Palm Sunday B - 5 April 2009

Palm Sunday B - 5 April 2009
Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 14:1-15:47
James V. Stockton

Of all the Sundays of the year, it is today that the challenges of being a follower of Jesus Christ rise up with plain and inescapable clarity. While each of the gospel writers tells the story, this year’s reading, today, from Mark the evangelist, tells it in a way that is the most straightforward. The truth is left to speak for itself. And perhaps ironically, the truth is found in Jesus’ decision to say nothing more. “But Jesus made no further reply,” the gospel tells us, “and Pilate was amazed.”

“The Passion is really the mystery of all mysteries the heart of the Christian faith experience.” So writes Episcopal priest and author Cynthia Bourgeault in her book titled The Wisdom Jesus. She goes on, “The spectacle of an innocent and good man destroyed by the powers of this world is an archetypal human experience. It elicits our deepest feelings of remorse and empathy (and, if we’re honest, our own deepest shadows as well).” As such, the Passion, as the Rev. Bourgeault notes, “has long been a popular subject of devotion…” as the literature and artwork attest that have grown up around it. “The Passion is quite manipulable,” she notes. It’s been used to stir anger and scapegoating… to fuel anti-Semitism, to induce [feelings of] personal guilt.”


And while I suppose people may be helped by a sting of conscience wherever the conscience has grown too comfortably numb, yet, people are right to wonder if guilty consciences are indeed the point and purpose of Christ’s horrific experience. Is this really why Jesus had to endure betrayal, trial, execution, and death, along with his resurrection and ascension?

It is important for Christians to recognize for ourselves, and to remind the world around us, that Christ’s resurrection and ascension are as important to the passion as is the passion to the resurrection and ascension. Whenever people over-emphasize the unsavory part s of the story and ignore its glorious and surprising victory, or when they do the opposite, then the full mystery of Christ Jesus is kept hidden. When people make the mystery of Christ either about their own guilty consciences or about their personal privilege due to their share in the victory of Christ, they diminish the Passion of Christ to a narcissistic story of their own reflection. The truth of God deserve better than this. I believe God thinks that people deserve better, too.

Jesus remains silent, and it amazes his judge. Jesus will not defend himself; more to the point, Jesus will not seek a way out of his death. This the truth of the gospel. This is the challenge of the mystery of Christ Jesus. Yes, Jesus struggles with what lies before him. Jesus is fully human, as Paul celebrates in his letter to the Philippians. He is not just fully God, but fully God surrendered to the fullness of being human. Jesus struggles in his prayers: ‘Please, God, Father; please Abba, Papa - please let this hour pass; if possible, let this responsibility pass from me.’ Jesus struggles, and thanks be to God. It makes it just that much harder for someone to make others feel guilty about having to struggle. And Thanks be to God, Jesus at prayer makes it harder for me to make myself, and for you to make yourself, feel somehow less than faithful when in the midst of our own struggles, we may ask God for an easier way.

Jesus’ trial now approaches through both the outward authority of the court and the inward strength of his conviction. And Jesus’ words may seem to suggest that he wishes to flee. His final prayer, though, shows Jesus feeling acutely the pains of the division of a fully human will from the will of its creator. Jesus struggles, and then he prays. ‘Your will be done, Oh God, not mine.’ And so his he prays not so much for permission to run away; but for some last-hour sense of the mystery of the unity of his human will with the will of God. It is, I think, the fracture between the collective human will and the will of God that is the very thing puts Jesus on the cross. And I think the fullness of his experience of it causes him to cry out from the cross and from the depths of his humanity, “My God, where are you?”

‘Jesus dies for our sins,’ and, as the Rev. Bourgeault writes, “…this [statement] is in fact completely and wholly (entirely) true. But, not individually,” she claims, “as [we] are most likely to hear it.” Jesus didn’t die because you lied, or you cheated, or you did something even worse. “Rather,” she continues, “Jesus died for – meaning ‘because of’ and ‘on behalf of’ – the human condition in its collectivity.” I think of it this way: that as a single note sounds in the ear of everyone present, so also a single sin, whether deliberate and malicious, or even the error of someone’s good intention, reverberates across humanity touching countless lives in ways that we could never guess. Jesus goes to his death with no attempt to defend or escape, because to live another day would be to live for self alone, and the effects of that would ripple through humanity forever.

It is perhaps the most challenging thing about following Christ, to make sense of his death on the cross. One thing we learn is that we cannot make sense of it by ignoring it. We must go to it to have any hope of understanding it. This means, of course, engaging the challenges and mysteries of Holy Week, yes. But it means also going to the cross of Christ, to the death of Jesus, to the death of self, in ways less overt than we do here today. And it means doing so throughout the rest of the year, and in area of our lives other than attendance and membership in Church. And as we do so, we learn along the way, I think, that we cannot approach the cross alone. It is too big in every way, too meaningful for any one of us to go there alone; we must go somehow together.

And whenever we arrive, and especially on this most challenging Sunday of all, we learn, I think, that no one of us alone, nor any group of us alone, can join his will, or hers or theirs, to that of God. But we learn that with those also whom we meet along the way, we stand a chance of at least making the attempt. And finally, all of us gazing together upon the one there upon the cross for us all, all of us listening together until he breathes no more, we learn that with God come among us to die and live again, we stand much more than just a chance of following Jesus to that death to self to which God calls us, and to that new life where God still leads the way. Amen.

© 2009, James V. Stockton