Palm Sunday
The Cross as God's "Yes" to Humanity
The centurion looked up at him and said “Truly this man was the Son of God.”
Palm Sunday is always a strange day in the life of The Episcopal Church. We always begin with joy and a procession around the block waving palms. Ponies are brought in for our children to ride. When we eventually get back to the Church, the mood begins to take a more somber turn and eventually we hear an account of the Passion. After we partake of the Eucharist, we leave the Church in silence. These changes that we make in the order of the mass are intentional. They are meant to put a point on the disjointed-ness of the day and also to prepare us to enter the remainder of Holy Week and to meditate on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
There once was an Episcopal Church who, on account of bad weather, kept their outdoor procession inside. While the hymn “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” played, the procession of crucifer, the choir, the acolytes, and the clergy wound their way through the church. At some point, someone, somewhere, took a wrong turn and the entire procession began to break up. Everyone was getting increasingly confused, but they carried on with it and muddled through as good Episcopalians tend to do. At some point, the unthinkable happened … They had come to the end of the last verse, and no one was near where they were supposed to be. Finally, someone looked up at the last chorus and saw the lonely crucifer coming down the centre aisle towards the altar all by themself. That, my friends, is what Holy Week is like. Everything starts off wonderfully, then something goes wrong, people, friends, family, start to fall away until only the cross … until only Jesus … is left.
When the disciples, the soldiers, and the crowds when they look up at Jesus on the cross, what do they see? We have plenty of stories which tell of us what saying “yes!” to God looks like, most notably when Mary said “Yes” to being the mother of Jesus. Today, on Mount Calvary, the hill of Golgotha, what we see on the cross what happens when humanity gives God a big, resounding “NO!”
There’s no way to look upon someone who is crucified and not feel something. Where there once was Jesus is now only a little more than a disfigured corpse, probably not too much different than the bandits who hung on either side of him.
During our Bible Study in the Gospel of Mark we talked about how similar some of the events Baptism and the events of the Passion are. In Jesus’ Baptism, we hear a voice from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son” and the heavens are torn asunder. Today at the crucifixion of Jesus, we hear that proclamation again but from a Roman Centurion, the very symbol of all that it means to live under an oppression and tyranny. As he looks up at Jesus, in a startling moment of insight, he simply says, “Truly this was the Son of God,” echoing the words of God himself. Instead of the heavens being torn asunder, Mark goes out of his way to tell us that the moment Jesus died, the veil in the temple had been torn asunder as he draws his last breath.
We could spend an entire week going through each of these characters and the events in Christ’s Passion. Today I want to speak briefly about Pilate. Historical accounts of Pilate outside of the Gospels are mixed with some saying he was brutal and others saying he was simply effective at keeping the peace. The truth is probably a mix of both.
At the end of the day, though, Pilate is the only one who can make the decision to crucify Jesus: not the Pharisees, not the crowds, but only Pilate. In giving in to fear in the face of a possible riot, Pilate gives up Jesus of Nazareth to be collateral damage for the sake of keeping the peace. Just another piece of bread and circuses for the peace of Roman rule.
On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem carried aloft not only by a donkey but by prayers of hope that he would be a liberator from the Roman Empire and from the Empire’s collaborators among their own people. But that Messiah did not come and pretty soon, all those shouts of “Hosanna!” turned into “Crucify Him!”
In a traditional Passion reading, the entire congregation is encouraged to lend their voices to the declaration, “Let him be crucified!” We add our voices to the crowd because on some level we are all Pilate, we are all Judas, and we are all Peter. Each voice in the events of Holy Week are in some way our own.
Mark Thiessen in his book “Jesus and the Forces of Death” talks about how there is nothing more defiling than a corpse. It could be argued that the one thing that breaks the image of God in a human being is death. Death, as it turns out, is the one place that God does not go and God has never gone. Until today.
Today, the Son of God goes into that one place where God has never been.
The message of Holy Week is that in the face of humanity’s insistence on saying “No!” to God and to one another, God continues to say “Yes!” to humanity. And the ultimate sign of God’s yes to us is the image of God’s crucified son. In the death of the Son of God on the cross, God gives God’s own very self for our redemption and salvation. He tells us “Yes” even as we insist on saying “No.”
The message of Palm Sunday is that someway, somehow … a way we cannot put our heads around but is only known in the mind and heart of God … God never turns his back on us, and we are always remembered and loved by the one who created us and sustains us. In the death of Jesus, God marches into the heart of the most corrupting force which stains and mars the entire creation as well as the hearts of every human being. And by going there … by filling the void that is death and emptiness with the goodness and the love which is God’s very essence … death is robbed of its power. Humanity’s “no” to God is met with God’s everlasting and eternal “Yes” to each and every one of us.