Sermon for Palm Sunday
“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
“They shall look on him whom they pierced,” as the Revised Standard version puts it, or, as the King James Version puts it, “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced;” either way, it is an appropriate and powerful text for our Holy Week meditations. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of the spectacle of Holy Week, not that we are merely onlookers standing idly by, but in a profound sense the whole of Holy Week is about the character of our looking upon the crucified. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ; our liturgy, literally, our public work or worship, the work of the people, is about the quality of looking upon the Christ whom we have pierced. How? By our sins.
That is one part of the deep message of Holy Week, the deep message of the Passion of Christ and one which is essential to the possibilities of any fruit of the Passion in us, namely, the Resurrection. No Passion, No Resurrection. It is as simple as that. There is a necessary and inescapable connection between the Passion and the Resurrection and it is the business of this week to make that point.
Holy Week starting with the Palm Sunday procession and the Passion Gospel of Palm Sunday is really one long, continuous liturgy that extends into Easter week. We contemplate as the poets of our tradition make so very clear, “two vast, spacious thing,” namely, “sinne and love,” as George Herbert puts it. We behold the spectacle of all our betrayals. It begins with the striking contrast, the utterly opposing moments that are the contradictions in our souls, made audible and visible on Palm Sunday in the cries of “Hosanna” while waving palm branches in the enthusiastic greeting of the coming of the King to his Holy City, Jerusalem, only then to cry out almost in the next breath, “Let him be crucified.” Our branches of Palms are cross-shaped to capture visibly the contradictions and the violence of our hearts. This is us.
We are part of this parade, this charade of human desires in disarray. It may be the tendenz of our age to want to celebrate our selves, to turn every parade into the charade of ‘look at me looking at you looking at me.’ It is so often the nature of many of our contemporary churches to turn religion into a mutual self-admiration society, tinged with not a little of that old Maritime vice of self-righteousness and sentimentality that makes such a mockery of religion, especially, the Christian Religion. Did we not hear last week Jesus’ strong counter to the ambitions of the Mother of Zebedee’s children who wanted power and prestige for her two sons? Did we not hear that domination and power – and what is self-regard and self-esteem if not a kind of assumption of superiority and arrogance? – are not to be named among you? Did we not hear instead about service and sacrifice? Did we not hear about the Son of Man coming “not to be ministered unto but to give his life a ransom for many”?
