Palm Sunday

28 March 2010

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

New York City

I think she had been actually looking for a way to abandon Christianity, because, after all, it does not work for some folks, especially if they don’t take the time to understand it fully. Anyway, she came to me at the beginning of Easter and announced that Holy Week had done it for her, she could not abide the Christian faith for one more minute.

Now, I think it is interesting to consider the ways in which people think about their religion, so I asked her why she had come to this conclusion. And she explained. “Christianity is all about an angry father who demanded blood from an innocent person. Jesus did not do anything, and yet it seems to me that God was perfectly pleased to have him suffer the most awful kind of death.”

And she could not abide a religion like that. As it happened, I knew something about her and the fact is that she had an abusive father who regularly beat her and her younger brother during the time they were growing up. In fact, the God she was rejecting was pretty much like her father.

And she was perfectly right in rejecting that form of Christianity—if it be Christian. If that were what Christianity was all about, I would pack it in, too. Compared to that, secular humanism or atheistic existentialism looks pretty good.

In fact, that is not Christianity. Christians do not believe that Jesus was an innocent son punished by an angry father. That is not it at all.

In order to understand what we celebrate this week, consider, for example, the second reading today. That brief reading from Philippians, one of the letters of Paul, has been the second reading for Palm Sunday for decades. Consider these words: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who did not regard equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself, he humbled himself. If you read the stories of the passion, such as the one from Luke we just heard, it is absolutely clear that Jesus walked into this passion and death of his own volition. He offered himself. One of the Collects in the prayer book, for Fridays, proclaims “[Jesus] stretched out his arms of love upon the hard wood of the cross.” .

Jesus was not a victim, he was a consenting participant.

There is an essential mystery to understand about Jesus and his passion and death. From eternity, the Son of God, the Word of God, God’s principle of self disclosure was a part of God’s very nature. In Jesus, God decided to become flesh and live among us. This decision was an act of the father and the son, acting together in the power of the spirit.

The purpose of his incarnation was to live among us. The purpose was, further, to know and experience everything we can experience, particularly those things which are a result of our bad decisions, our poor choices, our sins—which separate us from God. Jesus is God’s word and that word is: I will not be separated from the people I love.
And that intention to remain with us, brought him to the point of his death –death he endured because he would not abandon us.

Every now and again, we see little glimpses of that kind of love in human experience. Some of the great martyrs of the church were inspired by that kind of love: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who went back into Nazi Germany to help save the innocent—and who himself died in one of the camps. Polycarp, who in the first century, spoke tenderly of his love for Jesus, right before he went to the lions. But not many. However many there are, they follow in the steps of Jesus.

Jesus who is no innocent victim, but a willing lover of humankind, loving even to the point of death. That is love so broad, so deep, so high, that is surpasses all that our minds can imagine.