Matthew 26:14-21, 36-46, 27:11-23, 35-46
Palms, Parades… and Lament?
James Sledge April
5, 2020
I’m
sure that I’ve spoken before about my experiences of Easter as a child. I say
Easter because for me as a young boy, Palm Sunday was simply the pregame show
for Easter, a big celebration that prefigured the bigger celebration to come.
My brothers and I I already had our new Easter sport coats, my sister her new
Easter dress, and we had already dug out our Easter baskets.
On
Palm Sunday, we got to march around the sanctuary waving palms. On Palm Sunday,
we had a celebratory parade, a grand, rah-rah moment. On Palm Sunday we left
the church with shouts of “Hosanna!” echoing in our ears; just a week to the
even grander celebration.
As
a child, I never heard the term Passion Sunday. This was Palm Sunday. Period.
No thoughts of betrayal and a cross, of suffering and death. No thoughts of
despair and darkness.
I’m
not sure when I first encountered Palm/Passion Sunday. It’s possible it wasn’t
until I attended seminary. Oh I knew about Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and
the cross. But they didn’t intrude much into Sunday worship. I could go from
one parade to another, not bothering with the cross and the darkness of Good
Friday.
Passion
Sunday intruded into the rhythms of Holy Week and Easter I learned as a child.
It was something of a downer. Who wants to mourn when you could just celebrate?
But can we really go straight from “Hosanna!” to “He is risen!” without the
cross?
I
sometimes wonder about how we ever got into a rhythm that rushed from Palm
Sunday parade to the Easter one. Perhaps it was because so many Christians
adopted what is known as substitutionary atonement, the idea that Jesus
suffered and died in our place. This doctrine, which, despite its popularity,
never became orthodoxy for the Church, speaks of a God who must punish sin and
so must punish humans. But God comes up with a fantastic loophole where Jesus
steps in on our behalf.
In
this very formulaic understanding, the cross is an event without parallel, a
once for all thing that never happened before or since. It’s over and done
with. We need to know about it in order to be thankful, but it’s ancient
history.
A
popular element of substitutionary atonement is the idea that Jesus’ suffering
needed to be particularly horrible in order to be effective. If his suffering
was going to take the place of all humanity’s, it couldn’t be a run of the mill
execution. It had to be horrific.
If
you saw Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, you’ve seen what
I’m talking about. The movie caused something of a stir when it came out in
2004. It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but so many religious folks flocked to
it, I felt the need to see it and to hold a discussion about it during the
Sunday School hour at the church I then served. One faithful church member
became emotional talking about the horrific torture scenes. She was not the
sort who ordinarily enjoyed gore in a movie, but this was different. Here she
was moved by how terribly Jesus had to suffer so that she could be forgiven.
But
if we go by Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ torture and death are little different
from that of countless others. Rome crucified rebels and revolutionaries to
make examples of them, and there was nothing particularly remarkable about
Jesus’ execution.
And
at least with Jesus, it was all over in a matter of hours. Think of all the
political dissidents who are tortured for years by authoritarian regimes before
finally being executed or simply dying from it all. Think of the victims of the
Holocaust, many of them brutalized, forced to do slave labor, starved, then
finally killed.
Perhaps
that is another reason we find it more comfortable to rush from “Hosanna!” to
“He is risen!” If we lingered too long at the cross, we might catch a glimpse
of the unjust systems that we humans devise. If Jesus’ death is God being
caught up in just one more example of how humans exploit and abuse others, oppress
and kill in order to preserve power and status, then pausing too long between
palms and Easter may be an uncomfortable reminder of the world we have
constructed.
But
right now, how can we not pause to look? Now when this COVID-19 crisis
exposes our unjust systems where the most vulnerable are the first to lose
their jobs and healthcare. Where governments are quick to save corporations and
slow to help people. Where some people feel so entitled that they don’t think
calls to physically distance apply to them. Where we not only failed to prepare
for a day experts long predicted, but are still ignoring the horrors sure to
occur in refugee camps and other places where people are crowded together without
good medical care or sanitation.
If ever there were a Holy Week that
asked us to focus our attention on how Jesus entered into the brokenness of our
world, joined in its suffering and injustice, surely this is one.
_____________________________________________________________________
This
past week, New Testament scholar, prolific author, and Anglican bishop N. T.
Wright wrote an article for Time entitled,
“Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It’s Not Supposed To.”
In it he noted that “the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing
this to us. A punishment? A warning? A sign?” Wright categorically rejects such
thinking and instead calls us to rediscover the biblical tradition of lament.
The
Psalms are perhaps our greatest help here. According to many scholars, psalms
of lament are the largest single category. These psalms are filled with
unanswered questions of “Why?” and “How long, O Lord?” Jesus himself speaks the
opening verse of one of these psalms from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?” (Ps. 22)
Says
Wright, “The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical
tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow,
loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The
mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians
like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of
everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the
picture we get in the Bible.”
A
lamenting God comes to us in Jesus. He proclaims a new day that judges the
greed and unjust systems on which our societies are built,, but he also enters
fully into those unjust systems, suffering and dying because of them. But
Jesus’ suffering and death are more than solidarity with us. The hope of
resurrection, of Easter, holds the promise that the way of Jesus is The
Way, that the suffering and death of our world do not have the last word.
N.T.
Wright concludes, “It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to
explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian
vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead. As the Spirit
laments within us, so we become, even in our self-isolation, small shrines
where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. And out of that there can
emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding,
new hope.”[1]
Thanks be to
God!
[1] N.
T. Wright in Time.com, “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus.
It’s Not Supposed To,” March 29, 2020
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