by CCW | 10 April 2022 08:00
“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[1]). 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.
We go from the highs of shouting joyous “Hosannas” to the lows of the vindictive and mean cries of “crucify, crucify,” and then to the greater joys, but only through the deeper sorrows, of the “Alleluias” of the Resurrection. “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us,” is the underlying theme; our passover from death to life in him. We confront our evil in all of its many forms in the light of the greater good of God’s love in Christ. He is “the Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world.” We behold ourselves in him, to know even as we are known.
The challenge of Holy Week is for us to be immersed in his Passion. Nowhere is that more fully and completely presented than in our liturgy which beginning today sets before us all four Gospel accounts of the Passion of Christ. It is really quite powerful to read and to hear the Passion in the four voices of the Evangelists. Each account has its own voice, its own point of interest, its own perspective about us and about Christ. But all four together have a unity which is found in the teaching which they set before us, a unity found in and through the differences of emphasis. What is our task? To find ourselves in the crowd of the Passion, in the mob, in the madness of crowds, out of whose violence comes the greater good of Christ’s victory through his sacrifice and Passion. It begins today with Matthew’s account of the Passion; it continues with Mark on Monday and Tuesday in his account of the Passion; with Luke on Wednesday and Thursday as we enter into the Triduum Sacrum of Holy Week; it ends with John’s Passion on Good Friday. Ecce homo. “Behold the man,” as Pilate will ironically say.
Can we hear this? It is so profoundly counter-culture both with respect to the ancient world and certainly our modern world, so certain in its accusations and judgments of others; always of others and never ourselves. The mercy is in confronting ourselves. It is the counter to our over investment in ourselves. Here the deep love of Christ seeks to bring us out of the prisons of our ego and into the joy of our life in God.
How can we see and hear this in our post-Christian culture? Let me suggest a way offered to us from the Scriptures themselves. It is the story of David, at once a hero whose heart is full of courage and full of a deep commitment to God. “Man looks on the outward appearance,” it is famously said, “but God looks on the heart.” We are meant to see the heart of David which God sees. But the story of David includes the sins of David, a most compelling depiction of the slippery slope of sin, about how sin begets sin begets sin, going from the lust of the eyes to the lust of the heart, to adultery, to the attempts at covering it up through cunning and deceit, and to a conspiracy to commit murder. “It happened late one afternoon,” it begins, and ends with an amazing understatement. “But the thing which David had done displeased the Lord.”
But is that the end of the story? Are we simply left with our humanity in its sin and evil? The real interest lies in how David comes to confront himself in his evil as a persecutor of all that he knows as true and right and good. Nathan the prophet, with great literary wisdom, tells a story about a rich man with many flocks and folds and a poor man with only one little ewe lamb which he loves as a daughter. The rich man takes the poor man’s little ewe lamb and kills it to provide the rites of hospitality for a wayfarer. The story is simply told. David reacts strongly to the injustice of the rich man’s action. He says he deserves to die “because he had no pity,” no mercy. I find that particularly telling. “Because he had no pity.” Justice and mercy go together; “mercy seasons justice,” perfects it, as Portia says in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Nathan says simply but powerfully to David. “Thou art the man.” The parable has been told to confront David with the evil of his own actions.
How then does David respond? He doesn’t try to excuse himself. He doesn’t say there is ‘your truth’ and there is ‘my truth,’ the contemporary betrayal of any truth. He doesn’t blame his culture, his upbringing, and his privileged way of life and status, again another contemporary trope. In other words, he doesn’t blame anyone else for what he himself has done. He simply and beautifully says, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
This is the logic of the great penitential psalm, traditionally attributed to David, Psalm 51, and often treated in the commentary tradition as David’s confession of sin with respect to Bathsheba and Uriah. “Against thee only have I sinned and done that which is evil in thy sight”(vs.4). The logic is wonderful. All sin is fundamentally against God, the principle of all truth and order. Such is the way in which the dynamic of the Ten Commandments are revealed as intimately connected and interdependent but above all as grounded in the love of God without which the love of neighbour is negated as nothing. We can only love one another and even ourselves in the love of God is the deep lesson of Holy Week.
What we see in the story of David being brought to account and to the truth of himself is what belongs to the pageant of Holy Week. We behold our sins in beholding the God whom we persecute and deny by beholding Christ. We are at once the persons of sin, “thou art the man,” and yet we behold Christ, the redeemer and saviour of the world. “Behold the man” who is “the Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world.” We behold ourselves in him that we might say with Matthew that “truly this was the Son of God”; with Mark, that “truly this man was the Son of God”; with Luke, that “certainly this was a righteous man”; and with John that “[we] might look on him whom [we] have pierced” and so be pierced in our hearts at once in sorrow and in joy. “Thou art the man,” we realize about ourselves as sinners in beholding Christ who is the Lamb of God. “Truly this was the Son of God” and “thou art the man” go together.
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2022
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/04/10/sermon-for-palm-sunday-14/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.