Sermon for Palm Sunday
admin | 14 April 2019“What mean ye by this service?”
Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the week of the intensity of Christ’s Passion. In it we confront all of the contradictions in our souls and in our lives. We confront our betrayals of the good, our betrayals of God. This awakens us to the radical nature of that goodness. We are given to see ourselves and to find ourselves in the events that belong to this holy week. It is the week of the Passion of Christ, the week of the Passover which undergoes a radical change of meaning through the sacrifice of Christ. In the Christian understanding, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us”.
The connection to the Passover story is undeniable. The question that belongs to the Jewish celebration of the Passover becomes our question. “What mean ye by this service?” (Ex. 12.26). The question reverberates throughout the whole of Holy Week.
Holy Week is one continuous liturgy, one continuous service. It is marked by different degrees of intensity and expression but in essence we enter into the Passion of Christ as modelled upon the ancient Passover celebration that defines Israel. It is about God’s deliverance and thus signals the redemption of our humanity. It is about the liberation of the Hebrews from the yoke and tyranny of Pharaoh. How? By God’s passing over the houses of the Hebrews, their lintels daubed with the blood of a lamb, the passover lamb, and thus sparing them the plague of the first-born. A sign that signifies and effects what it signifies, we might say. The rituals are the sacramental ways in which God’s defining acts of deliverance are recalled and re-lived, re-presented for the Jewish people. They, in turn, shape the central act of Christian worship in recollecting the words and actions of Christ in the week of his Passion and the way in which those words and deeds are remembered and reenacted by us. We enter into the Passion of Christ sacramentally. Only so can we feel the thought, feel the Passion which we are required to contemplate and think always but throughout Holy Week especially.
The Passover recalls the exodus from Egypt under God’s guiding hand. The Passover signals the central Jewish insight that becomes basic for Christians and Muslims. God acts and his act is sovereign and free and in him we are free and made whole. How that plays out in Judaism and Christianity and Islam is, of course, different, but such is the fundamental insight.
“What mean ye by this service?” The very question that belongs to the establishment of the Passover ritual carries over into Christianity and to Islam. It is about the active remembering of God’s will to save and deliver and as such requires something of us. It means our participation in the ritual. The rituals are not empty signs. The question invites us to participate in the rituals of remembrance. Only so is the question a real question for us and in us.
We are in every scene of the Passion. We are in the crowd that belongs to these events. We are at once actors and spectators; either way we are totally implicated in the extraordinary meaning of this extraordinary week, the week that shapes all our weeks and days, all our months and years, and all our lives. Only so can we be gathered into the love of God for us. Only so can that love live in us. We are in the pageant of Holy Week.
Palm Sunday marks the beginning of a liturgy which will end at Easter and with a wondrous reversal of the heart-breaking cries of this day. The reading of the Palm Gospel entry of Christ into Jerusalem and then the reading of the Passion according to St. Matthew place us intentionally in these events. We are those who cry out “Hosanna to God in the Highest” only to turn about and then cry, “Let him be Crucified, Let him be Crucified”. And with equal intensity of expression, if we have hearts and minds that can feel. We are caught up in the contradictions of our own souls. We confront the very ugliness of our being in order to be awakened to the beauty and grace of Christ’s Passion and love for us. We cannot sing the Alleluias of Easter without the pageant of the Passion with these contradictory cries.
The two moments are inseparable; we separate them at our peril and miss the whole point of their conjunction. Holy Week reveals one of the great wonders of religion. God and God alone can make something good out of human evil. To contemplate our evil is to discover our good. Yet it all turns upon our desire for the goodness of God, our desire for his goodness to live and move in us. “O taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” Such is the liturgy by which we are immersed in the mortifying and yet redeeming and sanctifying grace of the God who seeks our salvation, our joy and our blessedness.
John Donne, in one of his holy sonnets, bids us look within and contemplate “the picture of Christ crucified.” The poem asks us to consider what we see there as recalled in our memories and to ask ourselves “can that countenance thee affright?” Can that face frighten you? What does the picture of Christ crucified awaken in us? Is it fear or loathing, revulsion or disgust?
There are no end of disturbing images of the crucified Christ. Donne has in mind, I think, the depictions of Christ crucified painted in Europe after the black plague of the 14th century (1347-1351) that decimated almost half the population of Europe, images which show the sufferings of Christ in particularly gruesome ways. They suggest that the hideous pains of the plague are known in the sufferings of Christ. This serves to emphasize the great spiritual insight that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ” (Romans 8.39). Donne bids us not only recall the image of Christ crucified as seen in Church windows and carvings but also to remember the words of the Crucified “who prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite.” The first word from the Cross is the word of forgiveness, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23.34), a word which makes no sense without our awareness of our need for forgiveness. “Can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite? the poem asks.
The two questions about what we recall as having seen and having heard, the spectacle and the words of the crucified, are answered with an emphatic “no, no”. To enter into Holy Week is to enter into the spectacle of things seen and heard, especially the things seen and heard of Christ. If we seek his grace and goodness, then the hideous events of this hideous week of our humanity’s inhumanity will turn into something beauteous and transforming. Such will be our salvation, our liberation, our joy, and our blessedness. But only through the Passion and all that it teaches us about sin and evil in order to teach us about grace and love. “This beauteous form,” Donne concludes “assures a piteous mind.” What seems hideous and evil in the picture of Christ crucified with his tears and his blood flowing down becomes something of surpassing beauty and truth to minds in need of pity and mercy. Our minds, our souls, our hearts, if we can think and feel. The question of our age is whether we can feel anything, whether we can feel what we are given to think and to contemplate.
Holy Week seeks the breaking of our hearts so that our hearts can be made new again. But only through the Passion of Christ and our participation in that Passion, letting our hearts feel all that belongs to our brokenness and all that belongs to the mercy of Christ. We, too, are on parade in the Passion of Christ. His passion reveals all of the disorders and disarray of our hearts in order to set love in order in us. Nowhere is that more concentrated than in the liturgies of Holy Week. The constant question is “what mean ye by this service?” As Exodus puts it, “it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt,” (Ex. 12. 26,27). We enter into Holy Week to learn the meaning of Christ’s service which is sacrifice. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” The challenge is to let that sacrifice live in us.
“What mean ye by this service?”
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2019