Passion Faith
Matthew 21:1-11; Isaiah 50:4-9
April 13, 2014
The other week on the book of faces there was a Louis C.K.
quote floating around. Something to the effect of, “we didn’t grant women the
vote until 1920. That means American democracy is 94 years old. There are three
people in my building who are older than American democracy.”
I chuckled and wondered what George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson would have thought about that … and then I wondered what their slaves
would have thought.
It’s pretty easy to judge the past by the present. The
present occupies a lofty perch from which to cast our eyes back. It doesn’t
take even an above-average historian to look back with a modicum of clarity and judgment.
It takes even less insight to judge the present in terms of
the past. That is the work, mostly, of nostalgia and sentimentality.
On the other hand, it takes a prophet with clarity and
discernment to judge the present by the terms of the future.
Palm Sunday often brings to my mind reflections on time and perspective.
It’s easy to judge the palm-waving celebrants marking Jesus’ triumphal entry
into Jerusalem through the lens of Good Friday when those songs of “hosannas”
turned so quickly to shouts of “crucify him!”
But in the midst of that triumphal entry I don’t doubt that
the sentiments were mostly genuine and authentic. It’s clear that lots of
people loved Jesus. After all, thousands of folks turned out to hear him
preach.
By the measure of their enthusiasm, in the midst of a day
that only retrospectively became celebrated as the beginning of Holy Week, I
suspect most people thought they were simply part of a joyous demonstration
that was poking some gentle jabs at the powers that be.
Riding into town on a donkey! That’s classic street theater
turning upside down the grand entrances of the imperial powers on their fine
war horses. The scene brings to my mind the many demonstrations and marches
I’ve been in over the years with their giant puppets and signs and songs.
Most of the people who turn out for such things do so out of
real commitment to the purpose, and I am not going to cast retrospective
suspicion on those crowds in Matthew’s gospel.
No. Palm Sunday’s enthusiasm is real! Hosanna in the
highest!
Sing it back to me:
Glory to God! Glory to God! Glory in the highest!
To God be glory for ever!
Hallelujah, amen!
That’s right! That’s perfectly appropriate! That’s genuine!
That’s also easy.
It’s almost as easy as judging the present by the terms of
the past. Our songs can so easily slip into sentimental nostalgia.
Or, they can bring us into equally easy judgment. After all,
we know those Palm Sunday crowds turned quickly on Jesus, and their songs had
barely faded before being replaced by angry shouts. We know that. And so we
like to believe better of ourselves.
I think that’s why we’re so prone to skipping, in terms of
our liturgical observances, straight from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. That
way we miss all the messiness of the week: the challenges of the Last Supper,
the bewilderment of betrayal, the deep sadness of the garden, the horror of the
cross, the silence of the tomb.
We’d prefer to go from “hosannas!” to “hallelujahs!” without
pausing for the passion.
We’d rather not go there. Indeed, we’d prefer to think that
we’d never go there. After all, we’re not like that. We don’t do those sorts of
things.
Jon Stewart had a riff on this last week regarding, in
particular, the release of CIA torture memos and the notion that, after all, we
don’t do those sorts of things. Jon said, it’s “like with your internment camps
and your, what do you call it there, uh, slavery, America has a history of
doing a tremendous amount of stuff that ‘we don’t do.’”
“We are a moral people. In hindsight.”
I don’t think that’s uniquely American. Rather, I think it’s
distinctively human. We are all moral people, in hindsight.
It’s only in the rare clarity of the present moment that we
sometimes confront our own deep complicity in the brokenness of the world. Like
when I sit back in great self-satisfaction in my “made in the U.S.A.” New
Balance running shoes, and get to work on my Macbook, without pausing for even
an instant to wonder about the hands that put my laptop together and the
conditions of work and life of the child of God who put it together for me.
We cannot escape our own deep complicity in the brokenness
of the world, any more than we can skip from parades and waving palms straight
on over to “hallelujahs” and an empty tomb. If our faith is genuine, our
journey will take us from palms to passion.
Oh, to be sure, we can choose to ignore all of that, but if
we say we are followers of Jesus, then we must confess that we worship a
crucified God made known to us in the life and the death of the suffering servant.
In addition to the songs of genuine joy, we must attend to that song of deep
sorrow, as well.
As we move today steadily more distant from “hosannas” and
waving palms, and draw closer this Holy Week to the reality of betrayal,
denial, and cross, we move in a wondrous contradiction – knowing already that
we are loved and forgiven, but asking of ourselves about our own responsibility
for that broken reality and about our own responses to that love.
What tombs are we stuck in? Personally? As a community? As a
nation?
Where do we desperately need a little light?
What would we choose to forget?
What must we remember?
How do we sing the Lord’s song in a broken land?
Whatever else it may sound like, I think that song begins
like this: Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.
posted by David Ensign at
6:28 AM
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