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Palm
Sunday and the Sunday of the Passion Readings:
Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 14:1-15:47
This
is no doubt the strangest celebration of the church year.
We began our service with the waving of palm branches and a
joyous procession. All the
emotions of expectation, anticipation and messianic fervour were
reenacted. Yet we know that
Christ's entry into Jerusalem led directly to his crucifixion.
We reflect that knowledge in our service. The reading of the Passion overpowers the joyous beginning.
It is highly dramatic. It
is the real focus of our worship today.
For with the reading, we enter into Holy Week, into the shock and
disappointment of the Christian story.
We enter into the world, as the followers of Jesus must have
experienced it, a world where the kingdom has not yet come.
It is the ultimate love story, for every love story comes to a
sad ending. At the worst,
love dies. At best, the
love lives but the lover dies. So
today we are left with a sense of emptiness that will only deepen
throughout this week, until finally the power of death is overcome.
It
is hard for us to imagine the change in mood that took place from the
entry into Jerusalem up until the crucifixion.
It is difficult to imagine that a crowd, who one day shouted
"Hosanna", could just a few short days later, pick up that
terrible chant, "Crucify"!
Or is it so difficult to imagine?
Perhaps the problem is that we can so easily pick out our own
voices in the crowd. As
we watch the story unfold again, incident by incident, surely it should
strike us that two thousand years have not made much difference to
humanity after all. The
changes are only on the surface. Humans
are still abusers of power. We
still betray one another. Much
as we say that such terrible abuses cannot happen in our enlightened
age, we live with the legacy of the holocaust and the horrors of its
victims. We know that
brutal torture still takes place in our world. We know, that violence lives within the hearts of people.
We know that one war follows another.
Newspapers are filled with evidence to that effect, so much so
that it has almost become commonplace.
There
is a song by Bruce Springsteen that really speaks to me of the kind of
abuse that we experience every day in our modern day world.
"I
was bruised and battered, The
song is about the city of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, but
it could just as easily be about the streets of Mississauga.
But it affects me even more deeply because it resonates in my
very soul. It sounds to me
very much like a paraphrase of the haunting words of Isaiah from the Old
Testament reading this morning. "I
gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled
out my beard." As
Christians we see in the image of the suffering servant, the death and
passion of Christ. Do we see also stories of the oppressed, the poor, the
underprivileged? They are
the reason for God's great gift to humanity.
They
are the reason that we cannot observe the cross of Jesus Christ
objectively from a position of detachment.
To be there at all is to be involved, implicated one way or
another. From the crowd gathered there shouting their taunts, one
passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, coming into Jerusalem from the country, was
compelled to carry the cross. He
did not choose to help Jesus carry the cross.
He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
How the taunts of the crowd must have affected him!
How he must have suffered knowing the suffering of the one he was
helping! We
are compelled, as was Simon, to carry the cross.
We don't line up for the privilege.
But we all eventually carry some of the world's guilt, pain, and
suffering. We don't always
deserve to. Some of the
really great people, the Martin Luther King's, the Mother Teresa's of
our world, actually seek out opportunities to carry a cross of suffering
or self-sacrifice. But most
of us are like Simon. Compelled!
Dragged kicking and screaming into service! And
there is Judas. We have to
understand the betrayal of Judas. Why
did he do what he did? How
many of you read about the Gospel of Judas?
It was in the news on Friday of this week.
A newly recovered papyrus has been translated.
While Judas has long been condemned as the most treacherous of
people, it portrays him as simply doing Jesus’ bidding.
I have to say, it is not a new hypothesis.
There has always been that question of what might have happened
had Judas not betrayed Jesus. Yet
none of us can become really involved in the Passion of our Lord unless
we are willing to be more deeply involved in our world, unless we learn
to see the sufferings of the hungry, the oppressed, the powerless, in
the light of the crucifixion. For
on the cross, every human suffering, every human evil, is focused in one
single event. It
is the Centurion who really got the point.
He understood the reason for Jesus’ death on the cross. Indeed, his words sum up the whole of Mark's Gospel.
"For this man truly was the Son of God." The
question is, do we get the point? Do
we come away from the reading of the Passion knowing that, knowing that
Jesus is truly the Son of God? What
commitment are we prepared to make?
Can we take meaning from the passion story?
Or do we find ourselves wishing that it all ended happily?
Do we avoid going through the agony of the cross?
If
we do we will be avoiding the suffering that goes on in the world around
us. We will never get past
it. It is only through
dying that resurrection can take place.
Are we open to experiencing the cross so that we can arrive at
Easter and experience the joy of the resurrection?
May this be a truly holy week for us as we follow the way of the
cross! |