NewCreation

Homily for Palm Sunday, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for Palm Sunday. Today I've not given you the processional gospel, the gospel of the coming into Jerusalem. We've talked about that often enough over the course of the year, the way in which Jesus was enacting the arrival of the Davidic king. Instead, I've given you the shorter version of the Passion according to St Mark, following the usual Holy Week discipline, I guess, of us reading a version of the Passion before Holy Week starts, so that we may then sink into the elements of it on particular days: on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then Easter Sunday. I'd like to stand back a little from the account of the Passion, which I imagine you may want to read in the longer version, the full account from the Last Supper all the way through to the Crucifixion. I want to stand back from that a little and consider two things about it before looking at some of the textual moments, if you like. The first is, apart from the fact that it's brilliantly and beautifully constructed, and brilliant is the sense of how much chaos and disorder is going on. Those of us who watched the insurrection on Capitol Hill in January of this year saw very much the same thing: chaos and disorder. People don't really know what's going on. Some try to know what's going on, some try to do something, but ultimately there's just a good deal of chaos, and people handing each other over to each other and betraying each other, various forms of violence. That's what happens. And what we have here is an account of a lynch death, ultimately, with various forces trying to manipulate events for their own understanding, so as to make their story stick. There's the story attempting to be told by the Jewish priestly authorities and their witnesses, who are attempting to spin things in such a way as to produce a capital charge. There are the Romans, who are not particularly keen on playing the game of these particular religious authorities. They have their own worries and issues at stake, but ultimately they too are frightened of the crowd. The threat of the mob is what is behind all of this. And in the midst of that, we have Mark showing two things happening deliberately — or rather one thing, but with two, if you like, visible names. And those visible names are, on the one hand, Messiah, and on the other hand, king. The question, if you like, that was raised by Jesus coming into Jerusalem in the way he did, fulfilling the Davidic promises, was: are you the Son of the Most High? Are you the anointed one? And of course it's how Jesus bears witness to that that is going to be key to what goes on in this period. So in front of the Jewish authorities, that's the question: are you the Messiah? Are you the promised one? And of course Jesus answers that in a way that is unmistakably positive. And then there is the question of whether he's a king, with the Romans playing games with the Jews, talking about the king of the Jews rather than the appropriate Jewish title, which would have been King of Israel. So there's an element of mockery going on by Pilate of the Jews, and the question which the chief priests now ask Jesus on the cross: "Are you the Messiah? If you are the Messiah, if you are the King of Israel, come down." That's the bringing together. And in the midst of all this, Jesus actually enacting and being the promised priestly king figure. The priest who is performing the sacrifice of the atonement, in which he himself is the priest, the sacrifice, the victim, the altar, and the king who is being raised up, enthroned, ascended. These two things are happening simultaneously, and Jesus is doing them. And there's a strange mix of the deliberate and the chaotic at work here, with the four handings over. Jesus had prophesied that the Son of Man would come. He said, "You don't know when he'll come, but you must be ready for him, whether at midnight or in the morning cock crow." He gives the three — at the evening he gives the three times, four times in fact — when he himself is handed over. The first handing over he does himself: he hands himself over to his disciples in the Last Supper, showing what he is doing, showing his interpretation of all that is about to befall him. And then he's handed over by Judas to the priestly authorities. Then he's handed over by Peter, betrayed in the courtyard of the priest. And he's handed over by the Sanhedrin to the Romans, and then he's handed over by the Romans to be crucified. So, the one deliberate handing over in the midst of three chaotic handings over. And in the midst of this, the extraordinary sensation — which I think is something that's worth meditating about during Holy Week — of what Jesus thought he was doing. The reading from Isaiah tells us something about what it felt like, if you like. It gives us some sense of what one is doing who is walking deliberately into a place of shame and violence and chaos, when he will be mocked, spat upon, buffeted by everybody, including even by the other criminals who were crucified alongside him. In other words, there is an extraordinary silence… of the one who scarcely says anything at all from the moment he's arrested. After he's arrested, where he lets them know, "Did you come after me with staves and swords?" he gives the answer that David gave to Goliath: "You come after me with staves and swords, but I in the name of the Lord God of Israel." So he enacts David before Goliath. This extraordinary silence, the unspeakable. What is it like to be walking into a place of shame where there is no glory, where there is no positive outcome, where he's going to be killed, it's going to be torture, it's going to be painful. And yet he is doing something deliberately out of love, even in the midst of those people who are spitting upon him, torturing him, acting crazy, getting all whipped up about nothing. In the midst of that he's walking as calmly and silently as possible, saying almost nothing, and what he says really counting, in the midst of a chaos of lies and farragos and attempts to shift stories and blames. And the whole point of this is because he understands what's going on, and he's going to make something visible for them so they no longer have to be run by this farrago of violence and nonsense. It's this extraordinary slow, patient walking into the place of shame that seems to be one of the most moving elements, especially clear in Mark's Gospel with its complete parsimony. And yet there's something also that is being fulfilled and brought to an end, and it's hinted at very delicately, very quietly by Mark amongst the many, many allusions. This whole Gospel is simply written with allusions to the book of Lamentations, the prophet Amos, the prophet Micah, Zechariah — there's scarcely a prophet, scarcely a book of the Bible that doesn't get some sort of referencing. Even Samson comes here. Samson, you remember, who had himself bound before he was handed over to the Philistines. And here we have Jesus having himself bound before he's handed over to the Romans. The word is the same. Mark knew exactly what he was doing. Little hints, like the fact that Peter was warming himself before a light rather than before a fire, referring in all probability to the habit on the Feast of Atonement of the altar light or fire being changed at a different time — at midnight, in fact — for that feast. So Mark is hinting constantly throughout at how the real act of atonement is being done. The high priest had troubled his soul the night before, it was appropriate, and now he was going to come out and perform the actual sacrifice. So Mark knows how to bring out and hint at that deliberateness. And this ends with the centurion saying "Truly this man was God's son" – when Jesus dies, just a little hint of what's going on there. This is at last Adam being recognized, the real Adam having done the real Adam thing. And this is hinted at so subtly by Mark. First of all, it is said that he is taken to the place Golgotha, the place of the skull. This was mythically the place where Adam's skull was buried. And then in the kerfuffle with Pilate there's the question of whether Barabbas or he should be executed. Barabbas, the son of the father, who was a thief, someone who had taken something inappropriately – that's the old Adam. Or Jesus, the son of the Father, who was going to show what it is to be the man, what it is to be the human being, Adam. And so Jesus going to the cross and actually living out the real Adam in his ultimate possibility, till at his death the Temple veil is ripped. That's to say the old order of creation, material reality, undone. God's breath is now outside it, back where it was before creation, hovering over the null and void. But now the real Adam has been created and made. In other words, Jesus was doing all this because he believed in the possibility of humans becoming something, of us actually being able to make something of this extraordinary adventure of being human. That in the midst of our lies, our fake news, our fake accounts of things, our insurrections, our robberies, all of that – that in the midst of all that he believes in us, that it's actually worth doing something for us, to make it possible for us to become human and sons of God. That is an extraordinary act of love. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.