The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
17 April 2011
St. John’s Church in the Village
New York City
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

This is the Sunday of the Passion. It is that Sunday when we celebrate the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, which might have led the early Christians to anticipate Christ’s victory in more ordinary earthly terms. He might have been hailed as a king. But as the liturgy unfolds, it makes a sudden shift into suffering, crucifixion and death.

It is easy to think of the crucifixion of Jesus as a great tragedy. We might put it in the same category as the assassination of Martin Luther King, the great Christian witness against American racism. Or in the category of the Frank family, whose articulate daughter Anne provided us a view into the horrors of the holocaust. Tragedy. Death which the sufferers tried to evade.

That is not what is going on here. The death of Jesus is something he walked into deliberately. The liturgy of the word makes that so clear.

The voluntary self offering of Jesus is foretold in Isaiah today: I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. Who are my adversaries, let them confront me.

Paul the apostle describes Jesus as emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, even though in his own way, he was a king.

In the garden, we see both his humanity, as he longs that the suffering may pass him by. And yet, he presents himself to the soldiers, “come do what you have to do.”

And then, from that moment on, he steps forward, his own man, in charge of his destiny and giving himself to the destiny of suffering and death.

And the Passion story, the great choral proclamation of the saving events of Jesus death builds to that wonderful climax. The bystanders who had seen Jesus suffering proclaimed: surely this was the son of God.

They saw that Jesus and God were one, that Jesus was, in fact, God. They proclaimed that unity by calling him the Son of God.

The most important proclamation to remember on this day is that Jesus gave himself freely to death on the cross. This is not a situation in which the Father gave his only son to suffer, regardless of the son’s will and desire. This is a situation in which the Father and Jesus’ will and desire were one, so united that people came to see that Jesus was God.

If Jesus the son were not God, then the Father would be the most abusive father in history. But that is not what is going on. What is going on is this: In this moment we call the Passion, Jesus and the Father are shown to be one.

What, you may wonder, does this have to do with me? Is this not idle theological speculation, the airy conjecture of men who have lost their connection to the real world? Is this the case?

It is not. What the passion does for us, what the unity of Jesus with the Father does for us is to remind us of the solidarity of God with his beloved humanity. The needs of humanity are met by the power of God in the paschal mystery.

In the passion of Christ, God himself walks through and experiences the full weight of human failure, defeat, sin and death. Everything which is a part of the human situation befalls Jesus. There is political intrigue, corruption in high places, personal abandonment, pointless cruelty, loss of friends, disappointed dreams, and trivial ambition. All the dark side of human life is played out in the passion and culminates in the crucifixion on Calvary.

If you are burdened by the life you live, if you are distressed by the suffering around you, near and far, personal and cosmic, consider the drama of the passion. God intends to suffer along with you in the midst of the human situation.

And yet, the story does not end with the passion. The passion is first chapter in the story of the resurrection. The Christian faith teaches that god himself became involved in the human situation, he emptied himself and became of servant. And, as the second reading proclaims, God raised him and seated him at his right hand in glory.

The passion is about gods solidarity with the human situation. The passion is about god’s coming to get us when we were at our darkest. He came to seek us, find us, and take us with him to our destiny in the risen life we share with him. It is that hope which motivates us, and that hope which we celebrate in this holy season.