Jubilant and Terrifying
Sermon for Palm Sunday: The Sunday of the Passion
April 2, 2023
Isaiah 50:4-9a,
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14-27:66
Today, Palm Sunday, is one of the most jubilant and also the most terrifying times to be in church the whole year. It is a day when the whole spectrum of our human nature is on full display: joy and sorrow, friendship and betrayal, celebration and lament, life and death. It is a day when our exultant shouts of “Hosanna in the highest,” and our approval of Jesus as our king in the first part of our liturgy this morning quickly turn to shouts of “let him be crucified” in our passion Gospel.
There is a real sense today, and throughout the liturgies we experience and participate in this coming week, in which linear time—that is, time the way we usually experience it—dissolves, and we are suddenly there, in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, in that crowd. With them, we wave our palm branches, and hail Jesus as our triumphant Messiah, and with them, in the next breath, we call for his execution.
Today is a day, and Holy Week is a week, that asks us to sit with the uncomfortably reality that our human hearts hold multiple, conflicting loyalties in tension at any given time. That within each one of us—as individuals, and also as a species, as “humanity”—lies the capacity for great beauty, goodness, kindness and truth, and also, profound evil, cruelty, deception and sin. Our humanity includes Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Rogers, Desmond Tutu and Dolly Parton… as well as Hitler, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Donald Trump. It includes selfless healthcare workers who daily risked their own lives to care for others during the pandemic, as well as vicious dictators who mercilessly invade and obliterate whole countries. It includes courageous drag queens brave enough to read to kids in public libraries while proud boys protest outside, as well as active shooters who walk into elementary schools and slaughter innocent children. All of this is part of us. Part of our humanity.
And today—and throughout this week— we are reminded that none of us is exempt from these truths about ourselves. None of us can extricate ourselves from our humanity or absent ourselves from it, or stand outside of it and say, that’s not whom I am. Because the truth is, that is precisely who we are. Who I am, and who you are. And this week, we’re asked to sit with this reality. Not to run from it, or deny it, but to face it, head on. To let it really sink in.
But of course, if all we were asked to do today and this week were to contemplate the two-faced, two-hearted nature of our humanity, we might quickly find ourselves growing hopeless, or despairing about life or ourselves as a species. As Christians, though, who know, as one of the collects we prayed during Lent reminded us, that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves, we’re also invited to contemplate something else this this week. Another reality, one that is just as a real as our broken and sinful humanity. And that reality is this: that we are loved so deeply by God, that in Jesus, God chose to step into our humanity with us, in order to experience all of what it means to be human, in all of our complexity. The good parts, the beautiful part, the triumphant parts, and the parts where we shout hosanna! And the ugly parts, the violent parts, the shameful parts, the sinful parts. The parts where we still crucify others. That parts we face head on in our Passion story this morning, and that we will continue to face throughout these coming days.
In Jesus, God chose to let go of power, to take on flesh and blood, and to experience first-hand what it is like to be human. This is what the apostle Paul is grappling with in our Epistle this morning. Paul is trying to wrap his head and his heart around the reality of a God who would willingly do this; who would choose to humble himself in order to know what we humans go through.
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes to the Christians living in Philippi, "who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross."
The fourth century bishop and theologian Gregory of Nazianzus once wrote these words about God’s decision to become a human being, and to experience all of our humanity, "What has not been assumed has not been healed or redeemed; it is what is united to his divinity that is saved…"
That is a theological way of saying that in Jesus, God chose to heal us, to redeem us, to save us, not from on high or from far away, but by becoming one of us. By standing in solidarity with us in the most intimate way possible, by being with us in our own flesh and blood. To know vulnerability as we do. To know frailty as we do. To suffer as we do. Even… to experience death as we will… in order to give us hope by showing us that suffering and death will not have the last word. That on the cross and in the tomb, the forces of evil, violence, shame, sin and death will be emptied of their power.
That is what we contemplate today, on Palm Sunday, and it’s what we contemplate together throughout this coming week. It’s what we’re invited to experience together this week. To take deep into our hearts. That like the empty tomb on Easter, with its stone rolled back, they might be truly open to the new life of the Resurrection. Amen.
—The Reverend Edmund Harris