Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion March 28, 2021 Mark 15:1-39
Palm Sunday is an intense experience if you allow yourself to hear the scriptures and prayers that make up the liturgy of the Word this morning, if you use your imagination to feel what the scene in Jerusalem must have been like. There are of course two parts to the story. First the Palm Sunday part. Just before Passover, Jesus enters into Jerusalem by the East Gate, riding on a donkey, and is greeted by ordinary men, woman, and children. They hail him as the “one who comes in the name of the Lord,” waving palm branches.
About the same time, Pontius Pilate would have entered the city through the West Gate with his military entourage. He would have ridden in on a battle horse and been greeted by the Roman forces that occupied the city. They would have raised their weapon and hailed him as the one who comes in the name of the Emperor, Tiberius Caesar. He had come to maintain the peace and domination of Rome and he would use force, if necessary, to do so.
In the second part of our liturgy this morning, the two men meet each other on Pilate’s turf and on his terms. The story moves pretty fast. There is a very brief exchange of words between them, “Are you the King of the Jews?” asks Pilate. “You say so.” Jesus replies, and has nothing more to say thereafter. Then Pilate gives the people gathered a chance to have Jesus freed, but they tell Pilate they prefer him to free an insurrectionist named Barabbas. Jesus is handed over to be crucified. The point of crucifixion was not only to punish an offense toward the Empire, but to completely humiliate the crucified and blot out their existence from memory. It was mostly used to torture and put to death slaves who offended their owners, losers in wars and rebellions, and occasionally enemies of Rome, although it was rarely if ever used to execute Roman citizens. The idea that a king or other ruler would suffer the indignity of crucifixion was unimaginably terrible to his subjects. Jesus crucifixion would have shown anybody present that he was not at all the king of the Jews. To add to the humiliation and possibly to demonstrate that Jesus was a common criminal, he was crucified between two bandits.
At noon that Friday, after hanging on the cross for three hours, and nearing death, Jesus cries out with a loud voice the only words of Jesus from the cross that Mark records in his gospel. “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?!” If you allow yourself to imagine the darkness of this moment, after the trial, the screaming of the crowds, the whipping at the hands of the Roman soldiers, being nailed to the cross, and the mocking of onlookers, it is hard to imagine a scene more heart-rending or a cry more desperate or painful.
The way the Passion story is told today, Jesus seems so very human. It may be hard for any of us to imagine the anguish Jesus felt as we live our relatively peaceful secure lives. But all of us have experienced suffering and perhaps you are even now. And that is one powerful message that the cross teaches us. Jesus experienced very real and awful human pain. In the midst of this pain, even he felt alienated from God. After a long struggle with the evil that is in this world— with disease, with disability, with the powerful who exploit the weak and poor— he expresses the anguish of the alienation he feels at the apparent absence of God. In this most passionate part of the story, we recognize in Jesus what we ourselves suffer and we draw closer to the truth of the cross.
One of the great temptations for the Church is to downplay or even deny the humanity of Christ. It is hard for us to wrap our minds around Jesus feeling pain as we do or doubting as we do. We prefer the Son of God who only appears to be human, but who really knows all and transcends all. He only appeared to suffer, but really, he knew exactly what was going to happen next, and he had a more than human ability to overcome pain. But such a Christ is beyond our reach, utterly above us, and not with us in our earthly life.
Jesus’s words from the cross echo the opening verse of Psalm 22:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.
The whole of the Psalm, like the gospel story itself is one of despair giving way to hope, of light in the darkness, of death giving rise to life, of sin being overcome by forgiveness and reconciliation. The cross reminds us that in this life the suffering is very real. But Jesus shows us that even the shame and terror of the cross can be redeemed and transformed by God into our salvation.
From the cross, Jesus asked the same question we may ask when we are in pain and despair, “God, where are you? Why don’t you make things right for me right now?” In Jesus, God knows our grief, feels our pain, suffers our loss. And so, for now, we watch and wait at the foot of the cross. We take care of each other and ourselves as best we can, we keep the faith, and we pray for that day when all things will be made new and whole.
The Rev. Dr. Mark W. Frazier