Palm/Passion Sunday
April 5, 2020
Matthew’s Passion
INTRODUCTION
Palm Sunday, or Passion Sunday, or Palm/Passion Sunday, offers us this ironic juxtaposition, where we start the service smiling and celebrating and shouting, “Hosanna!” and then our smiles quickly fade as we hear the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. To ease us into that shift, we’ll hear first from Isaiah about the suffering servant, and then from Philippians, the famous Christ Hymn, which describes the simultaneously humble and exalted position of Jesus. That pretty much sums up the story of Palm Sunday, doesn’t it? Jesus is simultaneously exalted and celebrated, and then quickly humbled, even to death on a cross.
I don’t normally preach on Palm Sunday, or Good Friday, but rather just let these rich texts speak for themselves. But this year, it felt right to preach on it. Because I think we all really need the Passion of Christ. We need to know that God knows our pain. We need to hear about the extent of God’s love. We need a suffering savior. And Jesus delivers. So, let’s hold onto that as we hear these texts today. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Writer and preacher Debie Thomas tells about when her daughter was in middle school, and was battling anorexia. During the worst of the illness, she was hospitalized for both physical and mental treatment, and the doctors would not allow her mother to see her depressed, malnourished child for several days. Thomas writes, “I walked out of the hospital, got into my car, and started driving without aim or purpose. I ended up in the parking lot of a Catholic gift shop I’d never seen before. Shaking, I walked in and wandered the aisles until a woman with a kind face approached me. ‘Can I help you find anything?’ she asked. I burst into tears and said nothing. She gave me a hug and said, ‘Wait here.’ After disappearing for a minute, she returned with a small, velvet box. Inside was a tiny silver crucifix on a chain. Pressing the necklace into my hands, she said, ‘Hold this. Keep it with you. Only a suffering God can help.’” Thomas goes on, “I’ve never forgotten that line (which I later learned was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s), and I’ve been thinking about it pretty much nonstop since the coronavirus pandemic began. Only a suffering God can help.”[1]
I have been thinking since this all this began that I really need some Easter, the assurance of new life. Of course, that conviction started when I thought we might actually be back together for Easter, or shortly thereafter. But still, even as the news and mandates changed, I kept hoping for some clear vision of new life, some clear sign beyond my inner conviction that God has got this under control. I wanted something external to assure me. Preaching about all this during Lent is one thing – Lent is a time to fast and to reflect and to pray. But I have longed to get to the Easter part of this story, to the part where we look back on this and think, “Boy, that was rough. So glad God (already) came through again!”
But now we know we will not, on Easter, be able to gorge ourselves on metaphoric chocolate to mark the end of our coronavirus-induced fasting from social contact. We will not, on Easter, be able to look back at how bad things were, back on Good Friday – indeed, we’re still looking forward at the worst, for the peak of this monster is still ahead of us. And while that reality may be really difficult to come to grips with, this line, “Only a suffering God can help,” can really put things into new and valuable perspective for us. Because even as we will celebrate resurrection next week on Easter, we do still need that suffering God, and the story of his passion. More this year than any other Easter in my memory, we need to hear about how God suffered, just like we do.
Maybe we, just like the 1st century Israelites, were hoping for a super-powerful, invincible hero as our savior, someone with sword and shield, washboard abs and chiseled features, someone who can swoop in and defeat the enemy with power and strength and make everything suddenly better!
But Jesus is not this kind of savior – and that’s a good thing. Jesus saves, not by making the bad go away, but by joining us in it. The way Matthew tells it, Jesus suffers all the way through this story. On Good Friday later this week, when we hear John’s Passion, we’ll see a different Jesus, one who is in control of the situation and knows he is fulfilling his purpose. His last words from the cross will be a triumphant, “It is finished!” But in Matthew, his last words are an anguished, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In Matthew, Jesus throws himself on the ground in the garden, and pleads for his life. Later, he is too weak to carry his own cross. Though Jesus certainly suffers in John’s version, in Matthew we really see on clear display our suffering savior. We see a God who loves us so much that he went to great length to be right there with us in our suffering – our longing, our pain, our loss, our fear, our sadness, our disappointment, our uncertainty, our despair. Remember back at the beginning of Matthew, the name given to Jesus in the Christmas story? Emmanuel. God-with-us. And in the Passion story, we see the extent to which this is true: God is so Emmanuel, that he becomes a suffering God, with us and for us.
Debie Thomas ends her reflection this way: “I’ll be honest: like many of you, I come to this Holy Week tired, uncertain, and afraid. Who knows how many deaths lie waiting around the corner? How many sorrows, disappointments, farewells, and jagged endings we will face before resurrection comes home to stay? I can’t imagine most of it, and sometimes I can’t bear any of it. But Jesus can. If anything in the Christian story is true, then this must be true as well: our suffering God will not leave us alone. There is no death we will die, small or big, literal or figurative, that Jesus will not hold in his crucified arms.”
And so, my friends, we enter Holy Week, and the story of Jesus’ own suffering. We enter this story knowing that our suffering God is right there with us – in the story of Jesus, in the story of pandemic, in whatever story of pain and fear and suffering you might be living through right now. We enter this story knowing the ultimate ending, in which God does bring about new life. We enter this story knowing that we do not enter it alone, and never will be left alone, because our God is indeed, Emmanuel – in death, and in life.
Let us pray… Suffering God, you know how it is to be in pain. You know what it is to cry out in anguish and uncertainty. You know us, Lord. Thank you. Thank you for your passion, for your presence, and for your life. Make us ever aware that even in this, you are Emmanuel, God with us, and for us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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