by CCW | 20 March 2016 15:00
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.
That is what is on display in all of its disturbing and wonderful reality in Holy Week. If we are like Mary then we shall see and hear about the truth and the untruth of our humanity. We shall see and hear about the greater truth and goodness of God made visible in the Passion of the Christ without which we cannot learn about ourselves. Human redemption is about discovering the truth of our humanity in the love of God, a love which reveals itself in the spectacle of human sin and confusion which is Holy Week. Can we bear that reality? As the modern poet, T. S. Eliot remarks “human kind cannot bear much reality” and yet the reality of Holy Week is the counter to the empty vanity and destructive nihilisms of our souls and communities. “Man is a vain thing, and man without God is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgement and germination” (T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from the Rock). No rest, no purpose, no peace. “Anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” like Martha; that is one thing. Far worse is what that can lead to – the fury and rage of our humanity in complete disarray which we see only too often in our world and day and in our souls. Our cries of “Hosanna to the King” quickly and rather easily, it seems, turn to “Crucify, Crucify”. It is not theatre, a mere rhetorical device. Palm Sunday confronts us with the fickleness of our souls, with the deep contradiction of our vey being. “The good that I would, I do not do; the evil that I would not do, is what I do”, Paul tells us with a kind of agony of his soul.
Holy Week reveals us to ourselves, if we will sit and listen and see and hear ourselves with Christ in the pageant of the Passion. It is not an easy task but it is a necessary one. “Why should men love the Church,” T.S. Eliot asks, “Why should they love her/ laws? /She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would/ forget./ She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they/like to be soft./She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts/They constantly try to escape/From the darkness outside and within/By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be/good” (Choruses from the Rock). This is the predicament of the Church in our present culture, despised by those without and those within. For there are those within the Church, and not a few, who wish to forget or deny the things which we are given to proclaim and live, and live again and again. Holy Week is about those things which we are bidden to face and see.
There is a certain intensity and fullness to the classical Anglican liturgy of Holy Week. We immerse ourselves in the rich fullness and intensity of the Passion as presented in all four Gospels. Palm Sunday begins with the Palm Sunday procession of Jesus coming into Jerusalem to celebrate the ancient Passover feast of Israel’s deliverance from the bonds of Egyptian slavery. In the Christian understanding of thing, Christ will be the new and greater Passover sacrificed for us as the triumph of good over evil, of love over sin and wickedness, our sins, our wickednesses, for we are in the story.
That is the entire point of the liturgy of Holy Week. I say, liturgy, for while it is composed of various parts and extends over the whole of a week and more, it is really one long liturgy, all its parts connected and concentrated for us in a powerful way. To make any sense of it means to be like Mary in Bethany, “sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to his word”, literally hanging on every word, especially the words of the one who hangs on the Cross for us. In a world of mindless busyness, this is the saving grace, the one thing needful that might, just might redeem us from the tyranny and the vanity of ourselves. “One thing is needful” if we are to learn the love of God for us in Jesus Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, March 20th, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/03/20/sermon-for-palm-sunday-8/
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