“All the people hung upon his words”
It is the challenge of Holy Week and of our lives in faith. We are to hang upon the words of the one who hangs upon the cross for the salvation of the world. The Passion of Christ is all our interest. The Passion of Christ crucified is the fullest attestation of the Incarnation. He suffers for us in what he has from us in body and soul. Redemption is not a flight from the world or the body as if it were evil. It is the redemption of the world and of our humanity.
We confront ourselves in all of the contradictions that belong to sin and evil. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of one long liturgy that culminates in the Resurrection. It marks the beginning of the intensity of the Passion through the reading of all four accounts of the Passion. We are meant to hang upon every word; in short, to listen attentively and to find ourselves in the madness of crowds. Like the exodus journey of the ancient Hebrews, we are meant to learn from the greater exodus of the Son to the Father. The Passion teaches us “two vast, spacious things,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, namely, sin and love. Both go together. The paradox of the Passion is the paradox of the Christian faith. It is only through sin that we know love. “God commendeth his love towards us, in that, while we were sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5.8). Only so can we learn what it means to be human, to know even as we are known in the all-embracing love of God for us. But only if we hang upon the words of Christ who hangs upon the cross in love for us and for our redemption.
Palm Sunday highlights the deep meaning of the Passion by revealing to us the contradictions of our humanity. We who cry out “Hosanna to the Son of David” in exaltation and praise then turn about and cry “crucify.” “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified.” We are in this story. It is a powerful and necessary indictment of our humanity, of each of us in the folly of ourselves. For in one way or another we all have an incomplete and false understanding of ourselves whether in overstating our faults or our virtues. On the one hand, we are too much with ourselves, and on the other hand, quite mistaken about ourselves. We see but “in a glass darkly.”
To be aware of this is the beginning of our learning. It is, to put it another way, to know that we do not know, even about ourselves. But that is a beginning. That is to know something which impels the greater journey of learning through the greater wilderness of Christ’s Passion. The greater wilderness is the wilderness of human sin in all of its wildness and violence, its confusion and disarray. Holy Week confronts us with the fullest and most compelling picture of our disorder and disarray. For only so can we learn the greater good of God’s love for us.
The American philosopher of the psychology of religion, William James, calls attention to the “twice-born,” those who are, in some sense, born again. What he means is the awakening to a larger understanding of reality rather than remaining either in a naive optimism about life or in a fatalistic pessimism. The latter, a dominant feature of maritime culture, now extends to a collective and global sense of hopelessness about all of the forms of human life and culture. Those who are twice-born, he suggests, hold onto the essential “goodness of being in the very teeth of suffering and evil”. Holy Week names that sense of suffering and evil as sin. We are meant to see ourselves in the madness of crowds at the center of which is Christ as victim and priest.
Nothing is more counter-culture. Nothing highlights more tellingly the truth of the Christian Faith as completely counter to our contemporary dystopias. The philosopher and sociologist, René Girard, long before the current confusions and assertions of intersectional identitarian politics, noted that the biggest problem for our world was not globalization but the ideology of victimization, seeing ourselves as victims of one thing or another. The paradox of Holy Week is simply this: we are not the victims but the victimizers. Christ is the victim who willingly embraces all of the sins of the world. In so doing, the radical nature of love is revealed to us. Upon him is visited all of our follies and sins made visible in his body on the cross. Even the Resurrection cannot hide the marks of the Passion. They become the signs and tokens of divine love made visible in the body of Christ, the crucified and risen Lord.
We have returned to ‘big church’ today in time for Holy Week and Easter. The very architecture of the church building teaches us about sin and love. For we pass under the rood screen to the altar. Rood is an old English word for the cross. We only come to the banquet of heavenly love through the cross and passion of Christ. This is what the building and our liturgy makes explicit. It is what we learn in the journey of faith, signed with the sign of the Cross in our baptisms, absolved and blessed with the sign of the Cross, and partakers of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross in the sacrament of the altar.
The “two vast, spacious things”, which “behoves” us, meaning that it is incumbent upon us “to measure”, meaning to learn, are “sinne and love.” But how? Holy Week shows us.
Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his graments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.
Mount Olivet marks the start of Christ’s preparation for his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem but it is also the place of the garden of Gethsemane, the place of Christ’s agony of soul that anticipates the agony of the Cross. Far greater than all the various forms of human knowing, Herbert suggests, is learning about sin and love. Thus sin but so too love.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.
Herbert’s poem, The Agonie, unites our atonement in the Passion of Christ and the Eucharist, emphasizing the dialectic of sin and love which belongs to the Christian pilgrimage. Without the one we cannot learn the other. Only by hanging on the words of Christ in the pageant of the Passion do we learn the way of love. It can only be through sacrifice and service, the sacrifice and service of Christ. The Passion reveals the love of God which redeems our wounded and broken humanity. This is our good and our joy.
Hanging on the words of Christ will be our challenge this week. The text belongs to the second lesson at Evensong for today, read along with the first lesson from Isaiah, the fourth suffering servant song (Is. 52.13-53 end), which has shaped both the Jewish and the Christian imaginary. The context is precisely our sin and evil and the goodness of God in Christ. “He was teaching daily in the temple,” Luke tells us. Teaching is often dangerous. “The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people sought to destroy him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people hung upon his words” (Luke 19. 47-48). Only by hanging upon his words can we learn what God wants us to learn. Such is the deep wonder of the Passion.
“All the people hung upon his words”
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2023