From Palms to Passion

First, a bit of a rant:

I have recently come across churches which use a "harmonization" of the gospels instead of reading the Passion Gospel from the actual Bible. I find that this attempt to explain away some of the difficult parts of the Bible ... well, kind of useless. The text is offensive, and in some places inaccurate, anti-Semitic, violent, and open to all sorts of erroneous interpretations which have been promulgated through the centuries. Our late-modern attempts to take a bit of this, a bit of that, just to make it more palatable for the current intellectual fad of "progressive Christianity" is, I think, really useless. Useless because it makes preachers lazy: how do we really get our fellow Christians truly to wrestle with the depth of this tragic story if we short-circuit how difficult and counter-cultural it is to understand in our day and age? Useless also because unlike the "progressive Christians" around us, I find that the theology is not the problem with the church: it's the practice, how we live out our lives as Christians in this extraordinarily difficult time and place we find ourselves, namely 21st century America. How do we understand the violence that assaults all kinds of vulnerable people, as the violence perpetrated by the powerful assaulted Jesus? How do we confront the growing disparity between the privileged and the poor, the disparity we see all around us every day, in light of Jesus' obvious solidarity with the last, littlest and least? How do we read words written in a far-away place thousands of years ago, and try to figure out what sense they make to us, here and now, today, if Christians come to church on a Palm Sunday morning, thinking they will hear this central story of the Christian faith, in its strange, peculiar, rough and dated language, and get instead a faddish interpretation tailored to the status quo of an academic intelligentsia?

That being said, what follows is my stab at how to begin this difficult week, attempting to face, rather than dodge, all about this Passion Gospel that makes me feel guilty, uncomfortable, miserable, afraid, worried and angry.

Palm Sunday
March 28, 2010
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Ps. 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 19:28-40 and Passion Gospel

O God, we prayed, help us to go with you in your passion. Help us to contemplate the mighty acts which you go through this week, which give us life.

We need to enter Holy Week and Passiontide as participants, not just as outside observers or curiosity seekers. We are called to participate in Christ's death and rising to life again. We can understand the story of the passion because it draws on experiences from our own lives.

Each of us is in some way one of the disciples who fall asleep even as Jesus has asked us to come pray with him. We can find ourselves in one of the twelve -- Peter, perhaps, full of bravado, or Judas, ready to betray Jesus with the best of intentions. In each of us there are chief priests and elders, righteously upholding certain inflexible standards justifying the status quo, the correct routine. There is Pilate and Barabbas and the women who anointed his body. We can even empathize with the crowd, whose part we played today. We all sang the "glory, laud and honor," and then, before many minutes were through, we shouted, "Crucify him!" and we mocked him by calling him “the Messiah of God, his chosen one.” We walk with Jesus to dark Gethsemane, we betray him, we try him and leave him hanging on the cross. We find the worst of ourselves in the story of the passion.

We can also find ourselves -- the best of ourselves -- in Christ, Christ who walks to the cross just as a human being who has been betrayed or rejected, just as any human being who knows what it is to suffer and face death. The Christ within me is the part of me that knows what it means to give one’s life for something good, and who knows, that sometimes no matter how good we are, there are those who find their power in violence who will strike me down. The Christ within me believes in love nevertheless, despite of it all and because of everything that has happened. The Christ within me wants to live, has the strength to forgive, to trust, to be healed, to create, to risk building community in a world that wants to tear all those good things down.

This is where the stories of our lives meet the story of Jesus, where what is good in us has been redeemed by the events of this week. Let us follow this story this week for what it truly is: the story of our lives, the story of the redemption of the world, the story of the good news that all the bad things we do, all the people we betray and the deaths we die are ultimately put into place by the triumph of good over evil, of love over betrayal, of community over loneliness, of life over death.