Palm / Passion Sunday

No Other Way

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 have experienced the threat of terrorism that many in the world live with daily. 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 is experienced every day in our modern day world.

"I was bruised and battered,
I couldn't tell what I felt.
I was unrecognizable to myself.
I saw my reflection in a window,
I didn't know my own face,
Oh brother, are you gonna leave me,
Wastin' away, on the Streets of Philadelphia."

The song is about the city of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, but it could just as easily be about the streets of Oshawa or Toronto. 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 and self-sacrifice. But most of us are like Simon. Compelled! Dragged kicking and screaming into service!

And there isJudas, sitting at table with him, sharing in that Passover meal, knowing the terrible deed that he was going to participate in. Knowing that it all rests on him. What was he thinking? Was Judas brokenhearted that Jesus would do no more than suffer. Watching Jesus’ ministry go down the drain, so he struck out at him with the feelings of a betrayed spouse. All his pent up rage, disappointement, love and humiliation spewing out as his high hopes are shattered. Is he asking himself how he could have been so blind? Was Jesus such a disappointment? Was it just not happening fast enough, or in the way he wanted it to? Was he only in it for what he could get out of it? And when it didn't happen the way he thought it should, he simply opted out? Do I simply opt out when life gets difficult or when things are not going my way? Am I a Christian only for what I get out of it?

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 on that 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. "Truly this man was God’s son."

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 God’s son? 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!