Sermon for Passion Sunday
“Lazarus, come out”
Passion Sunday marks the beginning of what I like to call deep Lent in reference to an older term, Passiontide, where already there begins to be a more intense focus on the meaning and purpose of Christ’s Passion. The Cross is veiled in Passiontide. Why? Because we see, as it were, but in “a glass darkly”. We are like the mother of Zebedee’s sons. We think that we know what we want but in truth we don’t. We enter into the Passion of Christ so that we may be called out of our ignorance and folly and into what God seeks for us, the redemption of our humanity in and through the Passion of Christ. Our Lenten meditations this year have been on the Scenes of Bethany, looking at the significance of Bethany in the pageant of Lent and now especially in terms of the Passion of Christ.
We go up to Jerusalem by way of Bethany. Luke names it as the place of departure for Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem and the place of our Lord’s Ascension; the place, in fact, of the comings and goings of our salvation. Bethany presents, as well, the very character of our Christian lives in the forms of loving attention to God’s Word and Son and loving service in the Body of Christ. The work of Martha’s hands finds its true meaning in the collectedness of Mary’s heart.
John tells us that Bethany is the village of Mary and Martha; that Bethany is where Christ raised their brother Lazarus from the dead; and that Bethany is where Mary anointed Christ’s feet with the oil for his burying. The Passion and the Death of Christ, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Christ, and our life together in Christ are purposefully and profoundly signified in the scenes of Bethany. In short, Bethany plays the fugue of our salvation in the interplay of action and contemplation, in the counterpoint of Passion and Resurrection, the cross and the glory.
Bethany, quite simply, is the place of the preparation for the Passion. There we begin to see the point of the Passion. The point is the Resurrection in and through the Passion. The Resurrection is present in the Passion. Easter is not some sort of fairy tale ending to an otherwise tragic story, any more than our spiritual life is merely the icing on the cake of our everyday lives, something nice, perhaps, but not essential, an added dimension, an afterthought, as it were. No. It must be the essence of our lives if it is to be our life at all, the “one thing needful”.
