Sermon for Palm Sunday
“One thing is needful”
And so it all begins. Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday. It begins with the cries of “Hosanna”. Where does it end? With the cries of “Crucify”? Yes and No. In a way, what we do today begins a pageant which only ends in Easter; ends and never ends with the greater cries of “Alleluia” but only through the agony of the crucifixion and on this day with our cries of “Let him be crucified”. The pageant of Holy Week concentrates the whole journey of the soul to God. Holy Week is really everything.
Have you ever thought or ever not thought that there is something terribly wrong about the world, politically and socially in which we live? I hear it all the time. Have you perhaps in a moment of reflection also wondered whether there isn’t something terribly wrong with you? Both reflections speak to the deeper meaning of human redemption wonderfully displayed in the rich fullness of Holy Week.
It is busy week, a week of spiritual intensity, of agony and ecstasy. And yet, as Jesus says to Martha in the house of Mary and Martha that is one of the scenes of Bethany, the place of the preparation for the Passion, “one thing is needful”. What is that one thing? It is the action of Mary, “sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to his word,” as Luke describes it. Holy Week is less about the busyness of Martha, “anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” and more about Mary who “hath chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,” Jesus says. The contemplation of Mary is the one thing needful. That and that alone redeems the busyness of Martha and the busyness of Holy Week for us. Without that good part, there is no real participation in the Passion which is the whole point of Holy Week.
For we are in the pageant of the Passion and in ways that will trouble us if we are properly attentive to what we see and hear. “Garde e escolta”. “Look and listen”, Virgil tells Dante in the garden at the top of Mount Purgatory. Look and listen to the pageant of revelation and redemption that unfolds before us. Only so, Dante suggests, can we be made “pure and prepared to leap up into the stars” of Paradise. Holy Week, beginning with the contrasts and contradictions of our souls presented to us on Palm Sunday, shows us what the poet, George Herbert, says are the “two vast spacious things” that few measure and ponder. What are those two vast spacious things? “Sin and love,” he says. To learn both means attending to the events of the Passion, to the agony in Gethsemane and to the agony of the Cross.
