Sermon
for Palm Sunday
Year C
April 1,
2007
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator
St. John’s in the Village
New York City
This liturgy, with which we begin Holy Week, is a rich, colorful
liturgy, a welter of symbols and ideas swirl about these rites
that begin the holiest time for all Christians. And,
beneath this liturgical and musical richness, there are some
troublesome ideas, ideas and events which have puzzled many,
sent others away from Christianity in horror, and often left
the faithful with the conviction that they should not look
too closely at what is going on here.
But today, I propose
to look directly into the face of the most troublesome parts
of this rite. Today, and Good Friday, we will look
rather intently at some of the things about these rites that
cause people the most trouble. We are not going to
be content to cover the rough parts with elegant music and
rich ceremonial beautifully celebrated. We are going
to look at the tough questions about what we celebrate today.
We celebrate today
the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The full name
of this Sunday is the Sunday of the Passion. It is
incidentally, the Sunday of the Palms, but the triumph of
Palm Sunday gives way rather immediately to the agony of the
passion, and it is the passion that forms the center of the
Word of God today.
Today we begin the
celebration of the death of Jesus Christ upon the Cross-.
The one who is the Son of God is despised, rejected,
and forced into an agonizing death. And, what of God
the Father? Does he sit on his heavenly throne, considering
the blood and the gore and the savagery and make a pronouncement
something like “Looks good to me.” If this were the
case, Christianity should be rejected as a monstrous distortion
of religion, an exaltation of indifference and savagery, and
an intolerable substitution of innocent for the guilty.
But that is not what
is going on here. God is not indifferently subjecting
Jesus to suffering and death. The one whom we know as God
is, himself, intent upon suffering on our behalf. For the
truth behind this passion story, underlying it and making
it sensible, is that the one who suffers on the cross is God
himself . That truth is spelled out in today'sreadings.
In Luke's passion story, we begin with the inquisitors
asking if Jesus is God, and Jesus subtly accepting their description.
We end, with the words of Jesus commending himself
to his Father, the one with whom he shared the triune divinity.
In the second reading,
the greatest theologian of all Christianity, Paul the Apostle,
proclaims that Jesus emptied himself on the cross.
This was not something that was done to him, but something
into which he walked with intention and commitment.
Jesus is no victim here. He is God himself intent on
doing this thing.
But why die for us?
What does it mean? The death of Jesus is a natural
consequence of sin, and a natural consequence of love.
It was essential. Let me explain.
If you really love
someone, you stick by him. Even when it hurts.
There is no example of this so clear as the love of a parent
for a child in trouble. I can remember parents to whom
I ministered when their children were deeply enthralled by
the drug culture. Lives being wasted, talents squandered,
fortunes frittered away—all in the name of that peculiar scourge
of modern America, narcotics. I have a piece of furniture
in my home given to me by a couple whose young musician son
destroyed his life with drugs. No matter what it did
to the family, that family bond was indissoluble. No
amount of “tough love” counsel ever convinced the family that
their love for Brian would ever wane or die. Their love for
an errant son brought heart-deep pain to a family.
The love of God for an errant humanity cuts to the heart of
God himself.
The commitment of God
to stick by humanity meant that even when the going got rough,
the commitment of the divine love remained clear. The
love of God for humanity is so deep and so broad that God
himself was wiling to die for us. That is what is going
on today. Death is a natural consequence of love, especially
when it is love unto death.
Death is also a natural
consequence of sin. The Love of God in Jesus puts god
in the firing line of human sin. When we speak of God
being incarnate in Jesus, we mean that God, in Jesus, lived
a full human life. And, in that human life, he encountered
and absorbed the fullness of human rejection, hatred, and—frankly—sin.
The passion stories, such as Luke's, which we read
today, make deliberate literary effort to contain the whole
sweep of human atrocity, failure, and cruelty. Besides
the obvious physical cruelty of scourging, whipping and spitting,
there is political intrigue and corruption, personal dishonesty
and neglect, the indifference of authority and the hypocrisy
of religion. Jesus meets them all. And in the
crucifixion, these forces of what the church calls sin do
their worst. When perfect love meets degenerate hate,
the forces of hatred and death do their worst. They
are bearers of death. And the love of Jesus is so perfect
that he cannot leave us, he cannot save himself, because he
is committed to see life through to the end, even when the
end is on a cross, abandoned outside the city.
Sometimes I like to
find myself in the passion story. I think today, that
I see myself in the last line of the story. We are
told that his acquaintances, and some of the women of Galilee,
stood at a distance watching these things. I am in
that crowd. Maybe you are, too. We cannot bring ourselves
closer—time and space put us at a distance. But this
week we will draw as close as we can, in the mysteries of
Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. But as we
stand there in that distant crowd, remember that we are watching
God himself give himself for us. Nothing less.
We are watching the depth of love acted out and feeling the
consequences of sin and abandonment. These powerful
deep emotions are being felt by the one who just could not
abandon us because his love was that strong. It is
that love which is at the center of our liturgy today and
is at the heart of God.
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