Day: April 10, 2022

“Truly this was the Son of God”

“The dogma is the drama,” the novelist and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers once wisely noted. Nowhere is that idea more concentrated than in the liturgy of Palm Sunday. It begins the one long liturgy of Holy Week which culminates in Easter. It is the drama of salvation but only if we learn what the liturgy of Palm Sunday and Holy Week teaches us in and through its intensity.

We are not the victims in this story apart from the being the victims of ourselves in our judgements and vilification of others. In a strange way, there is a kind of reversal of the “scapegoat mechanism”. For the scapegoat of all our discontents, our hatred, and our fear of others is transformed, first, by Isaiah in the Servant Songs, and, then, in the Gospels  into the Lamb of God. “Behold, the Lamb of God,” John the Baptist proclaims in the Gospels read at the end of the Trinity Season and in Advent, and so in the intensity of the Passion in the Good Friday sentences (BCP, p.173). But in him we confront ourselves not as victims but as persecutors. Palm Sunday and Holy Week confront us with ourselves in the disarray, the chaos and the evil of human sin which wreaks such havoc in our world and day.

As the sociologist, philosopher and literary critic, René Girard, observes, major social and political crises, such as the Black Death in the 14th century (not unlike the Covid-19 pandemic), result in the dissolution of all cultural distinctions, the things which belong to our individuality within a community of order. The resulting confusion and fear leads to fixing blame for this confusion and break-down of order and life; hence, the scapegoat figure, someone or some group who stands out as different in some way or another becomes the target of our discontent, our fear, and our hatred. Thus in mythology and history, scapegoat stories are really persecution narratives.

This is inverted in the biblical understanding, especially in the Gospels. We confront ourselves as the persecutors in a radical internalizing of sin. The spectacle of Holy Week which begins with the drama of Palm Sunday is the spectacle of our humanity in all of the forms of its disarray, on the one hand, and the figure of Christ, on the other hand, in whose presence we are revealed to ourselves. Paradoxically, in the sense of a profound yet dialectical truth, that is the mercy, the good, if you will, of the Passion.

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