From Palms to Passion

Background: This past weekend I preached for Palm Sunday, at Christ Church Easton‘s Alive @ 5 Saturday service and at St. Andrew’s Chapel in Sudlersville (one of two churches in St. Luke’s Parish) on Sunday. The Palm/Passion Sunday readings include both Jesus’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem as well as his suffering and execution on the cross. This is the text of the sermon I gave over the weekend.

From Palms to Passion: Heartbreaking, Necessary, Life-Giving

One of the things I appreciate about the Episcopal liturgy for Palm Sunday is that we get the full story. We are not left cheering waving our palms, we also have to stare into the face of Jesus being crucified. The feeling we get, going from palms to passion in such a short time, might be whiplash. How can you go from “Hosanna” to “Crucify Him!” so quickly?

When we think back over our lectionary journey over the past few weeks: Jesus giving sight to a blind man, raising his friend Lazarus from the dead, this triumphant entrance into Jerusalem seems just right. This is a man who can perform miracles, an inspiring teacher, one who brings hope and healing to the poor and the sick. Surely, he has the power to change the direction of the people of Israel, to challenge the Roman Empire, there’s no way they have anyone equal to Jesus.

We can understand when the crowds get fired up:  “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Finally! We’ve got our guy—he’s here! You better look out now!

I wonder if anyone has had a period of riding high in your faith, in your life. Maybe it was soon after you found faith. You felt energized, you could feel and see God speaking to you in different ways. When you read the Bible, you always find a verse or a phrase to take with you into the day. And you think, yes, everyone needs to feel this, God is good, all the time.

Happily, we find those places and times at different points in our life. It’s not just a one-time thing. And when we are there, it’s easy to follow the crowds—the blind gaining their site, the poor and hungry being fed, Lazarus being raised. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

This Jesus guy is great!

Here he comes, his triumphant entry into Jerusalem…riding on… a donkey?

Then he goes into the Temple and flips tables and angers Temple leadership. Then he gets arrested.

Are we still with Jesus when he’s called into question? What happens when the road of our faith lives gets bumpy. When we struggle, when God seems quiet in our lives.

Do we stick with Jesus when there might be a cost we don’t like associated with following him?

For the crowds in Jerusalem, it becomes pretty clear this is not the guy: the Messiah wouldn’t be arrested and sentenced to be crucified. Why would the Messiah, the one God sends to bring victory to his people, have this happen to him? He is supposed to win.

This guy must be an imposter. So the crowds put down their palms and call for the cross, when the cross meant to put someone to death. Crucify him!

When we read the Bible from a Christian perspective, we always want to identify with Jesus and the disciples. We know we are on Jesus’s team now, so we shout “Hosanna!” and next week, “He is Risen!”

We look back on history and see things like slavery, the Holocaust; we can look back and say, those things are wrong, they should never have happened. And that is true. And at the same time, I think it helps us to realize that people go with the crowd for a lot of reasons, including personal safety, for self-preservation, to not have to pay the cost of standing up for something or someone who is challenging those in power.

That even though we are Jesus followers now, that is in part because WE KNOW that he conquered death, we know how the story turns out… Maybe as things unfolded around them, we can understand those in the crowd. Maybe I would have been one of them. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

As we walk through the passion and suffering of Jesus today and through Holy Week and Good Friday, take time to look at the different characters in the readings. Be mindful that we encounter these same kinds of characters in our lives every single day, and sometimes we are these characters—these human beings with fears, doubts, questions, and who all need grace and mercy the same way that we do.

And realize that Jesus’s walk to the cross, his suffering, his death, and resurrection were for all of us, to make everyone recipients of God’s grace and forgiveness. Even and especially those who shouted, “Crucify him!”

When we look around today, we can still see why Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross was necessary.

Writer Debie Thomas, in her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories” says:

“In the cross, we are forced to see what our refusal to love, our indifference to suffering, our craving for violence, our resistance to change, our hatred of difference, our addiction to judgment, and our fear of the Other must wreak. When the Son of Humanity is lifted up, we see with chilling clarity our need for a God who will take our most horrific instruments of death and transform them at great cost, for the purposes of resurrection.”

When we arrive at Easter Sunday next week, we celebrate Jesus’s victory. But for his kind of victory to happen, it had to come out of the darkness. How can we see and appreciate light without understanding what darkness is like?

How can we appreciate love without knowing what heartbreak feels like?

Palm Sunday is a day of heartbreak. It feels like a loss. The disciples scatter and it doesn’t occur to them that something that is impossible could happen. Jesus has taught them so many parables that when he tells them he will be killed and on the third day be raised, that’s got to be a metaphor, right?

The disciples feel defeated. And as we hear Jesus cry out from the cross, he too experienced what defeat feels like. Allow yourselves this week to feel that defeat, to think about Jesus’s suffering and the suffering that is real around the world and here in our community.

But we also get the blessing of knowing that this defeat is temporary; it is short lived. It is what pastor and author Frederick Buechner calls “The Magnificent Defeat.” It’s only a defeat of worldly things, including power and death, by heavenly things, by God’s love, which is eternal, which goes beyond death; by God’s light, which overcomes the darkness, by God’s truth, which not only follows but fulfills the law, and God’s mercy, which forgives even murder on a cross.

It’s the darkness of Palm Sunday and Good Friday, which give us the light of Christ. Jesus took an instrument of death, the cross, and turned it into a symbol of life and love overcoming death.

We read these readings, we have these liturgies, we gather to tell and discuss these stories to remember the sacrificial love of Jesus. We invoke the bread and wine of the Last Supper to participate in the sacrament that he asks us to continue. Not just as something that happened in the past, but as something that is present for us today.

To get to the empty tomb and the new life of Resurrection Sunday, we have to stop so that we can look at and contemplate the cross.

This is the moment where we see what taking up his cross costs Jesus.

Remember that Jesus asks his would-be followers to take up our crosses and follow him.

What does it mean for us to take up our crosses? Debie Thomas writes:

“To take up a cross as Jesus did is to stand, always, in the center of the world’s pain. Taking up the cross means recognizing Christ crucified in every suffering soul we encounter, and pouring our energies into alleviating that pain, no matter what it costs us.”

This is what is means to love like Jesus. To love when everything is on the line. To have our hearts broken. To show by our actions, that our love for God is real and that we have skin in the game. That we remember and are grateful for the new life that Jesus made possible with his own life.