Palm Sunday20 March 2005Trinity, St. Louis
The Rev. Anne Kelsey
Palm Sunday begins the countdown. If you ask clergy during Holy Week how they’re doing, you’re liable to get an answer like, “Two down, four to go.” We know just how many services are left, and so do you. We tick them off in our minds like beads on a rosary, stoically hiking through the week with complete confidence that by the time we get to next Sunday afternoon, Jesus will truly have risen from the tomb and we can all go home for dinner.
But Holy Week itself begins with a liturgy that makes us uneasy, because there are two distinct moods, two themes, two dynamics. They’re in stark contrast with each other, and we tend to like the first much better than the second. It begins with noise and ends in silence. The overture is a happy dance tune and the finale is a dirge. The street party turns into an execution, and Jesus the hero becomes Jesus the victim. The individual innocent faces the brutality of the state and loses his life, and so we move from the palms to the passion.
Jesus enters Jerusalem in a bizarre parody of a king’s homecoming, riding not a noble prancing white horse, but sitting on a donkey. Peter Gomes, the chaplain at Harvard, said in a Palm Sunday sermon once that the only one who really knew what he was doing that day was the donkey. Everybody else was immersed in chaos, running around and shouting, waving palm braches, shoving each other to get a good look. Jesus’ appearance electrified the city, as he came riding that donkey over the crest of hill to the east of Jerusalem. It was a route that had long been associated with the appearance of the messiah, and so he came like a monarch after a military victory. And people threw their clothes on the road for him to walk on, just as their ancestors had done for kings, shouting that strange word, “Hosanna!” Hosanna is a Greek transliteration of a Hebrew word whose original meaning was “Save us!” but that meaning faded away, and it became a shout of joy and acclamation and praise that’s especially associated with today.
It wouldn’t be complete without singing “All glory, laud, and honor,” which was written by St. Theodulf in the early part of the 9th century. He was high in Charlesmagne’s court, and became his chief theological advisor, after he became bishop of Orleans. But he was imprisoned on suspicion of treason by Charlesmagne’s son. Theodulf is said to have composed “All glory, laud, and honor” in his prison cell, and to have sung it from behind bars as the king passed in procession on Palm Sunday. According to legend, the king was so moved that he ordered Theodulf’s immediate release.
It’s a real temptation to want to keep the focus of this day on the happiness of the first part of the liturgy, the procession with the palms, but as the legend behind the hymn suggests, the day is also about prison, and power, and justice. These are themes which engage us on a visceral level.
We move so swiftly from the triumphant entrance to the garden of Gethsemane and Jesus’ struggle with himself, and we know what’s coming. It only gets worse when he’s arrested, tried, tortured, and killed and we have to shout, “Crucify him” as part of the reading. We are happy to wave the palms, and dismayed to participate in the death. How often I’ve thought it terrible to have to say those words, “Crucify him.” I wasn’t born, I wasn’t there, I love the Lord and I wouldn’t have gone along with the rest of the crowd. Why don’t they save this reading for those masochists who go to every service in Holy Week and can certainly represent the congregation on Good Friday?
Christian faith doesn’t consist of presenting a smiling face to the world because you love Jesus and Jesus loves you. It doesn’t mean ignoring the ugly, the uncomfortable, the embarassing, the messy and inconvenient. It does mean that Christians are asked to understand both humanity and power, love and redemption from the perspective of the cross. So at least once a year we’re required to face the full meaning of the incarnation and to take a hard look at it all, including the places where we’re guilty bystanders.
It should come as no surprise to any of us that since torture is illegal in this country the U.S. government outsources it by delivering terrorist suspects to interrogation in places where it is most certainly used, and where it will be used on behalf of this country. Indeed, the new attorney general argued in his confirmation hearings that the U.N. ban on torture doesn’t apply to American interrogators overseas. A government whose leaders think it’s their moral obligation to deliver the world from madness enact increasingly restrictive laws and make secret agreements. Not only are innocent people plunged into the nightmare of imprisonment, but they are subject to cruel and inhumane punishment. And every person who suffers under such a brutal system calls to mind the Christ who did not limit his humanity, but accepted the worst that the world could inflict so that forever afterwards humans would see the face of Christ in every single victim of abuse, and torture, and maltreatment.
Well, you expect the empire, the gulag, or the miliatry junta to brutalize its people. The state is not much interested in sin. And it doesn’t care if you think you’re the son of God. You can claim you’re the messiah all you want as long as you leave the status quo alone. But when you start publicly speaking about the religious authorities, who “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to life a finger to move them,” then you’re going to be in trouble. Jesus was not as interested in personal sin as we are. He was much more concerned with justice, and that obsession was the real threat.
Jesus was condemned to death, and the very people who had shouted hosanna in his honor turned around and yelled “crucify him.” By our words and actions, or inaction, we do the same thing.
How is it, for instance, that the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider? How did it come about that 17% of the world’s population consumes 80% of its resources? How did the government end up thinking that it’s just fine to intimidate weaker nations and peoples in order to maintain American lifestyles? How is it that it’s okay to ravage the earth because it contributes to our own well-being? Why is it that we can’t manage to provide adequate health care to our citizens?
These problems aren’t annonymous. They didn’t happen by accident. They came about by choice. They belong to us. We don’t have clean hands. We are all involved in the suffering of others, people who are also children of the one God. Jesus was abandoned, betrayed, rejected, humiliated, and brutalized by the state to the extent that common ordinary people just like us found it too frightening or inconvenient. He died because people in power had too much to lose.
So as we walk these last days of Lent, there are some hard questions to wrestle with. How are we implicated in the world’s suffering? What do we have to lose by remaining silent? Can we tear our eyes away from ourselves long enough to discover the choices we could make that would take us in a different direction? Can we follow Christ to the cross?
Thomas Merton once wrote to Daniel Berrigan that “The end of the world will be legal.”
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