April 17, 2011

Palm Sunday brings us back to that familiar place and that familiar story. We have entered Holy Week and are walking with Jesus and his disciples through the last week of Jesus’ life, commemorating day by day the things that took place that week two thousand years ago. Holy Week is full of drama and emotion and if you participate in the services this week, especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, you will experience the depths of human suffering and pain, even as we all look forward to the joyous celebration of the resurrection.

Everything about it directs our focus, like a laser beam, to the main actor in the story, Jesus, even though, much of the time, and especially as the synoptic gospels tell the story, Jesus is less actor than acted upon. Now that’s not entirely true. There are moments when Jesus seems in charge—in Gethsemane, for example, and when he willingly allows Judas to kiss and betray him. There are moments when Jesus seems to be acting in desperation, when he prays to his Father to remove this cup from him, and when he shouts from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But for the most part, Jesus remains silent and passive in the face of those who want to kill him.

Everything in our faith, our piety, and theology, invites us to focus solely on Jesus in this story, to look at him as he goes through the events of holy week. We are encouraged to identify with him as he prays for deliverance, is arrested, and tried. We are invited to focus all of our attention, our hearts, minds, our faith, on that figure as he struggles with the cross to Golgotha, is crucified, as he dies and is buried.

But his is not the only story that is told in the passion narratives in the gospels. There are other characters, other stories. It may be that the gospel writers have something else in mind than our single-minded focus on Jesus. For as they tell the stories, some of those characters come to life, and if we pay attention to them, we are invited to identify with them as well as with Jesus. We are invited to imagine their roles in the story, their motivations, and their response to Jesus.

We could think of those disciples, Peter and Judas, who in some ways acted quite similarly. Judas betrayed Jesus into the hands of the Romans and when confronted by others with his relationship with Jesus, Peter denied it and ran away. Their actions were only the most dramatic examples of the disciples’ betrayal; for in the end, all of them abandoned him. This is a stark contrast to the Gospel of John, where his followers were with him to the very end. We tend to think of the disciples as exemplary figures, pillars of faith who stood fast in the face of martyrdom and were chosen by Jesus because of their superhuman qualities. The truth of the matter is quite different, for in the synoptic gospels, especially in Mark, but to a great degree also in Matthew, the disciples were anything but exemplary. They didn’t understand who Jesus was, what he was about until after the fact, until his resurrection, when they came to see everything that had happened before in light of that glorious event.

Like the disciples, we too have knowledge of the resurrection, so that tempers our experience of Holy Week. We know what is going to happen. Our liturgies are dark this week, especially on Maundy Thursday, when we strip the altar and chancel bare of all ornament, and on Good Friday where we dramatize the cruel power of the cross. But even then, we know that on the other side of the cross is resurrection and no matter how powerful and distressing is our experience of those two days, it is tempered by our knowledge of what will happen on Easter Sunday.

The story of the passion invites us to enter into it, to place ourselves in the narrative and make it our own. The liturgies of Holy Week do the same—from the beginning of the Palm Sunday procession when we wave palm branches and shout hosanna as Jesus’ followers did, to Maundy Thursday with its re-enactment of the Last Supper and Jesus’ washing of his disciples feet, and of course, the despair and anguish of Good Friday with our God nailed to a cross. We are invited to enter into the narrative, but for most of us, that invitation, if accepted at all, is done only half-heartedly. Few of us will attend all of the services of Holy Week, let alone Maundy Thursday or Good Friday; few of us will take time as we go about our daily lives, to reflect on those events that took place so long ago.

There is something very interesting in the way the story works on us, which is a result of the way it is told by the gospel writers. Today, for the first time since the First Sunday in Lent, we are back in the Gospel of Matthew. We followed Matthew’s story from the conception of Jesus—although given the addition of a genealogy, in many respects that story goes back to Abraham and the beginning of the story of God’s chosen people. We are given few chronological markers along the way. It’s not at all clear how old Jesus is in Matthew, nor how long his public ministry continued. That sense of disorientation ends abruptly, when we come to the triumphal entry and the last week of Jesus’ life, when everything seems to slow down, and each day’s events are clearly demarcated.

Time slows down in the gospels and in Holy Week, and the liturgies of Holy Week do much more than remind us of what happened almost two thousand years ago, they collapse the distance that separates the first century from the twenty-first. They invite us to enter in and participate, even when the world continues to bustle around us, and our daily lives with all of our routine, our anxieties and worries, continue to dominate our lives and thoughts.

In a way, we are very like those disciples who abandoned Jesus out of fear, or even like Judas, who betrayed him. We want Jesus on our terms, as a consolation and comfort in times like the ones in which we find ourselves. But Jesus demands more of us, even when we seem to have no more to give. Holy Week challenges us at our very core; it challenges our faith, not just in Jesus Christ, but it confronts us with the fundamental, human question of whether life itself has meaning.

We can recoil from that challenge; we can seek to avoid the stark reality of God’s death on the cross, and jump from the joy and celebration of Palm Sunday to the joy of the resurrection on Easter Sunday. But even if we would like to do that, life intervenes; for the world in which we find our selves is not just joy and celebration. It is also fear, and tears, and despair. To experience Holy Week again, is to recover the reality that God is with us, not only in happy times, but God is with us more clearly and more profoundly, when the world is dark and full of anguish.

Holy Week reminds us of that, and it reminds us of our call to follow Jesus to the cross. Like the disciples, we may falter or run away, we may fall asleep in Gethsemane, but in the end, we stand before the cross, which in the words of Isaac Watts old hymn, is “love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”