Palm/Passion Sunday March 28, 2010 "Ode to Joy, and Passion Too" Reverend Michael D. Powell Luke 19:36-40; 22:63-71

This morning we’re celebrating Palm Sunday, and we’re observing Passion Sunday! They’re one and the same day, each vitally important and inextricably linked, like life and death, like hope and promise.

First, the celebration! Palm Sunday is about joy. It’s a parade, a celebration of promise – and, God knows, the world needs a few joyful parades in these dark and uncertain times. We’ve lost sight of our rituals of happiness. That’s what Anna Quindlen, in one of her last Newsweek Magazine columns wrote. She noted that we have become adept, even mechanical, at remembrance and regret. There are ribbons for everything, she wrote, from AIDS and breast cancer to supporting our troops – but the public gestures that make us smile seem to have slipped away. “All over the country there are cities and towns troubled by natural disasters, personal loss and tragedies. Flags at half staff, black bunting, roadside memorials with crosses and flowers. Where are the markers of joy that make people smile?” Here’s a traditional Palm Sunday painting, as well as a more contemporary, slightly unorthodox version that makes me smile!

The first Palm Sunday parade made people smile. It was a marker of joy in the midst of dark and terrifying times. Jerusalem was the New York City of the First Century, and it had known its share of tragedy. It had been King David’s capital city in better times, but now it was an occupied zone and the people of David were oppressed by politicians and soldiers who ruled by terror and brute force.

Jerusalem was especially dangerous during the season of Passover, because thousands of Jews flocked to the city to worship at the temple, and their resentment, their revolutionary zeal ran highest during this most patriotic of times. Take everything the Fourth of July stands for in America and quadruple it and you get some idea of the kind of patriotic fervor that energized the Jewish people of Jerusalem. This is the backdrop against which we must understand the events of Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, deliriously happy people recognized it as the fulfillment of a messianic prophecy. Their liberating king from the house and lineage of David was expected to ride triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey. When they waved palm branches, they were participating in a celebration of remembrance, because the great Jewish revolutionary leader, Judas “the Hammer” Maccabees had also ridden triumphant into Jerusalem amid palm branches when he had driven foreign oppressors out 135 years before. Likewise their shout of Hosanna, which means “God save us,” was a revolutionary slogan from the Hallel Psalms that were composed to celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem from foreign occupation.

That first Palm Sunday parade was an ode to joy, a celebration of hope and the promise of liberation, and I thank God for this colorful, festive marker of joy that we reenact each year. We need rituals of happiness. There’s plenty of skepticism to go around, and not enough hope and good feeling. Having said that, we know that there were then, and are now, dark days ahead, which is precisely why it’s so important for us to celebrate and give thanks for the good gifts of God and the promises of our faith. It’s important because we still live in the shadow of the cross, and terrorism has not yet been defeated. We need joy, and we need hope.

Jesus rode triumphant into Jerusalem, and for that we are thankful, but the Passion of Christ, the somber betrayal of Maundy Thursday, the tragic denial and the heartbreaking crucifixion of Good Friday were yet to come. Today we mostly understand passion as strong emotions, like love or hate. The ancient understanding of passion, however, was suffering and agony, and each of us has to walk that lonesome valley. We each have our own passion to suffer. None of us can escape the inevitable dark times that befall our lives. In fact, the paradox of a Palm Sunday parade and a Good Friday crucifixion is that they are part of a seamless garment, and the suffering is every bit as important as the celebration. Here are two African paintings, of Judas betraying Christ with a kiss, and a black Jesus on the cross.

Without the Passion we cannot understand the Parade. Without the parade, I’m not sure we could endure the Passion. The essence of this paradox is summed up in the messianic prophecy of the Suffering Servant, as recorded in Isaiah 53:4 & 5: “He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows . . . and by his wounds we are healed.” We’ve all seen many depictions of the crucifixion, but I think the more contemporary interpretations strike me closest to the heart. Here are three modern versions of the crucifixion, the first, called Hypercubic Body, Salvador Dali, 1954; the second, entitled Crucifixion at Barton Creek Mall, by James B. Janknegt, 1985; and the third, called Father Forgive Us, James B. Janknegt, 1990.

I actually saw this paradoxical power of the cross to offer hope and healing dramatically enacted in Nicaragua. It just happened to be during the season of Lent, over 20 years ago, and I was with an American delegation visiting Latin America. We were staying in the little town of Jinotega. Earlier in the day we’d visited a hospital where victims of land mines were being fitted for artificial legs, and then we’d picked coffee at one of the high mountain plantations. We were driving back into town on a bus when out of the window I saw a crowd of people in brightly colored clothes, singing and parading through the streets. Kids were laughing and running alongside, dogs were barking, guitars were playing and there was even a tambourine. Leading the procession, on the shoulders of a group of men, was a large wooden statue of Jesus on the cross.

Being a sucker for a parade, I jumped off the bus and fell in with the crowd as they wound their way through the streets to the front of an old Spanish style mission church. Up the stairs they carried the large wooden crucifix and the people filed in for worship. The mass was pretty traditional, but what happened after worship will always remain embedded in my memory. The priest left, but that’s when the real action started. Many of the people stayed, and began making their way to the front of the church where the statue of Jesus on the cross was rather unceremoniously propped up against a wall. I watched as they reached out to touch the crucifix and then cross themselves. It was obvious that some of them were specifying certain parts of their bodies, like a side, a shoulder, a foot or their eyes. And there were mothers who held their babies up to touch the crucified body of Christ. They were praying for healing, claiming the promise of Isaiah: “By his wounds we are healed.”

Do you see the paradox; do you see the promise? The passion of Christ is important because it expresses God’s identification with us and our suffering. God knows. God understands. God is with us. And because God identifies with our suffering, we can also identify with Christ’s triumph over suffering and death, which offers the promise of our own triumph, our own healing and the opportunity for a new spiritual life – through Christ! We need to celebrate the joy of palms, but we also need to observe the passion of Christ.

I love the story that William Willimon tells about the time a man in his South Carolina congregation asked if he could make a cross and carry it in the procession that opens worship. Willimon writes: “I had in mind something simple, modern, and clean, something light enough for an adolescent to carry on Sundays. What we got on that First Sunday in Lent was a dramatic sort of cross, heavy, complete with a realistic, hanging, crucified Christ, blood and everything.” Willimon says that some people managed to say nice things because a nice man had carved it, but many didn’t like it. “More Catholic than Protestant,” they said. “Gory and depressing,” they said. “It clashes with the carpet and the stained glass,” they said. “What,” asked Willimon,

“is a modern, progressive, well-budget Protestant church to do with a bloody cross these days? We would strip the body off the cross, render the cross in bronze, polish it, make it triumphant and clean…but then, down the carpeted aisle of my modern sanctuary, before a pulpit where the gospel is made intellectually digestible in once-a-week doses, a cross is brought in by a groaning man. It is the crucifix, a visible, believable body on a cross, the work of a layman’s hand, a layman who, despite all I have told him, sheds a tear and continues to be stupefied that God’s love should be made so explicit, continues to be drawn to the simple truth that ‘Jesus did it all for me.’”

Palm Sunday made those who welcomed Jesus 2000 years ago happy, even as our reenactment this morning makes us happy, and for good reason. The darkness of the passion lies ahead, but our ode to joy comes with healing on its wings, with the rising of the Son that brings the promise of a new day, new opportunities, challenges and the confidence of a new life in Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.