Sermon: Palm Sunday, 1 April 2012
Propers: Mark 11:1-11, Isaiah 50:4-9, Psalm 31:9-16, Philippians 2:5-11, Mark 15
Preacher: The Reverend Addison C. Hall
I love theater, and have loved theater since I was a little boy putting on makebelieve performances with my brothers. In high school and college, theater was an
activity of particular importance to me. When I was floundering in my first year at
college, it was only when I got into a play in the spring semester that I began to feel that
there was hope, that I could make friends and start to have a life again.
I’ve been able to keep that experience of theater alive in a modest but important
way every Holy Week by recruiting the various ones of you for the Palm Sunday Passion
reading that we’ve just experienced, and by leading a rehearsal the day before to get
ready. At least one of the elements of my long-ago theater experiences is relevant to what
we’ve just experienced here, and I’ll try to explain the connection. The element of which
I’m thinking is the one to which I alluded a moment ago: the sense of camaraderie
generated, however briefly in this case, among all of us who gather to create an
experience, an experience that engages an audience and creates a reality distinct from our
everyday life.
In the Passion reading, however, the audience not only witnesses that reality but
also joins in creating it. All of us, not just those up front, have been participants in the recreation of Jesus’ anguish in the garden, his arrest and trial, his torture and death by
crucifixion. With the exception Jesus and of the Centurion, who speaks last and says,
“Truly, this man was the Son of God,” none of our parts is a sympathetic one. From Judas
to Peter to Pilate to the High Priest to the Servant Girl to the crowd who cry for Jesus’
death, all of us have taken parts that would make us feel guilty or ashamed if we took
them in real life. But notwithstanding the kind of parts we’re playing, we are in it
together. We have the excitement and the mutual support that any theater experience
generates; we’re in it together.
And here we encounter an important irony or paradox about the Passion narrative.
Despite the somber content of the story, we are in it together. But Jesus, who is the
central actor in the story, is almost completely stripped of his community of support as he
goes through the terrible hours between the Last Supper and his death on the cross. For us
the engagement in the Passion drama is an experience of community, but for Jesus in the
original events, the experience is one of isolation. It is isolation made even more painful
by its contrast to the experiences of community that immediately precede it: the joyful
parade into the city that we celebrated here today, and the Last Supper with the disciples
that we will remember in a moment at communion and again with special force this
coming Maundy Thursday evening. Jesus gives a warning to his disciples as the Last
Supper is concluding. He says, “You will all be made to fail me; for it is written: I will
strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.”
Peter and all the disciples protest, saying: “Even if I must die with you, I will
never disown you.” Jesus says to Peter, “This very night, before the cock crows twice,
you will disown me three times.” And so it was, as we just have remembered. All who
have professed their loyalty to Jesus panic and desert him, with the exception of the
women who stay with him to the end. Jesus’ community of support shrinks progressively
from a huge and jubilant multitude to a mere handful of brave and loyal women. In the
drama in which we have participated, and in participating in which we have had a special
sense of community, we re-create the reality of Jesus’ radical isolation, his abandonment,
his having to experience the emotional pain of betrayal and desertion just as he
experiences the physical suffering of his torture and tormented death.
Later the disciples will realize that in his apparent isolation Jesus has been
intensely close to God, who sustains and delivers him from the worst, and who enables
Jesus to return to his disciples and gather them again into community with himself and
each other and with God. That re-gathering of the community, based on Jesus’
faithfulness in spite of betrayal, is the foundation of our own experience of community in
this hour and in our whole lives. Jesus’ faithfulness to us is the source of our faithfulness
to each other, so that when death or the fear or threat of death strikes one of us, others of
us can gather and give support. On this very day, as in so many days of our life in
community, that very thing is happening. Some are being threatened, others are gathering
to support them. Our gift of community comes through Jesus’ willingness to risk isolation
and rejection for our sake, and to be true to God in spite of human fecklessness, human
fearfulness, human sinfulness.
As we enter the Holy Week, we give thanks for Jesus’ faithfulness, and for the
gifts of community that we have received from and through him. We look forward to the
ways in which we can share worship and prayer and fellowship with each other and with
Jesus as this special and most holy week in our year unfolds. We give thanks for the trust
that has been given us, to care for each other faithfully, even in the midst of terrible and
sometimes inexplicable suffering. Though in his time of trial we couldn’t find the
courage and strength to be there for him, yet Jesus was true to his commitment to be there
for us, as he is still, and as he enables us to be for each other. That is the reality that
makes this week, and our whole lives, holy, and for that reality, that holiness of our life,
and for Jesus’ faithful holy presence among us, we give thanks.
Amen.