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Sermon for Palm Sunday

March 24, 2002

I had a parishioner once who told me he never went to church on Palm Sunday. He would attend services on all the Sundays in Lent, on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Day—but he never went to church on Palm Sunday. The reason, he said, was that he didn’t like the dramatic reading of the Passion. And the reason he didn’t like the dramatic reading of the Passion was because he didn’t like the part where the congregation takes the role of the Crowd and shouts, Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!  “I don’t want to say that,” he told me. “It makes my skin crawl. I hate it.”

Well, I told my friend that if taking the part of the Crowd was that upsetting to him he should just not say it—but it would still be good for him to come to church on Palm Sunday! But on a deeper level, my friend was absolutely right: taking the part of the Crowd in the reading of the Passion, lifting up our voices to shout Crucify, crucify!, is a disturbing thing. It does make our skin crawl. We do hate it. And we are supposed to hate it. That’s why we do it.

Because the Solemn Reading of the Passion is more than just a historical drama. It is more than just an exercise in collective memory, a look backward at something that happened long ago and far away. The Solemn Reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday is a way for us to become part of the story—it is a movement of prayer and spirit that puts us inside the Jesus story, and makes the Jesus story part of our stories. Our participation in the Passion reminds us that the rejection and killing of Jesus wasn’t just something that those people did, back then and over there; it wasn’t the fault of the Jews, or the religious authorities, or the Romans, or any other nameless, faceless them we care to think of. Our participation in the Passion reminds us that the rejection and killing of Jesus is a reality of sin in which we are involved too, that our sin also is part of that fallen humanity that turns away from Jesus, part of that sinful humanity that refuses the life that Jesus offers and chooses death instead. When we hate to hear our own voices say Crucify, crucify!, then we are brought face to face with our own complicity in sin, the part that we play in rejecting Jesus even here and now.

In many ways we are not so different from the Crowd in the story. Like them, we live in a political system that often seems to favor the rich and the powerful, and that punishes the poor and the outcast for being poor and for living on the fringes of society. The Roman authority executed Jesus for being a political insurrectionist, for being someone whose message of the reign of God and the radical equality of all people before God was threatening to the power of the powers that be. And how often do we protect our political interests, how often do we turn our backs on the poor and the outcast and those who would have an equal share of our power? We too are part of the crowd that crucifies Christ.

Like the Crowd in the story, we find it too easy to accept violence in our society as an everyday thing, just part of the way life is. The crowd that gathered outside the governor’s headquarters in Jerusalem was all too accustomed to violent uprisings and violent reprisals, to attacks by liberationist Zealots and police actions by Roman soldiers, to stonings and riots and murders in the night. What was one more crucifixion against the backdrop of all that customary violence—what was the pain and torture of Jesus to them but a moment’s entertainment, half-a-day’s curiosity? And how often do we make our peace with violence, when we see Palestinian attacks and Israeli reprisals on the television news, when we hear stories of shootings in the classroom and bullying at school, when we read in our newspapers about murders and abuses and brutalizing social conditions—and when we shrug all that violence off as just part of the way life is? How often do we fail to see the pain of Jesus in the faces of the attacked—and of the attackers—and how often do we fail to act to stop that pain? We too are part of the crowd that crucifies Christ.

Like the Crowd in the story, we all too often slip into a mob mentality, we let our values and decisions be swayed by what seems popular at the moment, by “what everybody else is doing” and “what everybody else is thinking.” The people in the Crowd were happy enough to greet Jesus when he arrived in Jerusalem, when everybody was waving palms and shouting Hosannas. But then the wind shifted, then the mood changed, and the people forgot their first enthusiasm in the rush to see just how far Jesus could be made to fall. Then that seemed like the thing to do at the time…. And how often do we find it easier to go with the social flow? How often do we find our devotion to Jesus ebbing and flowing with what seems important at the moment, with what seems valuable and appropriate and “what we can get away with” in the cultural climate of the time? I was leaving a restaurant the other day, and just ahead of me there was another group going through the door, and they were laughing, and I overheard one of them say to the others, “Remember, it doesn’t count if you don’t get caught!” Now, I’m pretty sure they were just joking around; but it seemed to me like a sad comment on the moral character of our time. Whether it’s greed in the company boardroom, or shady accounting practices in major corporations, or priests and clergy who betray their trust and abuse their people, or all the thousand little dishonesties that crop up in the midst of daily life—how often it seems as though our devotion to the goodness of God made manifest in Jesus comes and goes faster than the time it takes to change Hosanna to Crucify. We too are part of the crowd that continues to crucify Christ.

And if that’s all there were to Palm Sunday, if all we did was shout Crucify!, then I would agree with my friend: then it would just be disturbing, then it would be hateful, then it would be better to give the whole thing up and just stay home. But there’s more to the story than that: there’s more to the story than the Crowd that turns on Jesus and the sin that rejects Jesus and the cross that kills Jesus. There’s more to the story than our coming face to face with our own complicity in sin. There is more to the story—because after we read the Passion we celebrate the Eucharist; after the story of Jesus’ death we share the bread and cup that is the promise of Jesus’ eternal life; after we hear with horror how our voices shout Crucify!, we raise our voices again to

(8:00) say O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

(10:00) proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

There is more to the story, because the story of Jesus points beyond sin to the promise of forgiveness, beyond hate to the triumph of love, beyond Crucifixion to the Good News of Resurrection.

And that Good News is ultimately what Palm Sunday is all about. We come face to face with our sin in the Passion, but only so that Christ may bring us face to face with forgiveness in Communion. We hate to say Crucify!, but only so that we may learn how much we love to say Hosanna! We play the part of rejecting Jesus, but only so that we feel more deeply the reality of accepting Jesus. That is the triumph of love told in the story of the Passion. And that is the love that blesses us today.

In the Name of God: Yahweh, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Amen.