Daily Archives: March 25, 2018

Passion Sunday: A Most Unusual Day in the Life of a Most Unusual King

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Sermon delivered on the Sunday of the Passion of our Lord (Palm Sunday), year B, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 50.4-9a; Psalm 31.9-16; Philippians 2.5-11; Mark 11.1-11, 14.1-15.47.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What are we to make of a celebration like Palm Sunday? It starts in triumph and ends in tragedy. And what does this tell us about Jesus, our Lord and King? Who and what exactly are we celebrating today, and why? This is what I want us to look at briefly this morning.

Palm Sunday is a strange day, is it not? We start in a festive and celebratory mood with palm branches and processions and shouts of God saves (hosannas) and all that. But we end the day in catastrophe, with a crucifixion. We’re all for the first part but not so keen on the second. Given our propensity to focus on the positive and expunge the negative by denying it in our lives, most of us would be perfectly happy to go straight to Easter from the first half of our liturgy this morning. But the ancient liturgical wisdom of the Church won’t let us do that. While most of us call today Palm Sunday, the actual liturgical title for today is The Sunday of the Passion, and with the reading of the full Passion narrative of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are reminded in a painful and compelling way that we don’t get to Easter without first going to Calvary. There can be no Easter without Good Friday and the reading of our Passion narrative provides an in-your-face reminder that our Lord Jesus, the Son of God, God become human, was betrayed, abandoned, condemned, and put to death in the most demeaning and degrading manner ever invented by humans. So what are we to make of all that?

Well, first, there can be no doubt that St. Mark wants us to see that Jesus understood himself to be Israel’s long-promised Messiah, or God’s anointed one. But clearly our Lord saw the role of Messiah differently from that of most of his contemporaries, his chosen twelve included. Most Israelites of Jesus’ day expected the Messiah to do three things when he came. First, the Messiah would free God’s people Israel from their oppression to foreign dominance, in this case the Romans. Second, the Messiah would cleanse the Temple and restore right religious activity there; and third, the Messiah would establish God’s kingdom on earth by ruling as God’s king. And while almost every one of Jesus’ contemporaries expected God to return to his people as God promised, almost no one expected God to do so in the person of the Messiah.

Consistent with God’s promise to return to God’s people to rescue them from their oppression, Jesus chose to act out the prophecy of Zechariah 9.9, entering Jerusalem on a donkey rather than a warhorse. Jesus would indeed come to free God’s people, but not by military force because the Romans weren’t the real enemy. Sin and Evil were (and are). And so Jesus would free us by shedding his blood for us. In other words, as both our OT and epistle lessons make clear, Jesus would free us from our slavery to Sin by his suffering and humble obedience to the will of God. This completely violates our expectations of how an all-powerful God would act on our behalf. Everybody knows that “might makes right” and if God were going to break the power of Sin over us and destroy the forces of evil and their human minions, God would do so by a mighty act of power, just like God did when freeing his people from their slavery in Egypt. This very nature of Jesus’ kingly rule is the first way our expectations about him are violated. We never expected to see God coming to us riding on a donkey or later being nailed to a tree, and St. Mark hints darkly that we are not alone in our violated expectations by suggesting that the rulers and people of Jerusalem were not there to greet Jesus on his arrival to Jerusalem. Instead of cheering crowds, Jesus entered the Temple alone and looked around at everything before he retired to Bethany for the night. There were no crowds, no praise, no enthusiasm for Jesus in Jerusalem, only silence—the silence of the anger we often feel when our deeply-held expectations are violated. Not even the Son of God is off limits to this kind of anger, especially from his contemporaries.

This understanding of the true nature of Jesus’ kingship prepares us to examine St. Mark’s Passion narrative to see how God intends to rescue us from our real enemies, the enemies of Sin and Death, that have enslaved us all. Like all the gospel writers, St. Mark wants us to consider the truth about Jesus and what happened on the cross by telling us his story. Consequently, almost 20 percent of Mark’s gospel (119 out of 678 total verses) is dedicated to the Passion narrative that we just read. We’d better pay attention to that. While we don’t have time to explore all that the evangelist wants to tell us, one thing we can see is that St. Mark invites us to follow Jesus to the foot of his cross, carrying with us all our hurts and fears and anxieties and brokenness and violated expectations about God and God’s will for us, not to mention God’s character and heart. There we will see, perhaps surprisingly and in further violation of our expectations, how God the Father has chosen, with the full agreement and cooperation of God the Son, to rescue us from our slavery to Sin and Death. How so, you ask? I’m glad you do. It will allow me to finish this sermon in a timely manner.

St. Mark (not to mention Isaiah and St. Paul) is inviting us to see and contemplate the love and justice of God being poured out on the cross for us. When we kneel at the foot of the cross, we are reminded of how terribly costly is God’s love for us. The cross did not cost us a thing; it cost God everything. Here we see how a good and loving God chooses to deal the powers of Sin and Evil without destroying us in the process. As we saw two weeks ago, God cannot possibly be a loving and good God if he turns a blind eye to all that is evil and wrong in God’s world. Sin and Evil, along with those who commit them, must be judged and God’s justice must be served. But how can God do that without condemning us for all eternity, given that we are all thoroughly sin-stained with no hope of fixing ourselves? St. Mark gives us the answer in his Passion narrative. The Son of God, God become human, willingly took on the collective weight of our sins and bore them in his body on the tree. As St. Paul tells us in Romans 8.3-4, on the cross, God condemned our sin in the flesh so as to spare us from his just and terrible condemnation. Jesus, in a moment of human weakness, asked to be spared this terrible task, but willingly and obediently took it on out of his great love for us. On the cross we see the Son of God dying a godforsaken and degrading death, naked, exposed, and nailed to a cross to die. We hear his terrible Cry of Dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and our very hearts are pierced with shame and sorrow knowing that we are watching our Savior die on account of our sins and the evil we commit. As we watch, we are shocked that we are seeing God’s justice being executed in the pierced and bloodied body of our Lord, that God himself is bearing his justice to spare us from having to suffer it. This too is completely unexpected.

So where does this leave us? What does Jesus’ Passion have to offer those of us who live today in an increasingly unhinged world? First, we are invited to see that in Jesus’ death, we are witnessing the turning point in history, even if it is riddled with enigmas, uncertainties, and questions. Note carefully that Jesus asked his Father to take the cup of God’s wrath from him but that his prayers were not answered. Jesus had to go to the cross if we were to be saved. We’ve just looked at why that was necessary but we should consider that this also represents our reality living in a broken and fallen world with all its enigma, uncertainties, and darkness. For example, we see all kinds of violence and injustice and hurt and suffering. We pray for help or relief but no answer comes, at least in the form we desire, and we don’t know what to make of it. We wonder if God really doesn’t care or has abandoned us. Yet the NT is adamant in its insistence that on the cross God defeated the powers of Evil and the power of sin was broken (cf. Colossians 2.15ff). Isn’t St. Mark telling us that Jesus experienced exactly this contradiction in his Passion? Salvation was achieved in the midst of his Cry of Dereliction! There is much we don’t know and much we do not see in God’s good purposes for us. So like Jesus, St. Mark invites us to be obedient to our Lord’s will and to imitate Jesus in his humility, even though we will certainly suffer for doing so, even though there are times in our lives that make us cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Life and our life of faith is anything but cut and dried, but we are rescued nevertheless. Are you ready to follow your Lord Jesus in humble obedience to his good and perfect will for you, even in the face of suffering, death, and uncertainty?

The NT encourages us to answer that question with a resounding yes! Hang on, its writers tell us. Don’t abandon your faith, even in the face of all life’s uncertainties and darkness, even in the midst of your own doubts, sorrows, and fears, because Easter is coming, where we catch a glimpse of the power of death being destroyed forever. But without Good Friday, Easter loses its power because without Good Friday the powers of Sin and Evil remain undefeated. Good Friday needs Easter and Easter needs Good Friday. We will never be able to fully plumb the depths of the meaning of our Lord’s crucifixion, but we are given enough to let us see the love of God poured out for us and to remind us that on the cross, especially in the Cry of Dereliction, we are witnessing the deepest identification of God the Son with our darkest and most profound sorrows and suffering. This is a God worth loving and obeying, my beloved.

All this is why I exhort you to make the story of Holy Week your story first-hand. Come with our Lord to the Upper Room Thursday night where he will give his disciples a meal as the means to help them understand what his impending passion and death is all about. Watch with him in the garden as he struggles and shrinks from the gigantic task of allowing the powers of Evil to do their worst to him, and the prospect of having to bear the judgment of God for the sins of the entire world, your sins and mine. Our own personal sins can be a terrible burden to us. Try to imagine having to bear the sins of the entire world. Come, therefore, and venerate the cross on Good Friday as you ponder and contemplate the death of the Son of God for your sake and the sake of the world. Such contemplation demands silence, desolation, and humility. Was there ever any suffering like our Lord’s (and if you answer no to this question, there’s a good chance you don’t really understand the magnitude of what happened on Good Friday)? Grieve with his first followers as they laid his crucified and dead body in the tomb with no expectation of Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday is the time to do just that, culminating with the Easter Vigil and the reading of the story of God’s salvation on Saturday evening. It simply won’t do to observe any of this from afar. It’s as unedifying as listening to one of Fr. Bowser’s sermons. No, if you really love your Lord and have even an inkling as to what great love has effected your salvation and changed the course of history forever, how can you possibly stay away from our Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil services? Easter Sunday will come with its great joy. But let none of us be too hasty to celebrate the great Paschal Feast without first pondering and agonizing and reflecting on the great and astonishing love of God that flows from God’s very heart as it was pierced by a Roman soldier’s spear. To be sure, it isn’t a pretty or fun thing to do. But if you commit yourself to walking with Jesus this Holy Week it will change you in ways you cannot imagine or envision, and for the good. It will change you because it is the Good News of our salvation, now and for all eternity. May we all observe a holy and blessed Holy Week together as God’s people at St. Augustine’s. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A Prayer for Palm Sunday 2018

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Almighty and everlasting God,
who in your tender love towards the human race
sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
to take upon him our flesh
and to suffer death upon the cross:
grant that we may follow the example of his patience and humility,
and also be made partakers of his resurrection;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Palm Sunday 2018

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He who came down from heaven to raise us from the depths of sin, to raise us to himself, we are told in Scripture: “above every sovereignty, authority and power, and every other name that can be named,” now comes of his own free will to make his journey to Jerusalem. He came without pomp or ostentation. Let us run to accompany him as he hastens toward his passion, and imitate those who met him then, not by covering his path with garments, olive branches or palms, but by doing all we can to prostrate ourselves before him by being humble and by trying to live as he would wish.

—Andrew of Crete, Bishop, Sermon 9 for Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday 2018: N.T. Wright on the Meaning of Palm Sunday

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r1405901_20102708The extraordinary twist in this story is that, having announced judgment upon Jerusalem for refusing God’s way of peace, Jesus went ahead, embodying simultaneously the love and the judgment of God himself, to suffer the Roman horror he had predicted for his people.

That dark royal story lies at the heart of all subsequent Christian understanding of the cross, though it is a truth so strange that few hymns or liturgies plumb its depths. Theseus and Oberon are one and the same. Good Friday, itself a form of Roman street theatre, was taken up paradoxically within God’s street theatre, the play within the play within the play that explains everything else.

But, even without that sequel, the questions of Palm Sunday itself force themselves upon us.

First, the questions of which story we are living in, and which king we are following, remain urgent within our culture. As our public institutions are less trusted than ever, and our behaviour at home and abroad is more confused than ever, the stories which used to make sense of our lives have let us down.

We thought we knew how the play worked: get rid of tyrants, and people will embrace democracy, peace, love and flower-power. How quickly things have moved from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. The so-called Arab Spring has turned back to winter, as we have no idea what to do about Syria, about Israel/Palestine and, of course, about Ukraine. We have run out of stories, we have run out of kings of whatever kind; all we think we can do is trust the great god Mammon, as though our fragile economic half-recoveries would trickle out into the mountains of Syria or the deserts of South Sudan. Give me Psalm 72 any day.

But that’s where the second question comes in, a personal question. If the Palm Sunday street theatre means what Jesus meant, it challenges all his followers, then and now. The crowds may have been fickle, but they were not mistaken. The two on the road to Emmaus had hoped he would redeem Israel, and they were hoping for the right thing – God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, a this-worldly reign of justice and peace – but they had not glimpsed the means by which Jesus would bring it about. Right story, wrong king.

Sooner or later, this happens to all of us. We start out following Jesus because we think we know the story, we know what sort of king we want him to be – and then things go badly wrong, he doesn’t give us what we wanted, and we are tempted to wonder if we’ve been standing on the wrong side of town, watching the wrong procession.

Jesus warned us this would happen: we all have to live through a Holy Week, a Gethsemane, a Good Friday of one sort or another. That happens in personal life, in vocational life, as well as in public life.

Read it all.

Palm Sunday 2018: A Fourth-Century Account of How Palm Sunday was Celebrated

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The following day, Sunday, marks the beginning of Holy Week, which they call here the Great Week. On this [Palm] Sunday morning, at the completion of those rites which are customarily celebrated at the Anastasis [the Lord’s tomb] or the Cross from the first cockcrow until dawn, everyone assembles for the liturgy according to custom in the major church, called the Martyrium. It is called the Martyrium because it is on Golgotha, behind the Cross, where the Lord suffered His Passion, and is therefore a shrine of martyrdom. As soon as everything has been celebrated in the major church as usual, but before the dismissal is given, the archdeacon raises his voice and first says: “Throughout this whole week, beginning tomorrow at the ninth hour [3pm], let us all gather in the Martyrium, in the major church.” Then he raises his voice a second time, saying: “Today let us all be ready to assemble at the seventh hour [1pm] at the Eleona.” When the dismissal has been given in the Martyrium or major church, the bishop is led to the accompaniment of hymns to the Anastasis, and there all ceremonies are accomplished which customarily take place every Sunday at the Anastasis [Church of the Holy Sepulcher] following the dismissal from the Martyrium. Then everyone retires home to eat hastily, so that at the beginning of the seventh hour everyone will be ready to assemble in the church on the Eleona, by which I mean the Mount of Olives, where the grotto in which the Lord taught is located.

At the seventh hour all the people go up to the church on the Mount of Olives, that is, to the Eleona. The bishop sits down, hymns and antiphons appropriate to the day and place are sung, and there are likewise readings from the Scriptures. As the ninth hour approaches, they move up, chanting hymns, to the Imbomon, that is, to the place from which the Lord ascended into heaven; and everyone sits down there. When the bishop is present, the people are always commanded to be seated, so that only the deacons remain standing. And there hymns and antiphons proper to the day and place are sung, interspersed with appropriate readings from the Scriptures and prayers.

As the eleventh hour [5pm] draws near, that particular passage from Scripture is read in which the children bearing palms and branches came forth to meet the Lord, saying: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” The bishop and all the people rise immediately, and then everyone walks down from the top of the Mount of Olives, with the people preceding the bishop and responding continually with “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord” to the hymns and antiphons. All the children who are present here, including those who are not yet able to walk because they are too young and therefore are carried on their parents’ shoulders, all of them bear branches, some carrying palms, others olive branches. And the bishop is led in the same manner as the Lord once was led. From the top of the mountain as far as the city, and from there through the entire city as far as the Anastasis, everyone accompanies the bishop the whole way on foot, and this includes distinguished ladies and men of consequence, reciting the responses all the while; and they move very slowly so that the people will not tire. By the time they arrive at the Anastasis, it is already evening. Once they have arrived there, even though it is evening, vespers is celebrated; then a prayer is said at the Cross and the people are dismissed.

—Egeria, Abbess, Pilgrimage