From Advent to Christmas, from Lent, to Palm Sunday to Good Friday to Easter. From the Ascension to Pentecost and throughout that long stretch of Ordinary Time, we Christians wait. And that waiting time, in each one of those holy seasons, has the power to challenge and stretch and purify us. If we cooperate, it can also transform us.
Palm Sunday, the feast we celebrate this day, initiates that week in the church year which Christians cherish as no other, which is why we call it Holy Week. For Palm Sunday leads us into the solemn high feast of God’s dark glory and dreadful grandeur. It inaugurates the most awesome and terrifying time of waiting in the church year. For the reality is that the Holy Week Liturgies form the core of the church’s self understanding because they set forth for us the meaning and the nature of Christian life.
And yet, why is it that so often during Holy Week you and I waver in our waiting? Each year, what always begins with our zealous straining to catch a glimpse of the young rabbi riding on a donkey somehow turns to tedium and then to a dulled-belief. Maybe it’s because the narratives of Jesus’ suffering and death intrude upon our notions of God and God’s place and presence in our lives. Is it because in this day and time of drones and Navy seals and power rangers that nobody wants to believe in, much less depended upon a crucified God? Or is it because we already know the end of the story which Palm Sunday begins.
We know that when the women arrive at the tomb on the third morning that the stone will be rolled away, the grave will be empty and an angel will be pointing to the folded grave clothes. We already know that a resplendent Christ will pass through walls and will show himself to his fearful disciples. And so perhaps because we already know the end of the story, it’s difficult for us to wait through Holy Week and yet wait we must. For the very realization and meaning of our Christian identity is recapitulated in this waiting time of Holy Week. For Holy Week teaches us that while nothing is impossible with God we still have to wait for the realization of that possibility. And that’s very difficult to do in an age that values activity and has very little respect for passivity or contemplation.
You and I seem to be happiest when we have something we can do don’t we? Something we can plan or plot or scheme or devise or work or produce. And because of the incredible technological sophistication of our contemporary context we’re always tempted to contrive: to control the uncontrollable, future and destiny, success and defeat, history and mystery. We’ve come a long way in our efforts to master chance in our lives. But Palm Sunday wants to counter all that energy and momentum. And so it seeks to slow us down. The man who comes seated on that donkey is a sign of contradiction. He’s a threat to the God whom we’ve made over in our own image. A God of high achievement, and performance, majesty and power, triumph and transcendence.
So when we’re asked to see God in Jesus of Nazareth, it unnerves and disturbs us. His crucifixion and death disclose the chosen vulnerability of God. The willingness of God to come among us, to share our ordinary lot, to suffer with us, and most of all, to suffer for us. Jesus refuses all power to determine the choices of those who decide his fate. He relinquishes all authority to overturn the vicious trajectory which fear and anger have conceived. He stands before us as messiah and king. But he’s not the kind of king for whom we’ve waited. What we get is the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, bruised and battered, the Man of Sorrows. He’s no omnipotent sovereign. He’s nothing but a wounded healer who’s worn himself out in love in order to lead us to his beloved Father.
And each year it’s Holy Week that gives us an opportunity to recover a deeper relationship with God and with other human beings. But we’re a people who value doing over being. So we’re troubled each year when Palm Sunday invites us during that week we call holy quite literally to stop our doing and instead simply be with God. We’re invited to draw near to the heart of that One whom we know and love. And it’s Palm Sunday which also reminds us, that this is the time when we wait with God in simple silence offering only our presence and through that presence the gift of ourselves.
There’s very little in modern life to prepare us to grasp the horror and the shame and the repulsion that crucifixion meant. In those times It was primarily a form of military and political punishment. In the Roman Empire it was the supreme penalty. Sadistic and cruel, it was conceived to dishonor and desecrate. In nearly all instances crucifixion was reserved for those of the lowest classes, the slaves and subjugated people of the Roman Empire because it was intended to intimidate by example and to subdue by horrific display. It was really high state theatrical violence.
Crucifixion called for the public display of a naked victim in some prominent place: at a crossroads, in an amphitheater, on high ground. Often the victim was first flogged and then made to carry the cross-beam through the streets to the place of execution. The victim’s hands and feet were nailed to the wood and after that torment had been completed, if the victim were still alive, death would eventually come from suffocation. Since the victim was unable to support the weight of his body with his hands, the diaphragm would be slowly crushed. And then what was most horrifying and insulting to the ancient people, the victim’s body would be left to rot rather than being buried.
It’s most probably this image of the crucified messiah which so disturbs and confuses us and which brings us to anguish. As the old hymn says, what we see there on Calvary causes us to tremble. For if our God suffers like that and is so exposed to the brutality and power of the world what will become of us? It’s both a daring and a daunting theological question. But let’s not forget that the waiting time of Holy Week also involves hope. For as William Lynch said, “the ability to wait is central to hope.” Present to one another and to God, waiting in silence and prayer with patience you and I will begin to recover the eschatological hope which is signified in the resurrection.
It’s Holy Week which prepares us to live in that hope. In that place of active creative waiting. Holy Week teaches us to hope in future possibility even in the face of all that is negative and seemingly devoid of hope in our lives. When we hope in the absolute future we grasp what was required of Jesus for he staked his whole life on its being directed towards God. He trusted that his life had a definite meaning in God. And he believed that God would save him and deliver him absolutely. That’s the hope that binds back to the heart of God the whole of creation which has been scattered by sin.
That’s the hope that heals and restores..that waits and creates. Palm Sunday is the high solemn feast of God’s dark glory and dreadful grandeur and it ushers in the most awesome and terrifying waiting time in the Church year. This coming week is holy for what it teaches us is to wait. To value being, presence and silence. To love without reserve. To live in compassionate and practical solidarity with women and men and children who suffer affliction. To hope that out of this waiting in the midst of this love within our solidarity will come the resurrection.
That’s our Palm Sunday hope. And it’s our only hope. That’s what the palms and the shouting were all about. That’s what our singing and worshiping and peaching and praying are all about. The hope that finally by the grace of God the impossible will happen. The hope that Pilate will take him by one hand and Caiaphas by the other and that the Roman soldiers will throw down their spears and the Sanhedrin will bow their heads. The hope that by the power of the Holy Spirit and the love of Christ, who is the Lord of the impossible, the leaders of the enemy nations will draw back while there is still time for drawing back from a vision too terrible to name. The hope that you and I, each one of us in our own pathetic but crucial way, will work, and witness and pray for the things that make for peace both in our own lives and in the life of this planet.
Despair and hope, they travel the road to Jerusalem together as well as every road that you and I take. Despair at what in our madness we are bringing down on our own heads and hope in him who travels the road with us and for us and who is the only one of us all who isn’t mad. Hope in the King who approaches every human heart like a city. And you know it’s a very great hope as hopes go and well worth all our singing and dancing and sad little palms. Because not even death can prevail against this King of ours. Not even the end of the world will be the end of him a the mystery and majesty of his love.
And now for a moment let us pray. Eternal God, as we enter this week of deathly grandeur, lead us out of our familiar settings. Out of our doubts and fears, beyond our pride and our need to be secure so that we may pass into that strange and graceful ease with our true proportions and with yours so that in boundless silence we may grow strong enough to endure, confident enough to hope and through that, flexible enough to share your grace. Amen.
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