Our offering of lament and praise. Palm Sunday with Passion Reading 2022
And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.
Watching these things. What can they do but hold each other and watch as the linear march of human mercilessness advances on an innocent man, their beloved Lord who simply and truthfully lived God’s love in real time. The women who had followed him from Galilee, their souls are inextricably linked to Jesus’ own soul, and in the shouts of condemnation, the gaslighting manipulation of the leaders, in the mockery, torture and in the inflamed temper of the crowds, they suffer their own pain and that of being witnesses to Jesus’ pain. They are a profoundly traumatized community.
In the space of very few days, they’ve travelled from the intimacy of sharing bread and wine together against the mounting threats of invasion by Roman troops, to a comic satire of the usual pompous processions with a joyful parade of children, a donkey, palm leaves and acclamations of the One who comes in the name of the Lord, with shouts of Hosanna! And now the deafening calls to crucify him. The linear march of human sin seems unstoppable and there is now an inevitable end: Death. The current of human cruelty is strong and unidirectional – it all heads to the same place: suffering and death, whether in Jerusalem or Mariupol, Yemen, Tigray, or in the Mush Hole residential school 40 kilometres from here.
But the procession of sin – as strong as it is in this narrative – is profoundly disrupted. Listen to the words of God in the midst of the wave upon wave of trauma inflicted: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me but weep for yourselves and your children… Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing… Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise… Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” On the way of the cross, Jesus notices and stops to pay attention to traumatized women and condemned prisoners. He listens to the rejected. He speaks the care, forgiveness, confident faith, and trusting hope in God that is resurrection life, and he speaks it right in the middle of a spiritual and political war zone set on following its own self-defensive linear course of assured destruction. The way of the cross doesn’t just anticipate resurrection on the third day, it lives and proclaims resurrection love in the midst of violence.
Resurrection is the completion of the new creation, our eternal and ultimate union with Christ, in God forever, where every tear will be wiped away. We don’t have to wait to the next Sunday’s Easter resurrection story to know that resurrection. Liturgy reminds us of this. Liturgical time is not linear. As much we’re bound by cycles of hours and days and seasons and years and mark Christmas in December and have these different seasons such as Lent, Advent, and Easter, the point of liturgical time is that it meets us in the specific time and conditions in which we find ourselves at any moment, but doesn’t keep us there.
Liturgical time – what we do here together – lifts us from the restrictions of our experience of linear time and all that goes with it, including sin, and the callous advance of human cruelty, lifting it all into God’s time. Resurrection life, God’s time, breaks all the rules by infusing every moment with a loving offer of something more beautiful, more loving, more healing, and more joyful than we can possibly know through just the accumulated knowledge that comes with the passing of human time.
It’s why we can celebrate the rather comic and fun triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the crucifixion together in one Palm and Passion Sunday liturgy. It’s why we can, in effect, do that every single Sunday in celebration of the eucharist. In each eucharistic prayer we proclaim this same journey: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! And we remember his suffering, death, and resurrection. Every time.
We do so today with a whole lot more words and a visceral and disturbing narrative that is hard to hear if we really listen. We’re asked to pay attention here to trauma. To give it space. To let the victims speak to us.
If we really listen we might hear and connect to the traumatized disciples of Jesus on that way of the cross, and find our place with them. With them may we cling to the words of God we hear on that way. Jesus, the wounded healer, continues to speak even from his own trauma, to the pain, suffering, and precious humanity of those around him. He can do no other. This is God entering over and over again in every moment in history into the worst of what we can experience of rejection, loneliness, powerlessness, and pain, and not leaving us here.
Today’s liturgy is a profound reminder that we can hold lament and praise together in the same offering to God.
It is good that the readings for today end there. The larger narrative, God’s story, outside of linear time, carries us over to that table where we will feast, as we always do, on the resurrection. It is good that the readings for today remind us of the earthly presence of resurrection hope in the worst of what humans can do to each other. It is good to give our thanks and praise to God for this gift.
Eileen Scully