Palm Sunday Sermon

THE REV. DAVID M. STODDART

Where does all the pain go? Seriously. If I misplace my keys I get bent out of shape. Developing tendinitis makes we want to yell in frustration. What does Jesus do with all his pain: abandonment, physical trauma, emotional agony? If anyone ever had reason to rage and scream, it was Jesus. But we don’t get that. He grieves for the women who are watching; he forgives his executioners, he offers Paradise to a criminal dying with him. But no ranting, no acting out. In the most concrete way possible, he practices what he has always preached: Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. Forgive those who hurt you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. Whatever else he may do with all that pain, he does not return it and he does not pass it on. It’s as if, in the story of his passion and death, God says in the most dramatic way possible: All the pain, all the violence, all the suffering stops here. Or as Jesus cries out at the end of John’s account, It is finished. Done.

If we had just listened to the saga of some superhero who lived long ago and far away, the story might be inspiring but largely irrelevant. That, however, is not what we just listened to. We eat and drink Jesus every week. We are his Body on earth. His Spirit dwells in us. All of Christian faith comes down to living in Christ and having Christ live in us. This is not someone else’s story: his path to death is precisely our path to life. And so let me reframe the question: not what does Jesus do with all his pain, but what do we do with all our pain? From the trivial to the horrific, our suffering must go somewhere. It doesn’t just disappear. That is a basic law of human nature. As Richard Rohr puts it so succinctly, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”

This world is filled with people who transmit their pain to others. Whether lashing out at their family at the end of a hard day or blowing up dozens of people in a crowded market, whether by sending a snarky email or calling for the torture of our enemies and the carpet bombing of their cities, pain has a way of escalating: “I’m hurt so I’m going to make you hurt!” And before we know it, often without even thinking about it, in ways large and small, we are adding to the sum total of misery in our world.

But there is a way out of that horrible cycle, and we just heard it. Jesus embodies it. He does not retaliate and he does not hate back. He refuses to pour more fuel on the fire of human anguish and rage. Somehow, some way, Jesus directs all that suffering to the one and only place it can productively go: into the infinite abyss of God’s love and healing power. But the Good News in all of this, almost impossible to comprehend, is that Christ does not only do this before us: he can and he will do it in us.

I wish I could now give you a simple formula for this, a clear step-by-step guide to having God transform your pain. But I can’t. The Apostle Paul says that we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling, meaning there is no way to do this but by actually doing it and learning from hard experience. And I am acutely aware of how often I have failed in this regard. But I have experienced enough of it, and I have witnessed enough of it in others, to know that letting God take and heal our pain is absolutely critical to our well-being and the well-being of the world: there is no abundant life, there is no salvation, without it. And what it requires is absolute, unflinching honesty, a willingness to name our pain, whatever it may be—anger, grief, jealousy, fear, whatever—and consciously, deliberately bring it to God. So easy to say, so hard to do, so hard to be that vulnerable (from the Latin vulnus, “wound”), so hard to be that wounded. But when we practice it, Christ meets us in that place of pain and does what we cannot do on our own (there’s a reason we call him Savior): takes it, takes all that negative and destructive energy, and changes it into something else.

That “something else” has taken different forms in my own experience. Sometimes it has been an ego-shattering realization of how much I need, how much I utterly depend, upon God’s grace. Sometimes it leads to greater compassion, a deeper empathy, for the suffering of others. Often it feels like what God gives me is simply the ability to put one foot in front of the other, to walk in hope even in the midst of pain, and to do it without wanting to inflict my pain on others. But when we are faithful, when we do bring our suffering to God and invite God into our suffering, there is always Christ: loving us; walking with us, if need be carrying us, and always, always shining through us, even when we don’t know it or feel it.

Which is the point, isn’t it? Jesus tells us that we are to be light for the world. We are called to offer the world a better way, to actually demonstrate what transformed living looks like: compassionate, not hateful; restorative, not destructive. The church should be filled with people who are learning to let God take even our worst suffering and bring something beautiful and life-giving out of it. When Jesus tells us to take up our cross and follow him, this is what he means. When we do it, we become changed people, beacons of hope in a dark world. And when we don’t, we are just adults playing church.

Of course it is not easy. If there were a better alternative, we would not be here today. If there were any other way for love to conquer suffering, then we wouldn’t need to read the Passion, wouldn’t need to go through Holy Week. Jesus reveals as much in Gethsemane when he prays, “Abba, if there is any other way, let this cup pass from me.” But the answer, then and now, is abundantly clear. The way of the cross, the way of letting God take and transform our pain, is not a saintly way or a pious way or even an excellent way. It is the only way. And, for God’s sake, let it be our way.