SERMON FOR PALM SUNDAY

MARCH 24, 2002

CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER 

Starting now and continuing through Good Friday you and I will accompany Jesus Christ through his Passion, the story of his suffering and death.  None of the events of these days is particularly unique to Jesus, but because he experienced them on behalf of you and me and all who turn to him for direction, the story is powerful.  These are the darkest, ugliest, most frightening, and realistic stories in the entire New Testament.  They are the news items we cannot bear to read but dare not ignore.  Reading the chapters of each Gospel as they outline the pain and betrayal and fear and degradation is like reading again the accounts of September 11th and of every horrific event that makes our stomachs churn and our hearts ache. 

All of us follow the road to our own death.  From the moment of birth we are on that road.  None will escape the final heartbeat.  Most of us have followed alongside others who went before us, holding the hand of a dying friend of parent, even a child, and in some cases a person we did not even know.  You know too well the via dolorosa, the way of sadness.  Sometimes we are nearby and can share every moment, or again we are far away and must rely on the telephone to keep up with events.  Often we know that the end is near, but when the actuality comes, we are not prepared.  Our hearts break.  We cope through what Emily Dickinson calls “the sweeping up the heart and putting love away we shall not want to use again until eternity” and begin blindly to organize.  Or we mask our grief, pretending to be just fine - until we can give way to our feelings in private.  Everyone grieves, but each does so in his or her own way.  We pity the one who denies grief, for grief is healthy and right.

Long before I knew much about death, when I was a dorm proctor in my senior year of college, I had to find one of the freshmen in my charge and take him to the dean’s office.  The dean, ill at ease on the sunniest of occasions, told him haltingly of his father’s sudden death.  The boy was stunned and sat down to let it all sink in.  I stood there and looked in silence at the boy beginning his life’s journey on his own at age 18.  He and his dad, as he told me on our way back to the dorm, had been very close friends sharing a love of deep-sea fishing and hiking.  The father had been strict but fair; there were two little sisters, but the boy was the only son and the first in his family to go to college.  I stayed with him most of the day until an uncle came to drive him home.  I can see his face and even hear his voice as he tried to be brave and share a joke with his father’s brother.  Their way back to New Bedford or Fall River was a real via dolorosa. 

You and I were all too suddenly caught up in the family grief of hundreds of people on September 11, and we shall never forget that day or the days following.  It was a horrible totentanz, a dance of death such as few of us had ever known.  We stood by and watched, called our families and friends, and hoped against hope that nobody we knew was a victim.  Most of us were spared the personal loss known to many of our friends and fellow citizens.  Yet we grieved and prayed and cried and kept reading those stories of this or that person lost in the Trade Center or the Pentagon.  For months the New York Times published poignant biographies of the victims, their stories overflowing with images of family love and unfulfilled dreams.  

I have spoken before of my friend Peter who died of AIDS in 1991; he was a hemophiliac who received tainted blood.  I have told you about Mills, a fellow priest who died of AIDS in 1984.  Of Chris who was shot to death on the Yale campus in 1991.  Of the dozens of patients for whom I was chaplain at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital.  Of those fellow parishioners whose funerals and memorial services I have conducted.  I am not alone in these sad experiences.  We all live in the midst of death and, in the final analysis, accept the inevitability, even while hating or fearing the often-long process of dying. 

Jesus, on the night before his death, praying in the Garden of Gethsemene, asked that the cup of suffering and death might pass from him, that he be spared, that he be given more time to do what he had come to us to accomplish.  He felt unfulfilled.  Defeat was in the air.  The enemy was outside the garden gate.  His disciples could not even bear the pain of praying for such surcease.  They fell asleep, his most loyal friends, and when the arrest, trial, and crucifixion came in rapid order, they fled, denying that they had ever known him.  I wonder what we would have done, what I would have done, on that night and the wretched day that followed.  Neither then nor now can we escape the truth and reality of the Passion of Jesus Christ.  

The writers of the Gospels, John and Luke in particular, overstate the case against those who called for the death of Jesus.  They began what has evolved into hatred and anti-Semitism, a process well-documented in James Carroll’s overlong but significant study Constantine’s Sword.  We would do well to note that a small group of Jesus’ fellow Jews resented his interpretation of the Mosaic Law to which they were excessively devoted.  They were happy to get rid of him, but not all Jews – as in “the Jews” as John puts it over and over again in his gospel - by any stretch of the imagination can be blamed for the death of Jesus.  How quickly and easily we look to accuse others when a friend dies suddenly and violently.  Jesus was so much more than a friend to his disciples.  Further, to blame an entire people is just as absurd now as it was in 33 AD.  Jesus was put to death in the manner of the Roman Empire, his Passion egged on by a few Jews and a whole lot of other unnamed people.  It is a historic disgrace that we have allowed the label of “Christ killers” to be attached to our Jewish brothers and sisters for hundreds of years.  I prefer to think that we are more sensitive now, and perhaps the trend will reverse.  The damage done by such perversity of grieving and such maladroit blaming will never be undone, only stopped in its contemporary tracks.  May the days come when we no longer glibly blame Jews or Muslims or any group for the actions of a few, however dangerous those few might prove to be. 

Jesus of Nazareth -- Messiah, savior, miracle worker, teacher, rabbi, friend, God incarnate – gives supper to his followers and gives us the Eucharist, watches his betrayer leave their supper table, invites his friends to rest and pray in the garden, and alone is awake to the arrival of the arresting party.  He is taken away, questioned, accused without proof, spat upon, mocked with a crown of thorns, questioned again, and nearly allowed to get away by the Pilate, the Roman official.  Yet he is condemned, given his cross to carry, and makes his long, painful, humiliating way to Calvary, the place of the skull, the trashy hillside where common criminals were regularly executed in the most protracted way.  Capital punishment, still a favorite of the unenlightened in our modern civilization, won the day.  Jesus died on the cross and was carried to a borrowed tomb until the Jewish Sabbath was over and he could be properly prepared for burial according to the custom.  You and I along with countless thousands, millions, watch the drama unfold.  We hold our breath, close our eyes, and hope.  He dies.  He descends to the dead.  Our hope dies a little with him.  His best friends had fled and only now begin to emerge from their shadows to behold death doing its worst.  His mother watches at the base of the cross, the Stabat Mater.  The dance of death is not over by any means.  Death continues to destroy and take from us those whom we love and those whom we can not even know.  A week from today we will have a new view of the power of death, not the reality of death, but the power of death.

You see, the fact is that Jesus did die, fully and completely, just as we will and millions have.  Yet in a week’s time we shall begin to understand the great and wonderful mystery of God’s merciful redemption.  Death, in the light of Easter, will not have the final word.  It is precisely because of the death of Jesus that the Christian can face death - face it honestly, emotionally, and with appropriate rituals and customs.  No matter how grievously we are tested by death, we can face the reality.  Jesus has gone there before us.  AMEN. 

                                                                                    The Rev. Richard H. Downes

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