Palm/Passion Sunday 2015 John 12:12-16, Mark 14:27-51, Ps. 31, Is. 50:4-9
Hindsight is 20/20. Even for the earliest Christians, that seems to be the case. Notice that only after the resurrection, only after time and reflection do they re-interpret their experience and their reading of the Hebrew Scriptures and apply them through Jesus. Those who sat at the feet of Jesus took a while to come to grips with the full depth of his life, so maybe we should be a bit easier on ourselves that ti takes a lifetime to grow into the faith.(Mercersburg Th).With today’s liturgy, I am going to let the sermon move from the height of Palm Sunday to the depths of Holy Week with the understanding that the very depth is a spiritual core of the faith.
My tendency is to skip over Palm Sunday and move into the last days of Holy Week. we see Jesus hearing words of Scripture to hail him as a triumphant entrance. Rob Lowe does a series of commercials, and in one he portrays peaked in high school guy. When little chance of seeing another high point comes in life, we try to rest on our laurels, as in the new Christian Laettner commercial. Surely, his spirit was lifted at that acclamation as fully as the palms and clothing thrown at his feet. Some folks see marriage as starting at a peak with the wedding and then being one long downhill slide. some fear retirement as the promise that no more peak experiences are to be had.It is a great sadness not to be able ot point to some high points in a life. It is thrilling to achieve or even exceed a goal, an aspiration.
The high point was to be short lived. Gethsemane is part of the descent into hell,perhaps.there Jesus starts to stare into the face of death. I wonder if Jesus looked back those few short days. We catch a glimpse of the far journey the Son of god is taking into the very heart of death, the place that answers that all is for naught, for nothing, that darkness, not light will prevail. Calvin spoke of it as seeing the face of god in judgment of us all, and Luther spoke of it as a struggle so tremendous that only Jesus could endure it. Forgive me if I have mentioned this before, but in one of my few mystical experiences, my vision was that Jesus saw a parade of evil in the past and into the distant future, the sheer history of what we do to each other-
(Mount of Olives and OT. It was a cemetery for years. it has apocalyptic mention in book of Zechariah with the presence of God.)
This culminating week in the Christian calendar opens a path to spiritual life and imagery. So often, we want to freeze Palm Sunday when things look triumphant, powerful and surging with energy. All of us go through Gethsemane moments. Sometimes that is what turn us to our knees in prayer, or it is precisely the time we abandon prayer life as we feel abandoned by God. In a way, Jesus encapsulates the high and low moments in the last week. Both are fleeting, evanescent, if they are not infused with meaning beyond the actual event. At its best, liturgy seeks to frame experience in life with God. We do not have many extra services in our congregation, but we do offer a number in Holy Week.( I have said before that Good Friday here is as good as liturgy gets. In my frustration with how we view Communion in our Baptist infused American experience, we have a focus entirely on the different levels of the Lord’s Supper this Maundy Thursday, and a new service that looks squarely at crucified, dead, and buried from the Creed)
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