Palm Sunday
When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient. God made man because he loves stories.
So begins Elie Wiesel’s novel, The Gates of the Forest. Sometimes all we can do is tell the story. We are, after all, storytelling creatures. It is our human way of finding and affirming meaning. In the midst of happenstance and disaster, when events often unfold in chaotic ways and we seemingly have no control, we tell stories: from fables to epics, we create narratives that move from a beginning towards a purposeful end. Individuals tell stories about themselves; families pass on stories from one generation to the next; nations rally around stories. We naturally prefer happy tales, but some of the most powerful are steeped in tragedy. Eli Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a child while the rest of his family was murdered, and then told stories to shed light on unspeakable horror and to try to find meaning in a world where such things could happen. I mean, how do you possibly get your head around the Holocaust? Sometimes all we can do is tell the story.
Today and throughout this week, we tell the story. A young man is betrayed, flogged to shreds, and tortured to death for proclaiming the sovereignty of a God of love and preaching the good news that everyone, even the worst sinner, has intimate access to that God. We’ve heard it before, but that doesn’t matter: the story’s power does not lie in its novelty but in the very act of telling it. After all, how can we possibly make sense of these events? We can scrutinize them and analyze them forever, but there is no accounting for such violence, such viciousness. No doctrine, no theology is sufficient here. So we tell the story and hear again that in the very heart of darkness, where terror reigns and an abyss of nothingness swallows everything beautiful and good, God is still God and does what only God can do. Against all odds, in the face of human despair, the story has a happy ending.
And yes, it is Jesus’ story, but it is our story as well. We are the crowds that turn on him, we are the friends who deny him, we are the powers that hurt him. And we are the ones dying next to him, receiving forgiveness. We are the ones entering Paradise with him. And we are even Christ himself, filled with the Holy Spirit, desiring love above all else and willing to give ourselves for the sake of goodness and justice, trusting that somehow, some way, God will make our crooked paths straight and turn our weeping into joy.
And it is crucial that we continue to tell this story in the Year of Our Lord 2022. We tell it as people in our country are still discriminated against because of the color of their skin. We tell it as family members grieve the loss of loved ones killed in mass shootings. We tell it while devastated parents around the world, refugees from violence and oppression, desperately try to find a place where their children can live in safety. We tell it while the bodies of massacred Ukrainians lie decomposing in mass graves. We tell it in a troubled, churning world because we have to. We have to.
And as we do, these words ring true: God made man because he loves stories – man loves stories and God loves stories. And just as God moves through the story of Jesus to bring life and joy out of death and despair, so God is moving through our story as well. This week we are reminded in the most compelling way that God can take the raw material of our lives, no matter how ugly it may appear to us, and create something beautiful out of it. The Creator, the Holy One, is working to do that right now, in my life and yours. For God is the master storyteller, and it’s staggering to think that God can use even our worst failures and our greatest sins to weave a story of redemption that has a happy ending — but that is the message of Holy Week. I wish I could prove it to you, I wish I could lay it all out in a way that makes perfect, logical sense, but I can’t. All we can do is tell the story. It has to be sufficient. And it is.
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