Matthew 21:1-11, 26:36-27:54
Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
“I don’t have the right personality...for the crucifixion,” confesses writer Anne Lamott, “I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection.” She goes on, “ In fact, I’d like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.” Which makes me wonder, who actually does have the right personality for the crucifixion? The impulse to avoid suffering and sorrow and the dark things of this world is completely normal, isn’t it? So how about we just go from waving palms and and shouting Hosannas today and just agree to meet back here next Sunday sporting our new Easter outfits and sing some Alleluias? And let’s throw in a basket full of chocolates too.
Tempting,
perhaps. And that approach to the
Christian faith may work as long as the world feels orderly and everything
makes sense. But when things don’t go as
planned, when you or someone you care about loses a job, goes through a
divorce, faces a diagnosis or if you are just one of those people who pays
attention to the seemingly never-ending reports of suffering and struggle in
the world or here at home, then a faith that goes only from one party to the
next, Hosannas to Alleluias with a basket full of chocolates, may not be enough
to see you through. When we encounter
times where the world at large or our lives in particular seem as if they are
God-forsaken, what we need is a faith and a God that knows about those dark
times, that has lived through brokenness and suffering, that has endured the
worst that people can inflict upon one another.
And not only that God knows what that’s like, but does not turn
away.
With the
reading of the Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew today we begin Holy
Week - a time in which the Church encourages all the faithful to soberly
reflect upon the suffering and death that Jesus willingly endured during his
last days on earth. And although our
impulse may be to turn away and avoid all of that unpleasantness because we
think we don’t have “the right personality for the crucifixion,” if we are
willing to be present nonetheless, what we find is that this week is not so
much about us being present with Jesus in his sufferings, but discovering that
it is Jesus who is always, always present in ours.
Unlike our
natural response, Jesus does not turn away from our pain. Rather, when we are most broken, most raw,
most vulnerable it seems as if God’s spirit comes even closer. For God is with us - God is able to share our
pain like no one else can. And during
this Holy Week we are given the opportunity to know even more surely that there
is no situation, no circumstance that is truly God-forsaken. For in Jesus’s life and death we see that
there is no place that God will not go nor is there anything that God will not
do to be with and for you and me.
Jesus’s path to the cross is love in action and what it graphically
shows us is that Love endures all things, that Love never fails.
And indeed,
that is something to shout about and celebrate.
We do it today with Hosannas and palms and we’ll do it next week with
Alleluias and, perhaps, a chocolate or two, but what makes these celebrations
so rich and meaningful is what comes in between. Today as we mark Jesus’s triumphal entry into
Jerusalem we know that in just days he will hang on the cross. For it turns out that God’s triumph isn’t a
momentary celebration over suffering,
but the ultimate victory gained through suffering. And in the passion of Jesus we are invited to
live even more fully into the mystery that has the power to see us through all
things in this world - the triumph of God’s Love.
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