The Sunday of the Passion

April 1, 2007

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

Why this story, now?

Luke 22:14—23:56

Forsythia blossoms were emerging one warm day last week while I was meditating on the story just read. I noticed a tension immediately. Here is this dark story, the Passion, complete with gory details on subject matter we would rather not think about such as pain and suffering and death and grief, and every year we read it like clockwork in this season of renewal and bright colors and new life.

And I thought, if there is anything at all that makes the church counter-cultural, this must be front and center. What other institution, what other group of people, would rehash every year such painful experiences from the past: to inject this dose of darkness into a season of renewal (in the northern hemisphere, at least)?

I mean, I love spring; it is my favorite season. There are pleasant memories of azaleas adorning my hometown in North Carolina or cherry blossoms lining the Potomac when I lived near Washington, DC. Dark and overcast winters are hard for me. I latch on to those words read at Christmastime about light coming into darkness. I look forward to the days getting longer. Then springtime arrives, people seem happy again, the refreshment of summer is on the horizon, and then along comes this dark story.

There is a tendency, I think it’s human, to cover up the dark sides of life and focus only on happy things. The movie World Trade Center focuses on rescue efforts following 9/11. It portrays some of the generous and compassionate people who risked their lives to save others, and there were, in fact, a few successes in such efforts. When we focus on the successes, we might even manage to muster up a smile and feel uplifted. We may even leave the theater feeling good. Never mind how we really felt on that dark day. Those feelings are better left behind.

Judy Shepard, whose son Matthew was brutally beaten and afterward died a few years ago, spoke recently in Indianapolis about walking into her son’s hospital room for the first time. She could hardly recognize her son except for a spec on his forehead and the color of his eyes. Matthew’s brother at first refused to come into the hospital room. This was not the way he wanted to remember his brother. He eventually did walk into the room, and immediately broke down. We all would have reacted the same way. Stepping into dark places is never easy.

When Mel Gibson released his movie about our Lord’s Passion a few years ago, some of us were critical. Where was the good news we asked? If there’s going to be a major Hollywood blockbuster that could very well expose some people for the first time to the Christian faith, then we can’t just show someone being flogged and beaten and put torturously to death. Finish the story, we said. Talk about resurrection. Talk about following Jesus’ example. Talk about love.

But here we are gathered on the Sunday of the Passion. For whatever reason our Christian forebears felt we needed to focus on the Passion as a prerequisite to the resurrection, and for whatever reason all of us have chosen to be here this day. I suspect that most of us knew very well what we were getting in to. And to anyone who may have wandered into a church today for the very first time, do come again. Our readings are not always this gloomy. We really are a people of good news.

But maybe there is more to this day than meets the eye. On this day perhaps above all others, we realize the extent to which our faith is grounded in truth. The world is not a perfect place. There are wars lingering on and on, soldiers dying, people being beaten to death because they are gay, families grieving, and deadly diseases progressing. There is pain and sadness. There are people struggling to make ends meet, and more people than we would like to acknowledge living under bridges in cardboard boxes.

It is very easy to look the other way as all this happens. As long as it isn’t happening to me, I can just ignore what I read on the internet or hear on the television new shows and have a few less worries on my shoulders. And to be honest, sometimes that is exactly what I do. I would rather think about happy things.

For a time in my early life, I thought the accumulation of wealth was the key to happiness. When measured against the overwhelming majority of people in the world, I am in fact very affluent, but I still get sick and feel pain and suffer disappointments. Wealth does not take away the harshness of the human condition. It is at best an abstraction from the plight of others and at worst gained at the expense of them.

Sometimes I succumb to the multitude of marketing schemes that define our cultural landscape. I buy all sorts of unnecessary things thinking they will make me feel better. They never really do, but the temptation still looms and the pattern continues.

And sometimes I just look at the flowers of springtime. Their beauty usually does make me feel better in a sense, and I believe they are a gift from God and a product of God’s wondrous and good creation. Even so, at the end of the day the world is still a very broken place, and darkness is very real. We cannot afford to pretend otherwise.

In his book Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his thoughts and experiences as a prisoner at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. What struck me in particular was his thoughts one Jewish New Year’s Day about how his suffering and that of those around him so tested his faith.

“Once, I had believed profoundly that upon one solitary deed of mine, one solitary prayer, depended the salvation of the world. This day I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy. I had ceased to be anything but ashes.” (p. 65).

As I read Wiesel’s words, I heard echoes of other familiar words. The people Israel wandering through the desert crying out in utter frustration, “Why have you done this to us? Why have you brought us here where there seems to be no food and water? At least as slaves in Egypt we had those basic necessities?”

The Judean exiles in Babylon trying to make sense of the loss of their homeland, their homes, and everything they held dear cried out in utter despair, “God, are you even there? What have we done to deserve this? Why have you done this to us?”

Jesus on the Mount of Olives, looking into the city Jerusalem, anticipating an agonizing death and pleading with God, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.”

And you and I know the depths of despair as well. We know that pain, suffering, death, and grief are very real. They are part of the human condition. It is from these places that we long to be saved.

Here is our faith that sounds so different from most other things we hear in the world. It is no self-help seminar. It isn’t packaged in something shiny for sale. It isn’t about what works for me and what might work for you to improve our sense of inner happiness. It isn’t about optimism for human progress and advancement. It doesn’t distract us from reality. Sometimes it even challenges us and rocks the boat. It even gives us the Passion.

Here is our God who dares to meet us where we are. Here is a God who so grieves when we suffer that he says, “I will suffer along with you, only I will suffer more intensely.” Here is a God who so grieves over our encounters with death that he says, “I will die along with you, only I will die an even more agonizing death.” Here is a God who so grieves because of the brokenness of the world that he says, “I will bear all that brokenness on my very own back.”

Spring is in the air, and so too is darkness every bit as much. But so too is God, and so too is hope: the hope of people wandering in the wilderness, the hope of people banished from their homes to a strange and foreign land, the hope of chaos turning into creation and death turning into resurrection, the hope of Rosa Parks daring to sit at the front of the bus, the hope of journalist Terry Waite enduring month after month as hostage in a concrete cell, the hope of you and me bearing our brunt of the human condition.

Martin Luther King used Exodus imagery when he said, “I have seen the promised land.” You and I have seen that promised land, too. It is called the kingdom of God. Let it be our delight this Passiontide to proclaim that kingdom, to share our hope even in the midst of adversity, to a world that so desperately needs to hear it. Amen.