Palm/Passion Sunday E. Bevan Stanley

Palm/Passion Sunday E. Bevan Stanley March 20, 2016 Year C, RCL

. . . Christ Jesus . . . though he was in the form of God . . . did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Passion. The word "passion" comes from the Latin

"patior" meaning to suffer. The root meaning of the word is to be acted upon by outside forces. It means to suffer in the sense of permit or allow. To be passive is to allow others to act upon one. Our modern understanding of the word to mean strong emotion comes from the idea that emotions are things experienced or suffered by the person. The Passion of Jesus Christ has all these meanings. First, Jesus suffered. He was subject to pain, to doubt, to temptation. Insofar as Jesus is human, this is no more than is true of any of us. We all suffer. What is remarkable is that, in Jesus God suffers. God experiences our pain. Second, Jesus’ passion means that God allowed bad things to happen. This is not a surprise. We all know that God permits bad things to happen, and we often complain about it.

However, in Jesus God allows, permits, and suffers God’s own creatures to hurt God. There can be no doubt that the Roman crucifixion was designed to be a most horrible, painful, and lingering death. The ultimate cause was usually either suffocation from the pressure of the distorted rib cage on the lungs, or starvation and exposure. The death could often take up to four days. One can read entire books about the death of Jesus, and how horrible it was. But that is, I believe, a red herring. For although in our comfortable lives it is certainly beneficial to compare our ease with our Lord's service and pain, the fact is that his death was simply human. He did not suffer as much as most people did on the cross, for he died in only six hours or less. There are many other painful ways to die--starvation, for instance, or burning, or being impaled. And there are many more painful ways to live--with cancer or arthritis, or depressed, or oppressed. The degree of the effectiveness of Jesus' sacrifice is not dependent upon the intensity of his suffering. If it did, one might wonder, given the amount of wickedness in the world, whether Jesus suffered enough. Nor is it the case, I believe, that God is so ghoulish that God must see a good solid amount of innocent suffering before God is willing to forgive us sinners. Indeed it is a mistake to understand the sacrifice of Christ as only those few hours on the cross. Rather the whole incarnation is the sacrifice. The sacrifice is that Divinity "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross." For remember that sacrifice means something that is made holy, that is set apart for God. In this case it is a human life that is set apart for God, totally. The sacrifice is Jesus' obedience of love. That loving obedience to God in this world leads to the cross is simply the hard truth about the nature of our human society. The point is that for once Goodness itself came into the world in human flesh. And so foreign a thing was that goodness, the world rejected it, just as a body rejects a foreign tissue. "He came to his own but his own received him not", as John the Evangelist puts it. The bitterness of today's story for us is not that we look upon the spilt blood of a good man. It is not the unpleasantness and yet attractiveness that gathers a crowd around a car accident. We are not here today simply to remember that those bad people two thousand years ago were so blind and bigoted that they killed a righteous man. No. The bitterness of today is that the blood which stains these festal garments so brightly is the same blood that is on our hands. For we are the same people, the same humanity, with the same sins, the same blindness, the same self-righteousness, the same fickleness as that crowd whose part we played in this liturgy, first crying "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!", and then so soon shouting, "Crucify, crucify him!" The Hosannahs turn all too soon to mocking in our mouths. "He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen one!" But of course, he is obedient unto death, retaining the form of a servant, and relying entirely on God, even with his dying breath: "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!" And we are the same humanity whose perfect representative is displayed on the cross, all too much like a butterfly pinned in a collection. For we too are nailed by the cruel iron of our sins to our own crosses. Those spikes keep us immoveable and bleeding. As much as we hate them, we cannot remove them. And the more we turn and twist the more excruciating the pain. And we can hear the Despiser laughing and saying, "Come on down off that cross if you can." And we cannot. All we can do is imitate Jesus and commit our spirits into God's hands. When we look at the Cross with Jesus hanging there, what do we see? We see humanity suffering and caught. And we see God himself sharing our tragic lot. And why does God let it get this far? Why does he go to such extremes? So that all humanity, with all its sins, all its pain, all its ignorance and frailty, you and me and all those others out there who have not even heard the story, so that all of us will be raised to new life in Jesus Christ our Lord. There is not anything left out of this perfect sacrifice for the world. All is made holy. Imagine the scene. In the end, Jesus is surrounded by a variety of people. We look at their faces. The mockers with their cruel grins. The crowd looking for grisly entertainment, nudging each other and pointing. His mother and few of the other women among his disciples, weeping, not able to look at his suffering and not able to turn away from him whom they love. John, the youngest of the disciples who is too overcome with love and horror to flee. And two murderers, also nailed to their crosses. One uses the last time he has to express his anger and hatred for the world by reviling the only one who could love him. The other, ah well, that could be any of us, couldn’t it? The criminal is on the cross. He was tried, convicted, sentenced for something done or left undone. And this Jesus is suffering along side for being good and faithful. He or I or you call out, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Not because we deserve mercy, but simply because we are in this together. Jesus looks down at me or you or the thief. He looks, and with what might have been a smile if it could get past the pain and torture and betrayal, he says, “Truly, this day you will be with me in paradise.” Of all the people who lined the way into Jerusalem, of all the voices shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” one now remembers that Jesus is king. One asks to go where Jesus goes. One follows Jesus through death itself. And that one is each of us on our own particular cross. This is the atonement. This is how God makes us at one with God. By coming to us and then taking us with God. We are in this together, in this beautiful and terrible world, in our glory and in our suffering. By going with us into our deepest suffering so that we can go with Jesus to joy, we know that for God, the price of love is never, ever too high. This is the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.