by CCW | 29 March 2015 14:43
“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”?
Yet these are precisely the challenges of Holy Week. The challenge is to see ourselves in the events of this story. Simeon prophesised to Mary that “a sword shall pierce through your own soul also that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” That is the precisely the point. The thoughts of many hearts are revealed in the spectacle of this week, to be sure, but the real challenge is whether our hearts will be pierced as we contemplate the one who is pierced for us.
The first chapters of The Book of Zechariah are understood to be written in the late sixth century and look towards the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple after exile and Persian domination. The second half of the book probably dates from the fourth and third centuries, a time when the Greeks were in the ascendency. This part of The Book of Zechariah looks to a Prince of Peace and to the Good Shepherd in ways that foreshadow the picture of Christ in the New Testament which is why this text is read during Holy Week and has often been used by preachers on the Passion of Christ. It helps to concentrate our attention, to get our attention actually.
Holy Week presents the unfolding of the spectacle of the Passion through all four Evangelists; four accounts which rather than confuse things add an aspect of greater veracity to the story. Of course there are confusions and contradictions – the accounts are written sometime after the events; they are all written in the light of the Resurrection which makes the accounts of the Passion even more astounding. They couldn’t have been written otherwise for, however much even in our own times we congregate and gawk at accidents and take delight in the mistakes and follies of those in power, finding some sort of perverse frisson or excitement in the hardships and misfortunes of others, what the Germans call schadenfreude, that does not even begin to account for what the Passion Gospels present to us.
There is a genuine and profound kind of soul-searching that runs through the accounts of the Passion, a drama of the uncovering of the human soul in all of its potentialities for good and evil, for sin and love. More importantly, we are implicated in every aspect of the Passion for good and for ill, for sin and love. The Passion reveals “the thoughts of many hearts;” indeed, I would take it further; the Passion reveals the thoughts of all our hearts. Our humanity is on parade even in the charade of our pretense and folly.
Matthew’s account of the Passion read on Palm Sunday ends with the picture of “the centurion and they that were with him, watching Jesus;” looking, in other words upon the crucified. As Matthew tells us when they saw “those things that were done, they feared God greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.” They are moved in their hearts to a confession of faith. And us?
Whether we take the text from Zechariah in the Revised Standard translation with its third person character, “look[ing] on him whom they have pierced,” or whether we take the more dramatic and compelling translation of the King James Version, reading it in the first person as if Christ is speaking to us “look[ing] upon me whom they have pierced,” the point is the same. We need to place ourselves as the ‘they’ who have done the piercing. We are ‘they’. That is the sole point of Holy Week. If we cannot find ourselves in our disorders and disarray in this spectacle, then we cannot learn love either. Indeed, we would persist in another aspect of our unloveliness, our refusals of the good.
The great good of Holy Week lies in our being pierced in our hearts, in our being moved to tears, our being moved to compunction, to contrition and confession. Only so can we begin to make sense of the love of the crucified who makes satisfaction for us through his sacrifice. We “look upon him whom [we] have pierced” that we may be pierced not just with the conviction of our sins but even more with love. There is, as Bonaventure wonderfully puts it in his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, “no path to God except through the burning love of the crucified.” That means our hearts being pierced so that the thoughts of our hearts may be revealed. Only so in looking can we be healed and redeemed.
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/03/29/sermon-for-palm-sunday-7/
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