends on the world as we know it.
What kind of Messiah – King – God – is this?
What kind of Messiah – King – God – is this who, as Yann Martel’s character Pi says (Life of Pi, p. 55 – 56), “goes hungry, suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don’t get it and opponents who don’t respect Him – what kind of a god is that? It’s a god on too human a scale, that’s what…
I’m sure that passage reflects some of the murmuring and distress of Jesus’ disciples on that Thursday night in Gethsemane, on that Friday morning of the crucifixion.
Is this just one more leader who turns out to be nothing but an empty promise?
I’m sure, if we really allow ourselves to think about it, to be in that despairing, confusing space in which the Passion Gospel leaves us, these same sentiments reflect some of our own questions and confusion. What sort of a god is this?!!
However, most of us look at the crucifixion through the lens of the resurrection, and for many of us there is a tendency to leap from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem of Palm Sunday to the resurrection of Easter, skipping over Good Friday as much as possible.
The crucifixion is too painful to bear, physically and spiritually, and we are afraid.
Like the young man following Jesus, we run off naked, leaving our linen cloth behind.
Like Peter, we try to protect ourselves by denying Jesus, by distancing ourselves from the painful reality of who he is – and what is going to happen to him.
We want the empty tomb – without the crucifixion, thank you very much!
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Unlike the followers of Jesus, we know the end of the story, so our tendency is just to go there… to skip over the painful parts and into the joy of new life.
But there is a danger in such “skipping over” – without the reality of the crucifixion, the resurrection loses some of its power, some of its meaning.
The Passion Gospel today leaves us in a despairing place: Jesus is dead, his body wrapped in a linen cloth and laid in a borrowed tomb, sealed with a large stone; his followers scattered, wandering isolated, wrapped in cocoons of grief.
Can things be any worse?
Like Shelley, we cry out:
“Then black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the world in which I moved alone.”
This is not a “feel good” story.
We do not leave church with the same excitement with which we entered.
But we must resist the temptation to skip over this part of the story, to leap to next Sunday.
It is incumbent upon us to sit at the foot of the cross, to be in this place, to know the magnitude of the pain, the sacrifice, the confusion, the desolation and the disarray. For it is in the midst of this abject despairing place that the resurrection occurs, that new life is born, that, to paraphrase Blake, a “Heaven is built in Hell’s despair.”
We must first know this anguish in order to know the joy it births; this death in order to know that death, now, is vanquished, this entombed body in order that we might dance on the empty tomb.
No, today we do not leave church with the same excitement with which we entered it. We leave heavy, with the magnitude of the sacrifice which has been made for us.
But, if we allow ourselves to walk through this Holy Week, carrying the words of today’s Passion Gospel in our hearts, if we can go to the cross with Jesus on Good Friday, what an Easter awaits us!
For the love of Jesus, which has held in tension suffering and joy, death and life, greets us in the presence of the Risen Christ, in whom all mortal death is vanquished and all earthy despair is transformed.
May we live into this Holy Week, conscious that the love which sustains us is also the love which leads to Calvary - and the hope of the resurrection which lies ahead, at the dawning of Easter Day.
Amen.
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