Sermon for Palm Sunday

admin | 13 April 2025

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. It is the beginning of one long liturgy which ends with Easter. In one sense we begin with joy and end in joy, yet there is a great difference. For between that beginning and ending is the spectacle of all our betrayals concentrated for us in the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and fullness as proclaimed in the reading of all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. “We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, Paul tells us (1 Cor. 4.9). But what kind of spectacle? One in which we are both actors and those who acted upon but in both senses through all of our disarray and disorder and in all of our folly and sin.

We cannot come to the greater joy of Easter without beholding ourselves as participants in the Passion of Christ, at once as those who cry “Hosanna” and those who then cry “Crucify”. And yet we are also those who going through the rigour of Holy Week may learn what the Centurion learned in contemplating the full meaning of sin and evil; as the end of the Passion According to St. Matthew puts it: “Truly this was the Son of God.” The point of Holy Week is that we are more than spectators, more than those who merely look on and then pass by, indifferent to what we behold and indifferent to everything else. We are the spectacle, meaning that we are what we behold. And only so can we be in Christ. It means beholding all that belongs to the contradictions in all our souls . We are in this story and in every way.

We go from joy and gladness to sadness and sorrow and then from sadness and sorrow to joy and gladness but with a greater intensity of both. While the beginning and ending of Holy Week seem to be the same they are not. There is a profound difference from the Hosannas with which we greet Jesus coming as King to Jerusalem and the cries of Alleluia at Easter. The difference lies in the spectacle of human sin and wickedness which this week unfolds in all of its dramatic intensity. “Your sorrow shall be turned to joy,” Jesus says. Only through the spectacle of sin and sorrow can we come to the joy and gladness of Easter.

“Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus said to the mother of Zebedee’s children and to us last Sunday. Christ’s first word from the Cross, Luke tells us is “Father, forgive them; for they know not what we do.” It is the most gentle and yet the most moving of the seven last words of Christ, it seems to me. Why? Because it highlights the radical meaning of human redemption as the motion of God’s love to us. “Forgive them,” Jesus prays, forgive the enemies of the good, forgive us as the enemies of God and the enemies of all that belongs to the goodness of God, he prays. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” He does so on the Cross to the Father.

Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples that “temptations to sin are sure to come,” bidding them to “take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him”; even if he repeatedly sins and then repents, “you must forgive him” (Luke 17.1-4). At the end of the last Chapter of his Gospel, Luke has the risen Christ open our understanding by reminding us that “it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead,” but also “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations” (Luke 24. 46,47).

Repentance is metanoia, a kind of double turning or conversion, a turning away and a turning towards, turning away from sin and evil and turning towards truth and goodness. Christ’s first word speaks to us about this double turning for us in the one who bears our sins and makes them visible to us and in so doing turns us to the truth of our being in God. The word, too, concerns our knowing, our minds, and the direction of our minds.

Augustine notes that “in God’s eyes, I have become a problem to myself,” literally, a question (quaestio) (Conf. 10. 33). Holy Week confronts us with ourselves as a problem to ourselves made visible to us in what we do, quite literally, to Christ. We are not the victims but the victimizers; implicated in one way or another in every part of the Passion. Christ is both victim and victor, the scapegoat of all our sins and follies who bears them in order to have them ‘sent away,’ forgiven in the motions of his sacrificial love made visible and audible on the Cross.

That we do not know what we do is more than an intellectual failing; it is the turning of our minds away from the truth that is always before our minds. Sin, in its essence, is turning away from God. Its deeper meaning is what we contemplate in Holy Week. We see its active and destructive force, its will to nothingness, its will to destroy whether in our active aggression and violence or in the violence that belongs equally to our indifference since that, too, allows for the triumph of evil and belongs to the negation of the good. What is the good for us in this Holy Week? The good of contemplating the meaning of human sin and evil. How is that possible? Only by the grace of Christ. His turning to us turns us to him and away from all that turns us away from him.

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes to the Philippians, about the meaning of the Incarnation and Passion of Christ. “Made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient to the death of the cross.” In the paradox of salvation, his death is his exaltation and the salvation of the world.

We contemplate at once the untruth of ourselves and the truth of ourselves in the Passion of Christ. Both are revealed to us and both belong to our good. And, as Paul makes clear, redemption is cosmic: “things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth,” all are part of the salvation of the world. Thus all things join in the confession that “JESUS CHRIST IS LORD, to the glory of God the Father”. Our Palm Sunday liturgy began with the Salvator Mundi. “O Saviour of the world, who by thy Cross and precious blood hast redeemed us.” Holy Week reveals the radical gathering of all things created back to God.

Does this have any meaning for us in the confusions and chaos of our contemporary world of competing and conflicting opinions and claims? At the very least, the Passion belongs to a necessary self-critique of our humanity in the various forms of hubris and conceit, on the one hand, and of despair and ignorance, on the other hand, about what we think we know and do. My hope is that this first word of Christ may carry us through the Passion that the mind of Christ may be in us more fully and more clearly. This is the forgiveness that belongs to the greater joy of our end in God and with God.