“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.”
Our cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to “let him be crucified.” And so it begins, and ends, on Palm Sunday. It begins with the exultant note of rejoicing but ends with the grim spectacle of Christ’s death on the Cross. Yet that ending also marks a beginning. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ. For only then can we say that “truly, this was the Son of God” (Mt.27.54). Already something comes to birth, to light, out of the darkness of Christ’s suffering and death.
The global pandemic has made the world a rather fearful place. That is, perhaps, the greatest danger of the Covid-19 crisis; the fearfulness that brings out the worst kinds of despair and anxiety as we contemplate the growing numbers of fatalities globally. Churches are closed and media headlines suggest that preachers wonder, ‘where is God in all of this?’
Where is God? Right where He always is, right in the midst of the struggles and sufferings of our wounded and bent humanity. Never more so than in Holy Week and in the drama of the Passion of Palm Sunday. The question is not, ‘where is God in all of this?’ The question is where are we in our thinking and our caring about the ethical and about one another? The whole point of Holy Week is to confront us with the contradictions that belong to human sin and wickedness without which we cannot be awakened to the truth of our humanity in God. Such are the deep lessons of the Passion. We are to be where he is. As Rowan Williams puts it in his lovely book Being Christian, “Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering” That is where we are.
“There were they in fear where no fear was,” the Psalmist says (Ps. 53.6). In a way, such words speak to our current state of isolation. For as cooped up in our homes we are, it seems, largely insulated from contagion but not from the fears of our minds and hearts about others in our families and communities, fears about those in the front lines of health care, fears about deaths in Nursing Homes, fears about ourselves and a growing fear, suspicion, even hatred of others, precisely because of our isolation. No doubt, too, there are fears about the necessities of life, fears about other kinds of illnesses that belong to the human condition quite apart from the coronavirus. Our fear is very much a fear of the other, a fear of bodies, a fear of nature. At the heart of our fears is uncertainty. Yet the Passion of Christ is all about God’s willingness to subject himself to the bodily realities of human suffering. God wills to suffer. That is the striking paradox and meaning of Holy Week.
Such is the radical truth of the Incarnation, recalled for us in the Annunciation of Mary which fell in Passiontide this year. Her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God being with us and so with human suffering. Her Annunciation marks his conception in her womb. Only so can God suffer for us and with us. In the body. And why? To bring us to the truth of ourselves in his will for us. To do so through suffering.
It is the great and real counter to all our fears and worries. It reminds us that we are embodied beings. Fearing, even hating, the body is to despair of the essential goodness of creation. As the Litany reminded us last week, there are no end of troubles and tribulations, many of which are directly physical, such as “earthquake, fire, and flood,” such as “plague, pestilence and famine,” to name but a few. They are all about the realities of human sin in one way or another. The wonderful and astounding good news of Palm Sunday and Holy Week is that God makes a way for us to him through such things, through the sufferings which we inflict upon our world, ourselves, one another, and, as we imagine in our folly, even upon God.
In the crucified Christ we confront all of the confusions and contradictions of human experience in order to regain a proper sense of ourselves as made in the image of God and to reclaim the essential goodness of creation. The pageant of Holy Week is the strong reminder that our bodies are not evil, that the material world is not evil. The body is not nothing. It matters. Sin and evil are in us, in the malice of our “thoughts, words and deeds” which contradict the truth of God which in some sense or another we know simply by virtue of the truth of our creation. Holy Week shows us God suffering for us to redeem us from ourselves, from our fears and worries, from our hatreds and animosities, from our self-righteousness and envy, from our despair and death.
We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ. “He humbled himself,” as Paul says in Philippians, “and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” He wills to embrace what belongs to the human condition in our sin and fallenness. That is the great wonder which alone counters the fears of our isolation and loneliness. He suffers with us and in us. He is with us in the sufferings of the world.
Matthew and Mark in their account of the Passion give us, perhaps, the most terrifying word of Christ from the Cross, his word of desolation and aloneness. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” In our Lenten study of the Lord’s Prayer, we noted that all seven petitions of that prayer are to “Our Father” and how significant that is in the Christian understanding. The words of the Crucified begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23.34). “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Lk. 23.46). Yet at the heart of the Passion is this word, this cry of dereliction, his cry of abandonment.
It troubles many preachers perhaps. How to make sense of this word? Does it not confirm the atheist view? ‘You see, even Jesus doubts the truth of God!’ “Even God,” as G.K. Chesterton puts it, in a phrase which has been largely twisted out of its proper meaning by ‘Christian’ atheists like Slavoj Zizek, “seemed to appear for a moment to be an atheist.” Even if it were the case, that even for a moment Jesus despairs, wouldn’t that be enough to overturn the Christian faith? Yes, perhaps it would. But the point is that it only seemed for a moment. Chesterton in his subtle way wants to argue that there is something even for atheists to ponder in the Passion of Christ.
For the cry is emphatically a prayer and, if not explicitly to the Father, at least to God. In a way, that is the special significance of this word of the Crucified which we hear on Palm Sunday as well as on the Tuesday of Holy Week in the Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark. We may hear it, too, on Good Friday at least in those places where there is the tradition of meditating and preaching on the Seven Last Words of Christ, a devotion which had its origins in Lima, Peru, just after a series of earthquakes in the late seventeenth century. In other words, they are devotions that arose precisely out of a time of suffering.
Voltaire, in his satirical novel, Candide, alludes to the earthquake(s) in Lima in relation to the devastating sufferings caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755, in which more than 40,000 people died at the outset and upwards to 100,000 by the end of the first week. But it was a Jesuit missionary in Peru, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, whose ordering of the scriptural seven last words of Christ on the Cross, shaped the spiritual imaginary of both Protestant and Catholic Churches in the eighteenth century and especially in the baroque musical traditions. One thinks of Haydn’s work on the Seven Last Words of Christ, for instance. Praying the Passion connects the sufferings of Christ with the world’s suffering in its various forms.
The point is simple and direct. God suffers to redeem us. And so, Paul in Philippians can proclaim “that every tongue should confess JESUS IS LORD, to the glory of God the Father.” Yes, the Father! For all prayer is ultimately through the Son to the Father in the Spirit, the bond of their mutual love. Through the sufferings of Christ we are gathered into the Father’s love, into the love of God in whom we find our truth and our joy. To learn this is to go with the God who suffers. We go into the Passion of Christ. He wills to suffer out of his love for us in his love for the Father.
“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.”
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak