Tag: Suffering

What If?: A Sermon for Palm Sunday

I preached this sermon on Palm Sunday, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The text cited is the Passion narrative in the Gospel according to Mark.

One thing that strikes me, every year, as Holy Week envelops us in the stark power of its narrative, is how inevitable it all feels, this story about Jesus’ betrayal and death. How fixed the trajectory, after lifetimes, after centuries, after millennia of retracing it. It is easy to forget that the story we tell today began so differently.

Just a few months ago, we beheld a baby born in Bethlehem under the chill of starlight, and we heard angel choirs singing of peace, and then we watched that child grow and mature through the soft gloom of the season, and in the slow lengthening of our days through Epiphany, we beheld his light and his life and his love gathering their own brightness, and we have looked for signs of the unfurling promise of his Kingdom, like springtime emerging from the muddy, fertile ground of Lent. 

And yet, once more, here we stand on Palm Sunday, only to witness this particular story of God’s goodness cut short again, this particular promise deferred again, the tender green growing palms trampled, again, under the force of misguided adulation; the gently stirring earth soaked, again, not with gentle spring rain, but with blood.

And yet, despite the grave horrors, the enduring shock of what we see and experience in this Passion story, still, I think, we tend to see it as inevitable. As if this brutal end to Jesus’ earthly ministry was somehow the necessary price of his message, as if it were normal for for mothers to mourn their children, as if it were normal for springtime to give way to winter instead of summer. As if this sacrifice was as natural as the turning of the seasons. As if there was no other way the story could have ended. 

What if there was?

It’s odd, we rarely seem to ask that question about Holy Week. And it’s especially odd because, for most of us, in our own lives, we spend a lot of time and energy asking “what if?” 

What if I had made a different choice? What if I had chosen a different path? What if I had learned from my mistakes sooner? What if we, as a nation or as a community or as a church had chosen another course of action? 

Asking these sorts of questions is, most of the time, as natural as breathing. 

We are accustomed to “what ifs” because we are faced with a dizzying number of choices every day, and so of course we wonder how else things might have turned out if we had gone a different way. 

And yet, when it comes to Holy Week, when it comes to Jesus stumbling on the rocky road to Golgotha, we surrender him to his fate. We surrender our “what ifs”  to the violence we know and expect, and we behold the drama as if it were fixed and preordained, the way that it had to be for Jesus to be who he was and accomplish what he did. 

Without the suffering of Christ, without the brutality of the Cross (we have often been taught) there would be no salvation, no redemption, no liberation from the brokenness and sin that formed and fashioned the Cross in the first place. And so we have accepted, on some level, that all of this was necessary.

It’s a strange sort of logic that a God of Love would require torture to prove that love. At best, it leaves us to simply shake our heads and shrug at God’s inscrutable will. But at worst, it gives rise to the idea of redemptive violence—a God who inflicts harm upon himself and creation to achieve the ends of peace. Which sounds suspiciously like the tyrants we know, not like the God for whom we long. 

And so I wonder if, perhaps, as we move through Holy Week together, we are meant not to accept the inevitability of the Passion as passive observers of Jesus’ pain, but to trouble the narrative, just as our spirits are troubled by it. I wonder if we are meant to ask “what if?”

What if Jesus did not have to die in the way that he did? What if his own predictions of the Passion reflected his deep, grief-stricken understanding of our brokenness rather than some necessary violence inflicted by his Father? 

What if none of this had to happen?

What if the crowd chose to listen to his actual teachings? What if they understood, as he entered the city, the subversive symbolism of his ride on the colt for what it was—a challenge to the pageantry of imperial power—rather than projecting their own political agendas onto his actions?

What if his disciples had not forsaken him? What if the temple authorities had kept an open mind, had been humble in the face of things they did not understand? What if Pilate had chosen to be something more than a functionary of the deadly inertia of empire? 

What if there had, in fact, been another way for the story to end, another way for Jesus’ undying love to be made manifest and to bless the earth? 

We cannot know the answer to these questions, anymore than we ever know the answer to the “what ifs” of our own lives. The story is the story. And we must tell it. 

But that is not the point. The point is that we still need to ask the question. We need to ask “what if” during Holy Week, just as we must ask “what if” every time we are faced with violence and pain and prejudice, so that we do not accept these things as somehow normative, somehow determinative, because without “what if,” we will have made an uneasy peace with the crucifying impulses of the world. We will have surrendered our imaginations to the sense of their inevitability.

But what if we didn’t? 

What if the God who has repeatedly said “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” actually meant it, and meant us to expect this from ourselves and our world? What if the brutality of this Passion story is no more part of God’s plan than any of the rest of the suffering we inflict upon one another? 

Because when you start asking “what if,” you realize that everything in the Passion narrative is the result of choices, choices made made by people not so different from you and me, choices made, too often, in service to the prevailing order, choices made by people who were as agitated and lost and polarized as we are, people caught up in faltering hopes and flourishing suspicions, people distracted and weighed down by a history of loss, people who also forgot to ask, “what if this was not the way it has to be?”

I tried it this week, asking “what if” as I was reading and wrestling with the story. And there are signs of possibility, thank God, if we look closely. Especially if we look closely at the women.

There’s the unnamed woman with the alabaster jar, who pours out her rare, costly, sweet ointment with the same mixture of wild abandon and care by which God pours his love upon creation. They say it is wasteful, this love and care, and yet she seems to be asking, “what if it’s not?”

And there’s the servant girl who, like a prophet, calls Peter to account for abandoning his true identity, all of his no, no, no, I do not know him. And she seems to be asking, “what if you said yes? What if you did finally, fully, know him and claim him as your own?”

And the women who gather near the Cross to hold vigil with Jesus as he dies, refusing to abandon him to his shame and loneliness. The crowds call it a lost cause, a failed revolution, a big disappointment, but the women seem to be asking, “what if none of that was the point?”

All of these women are the ones who refuse to accept the unfolding trajectory of the story—the ones who see another way, the true Way. They are the ones brave enough to name presence and fidelity, not violence and power, as the strongest force at work in this narrative. They are the ones who are asking, what if this story is not about the myth of redemptive violence that forms its center, but about the quiet, determined insistence of love that flourishes on the margins?

What if the point of Holy Week is not to valorize the story of Jesus’ suffering, but to build a world in which it is the last such story that ever need be told? 

What if we realized that the Cross is not the necessary means to an end, that God would have saved us in a thousand different ways if we would have let him, and that he still will?

What if we realized that the only inevitable narrative is not the Passion, but this: that Jesus—and all of us— are loved passionately from the day of our birth, all of us adored by angels under the chill of starlight, loved through the soft gloom of the turning seasons, loved through the lengthening of our days, and loved when we rejoice and loved when we despair and loved even when we die—however we die—and loved, ultimately, back to life.

What if that was the one, true, enduring, necessary story we needed to hear? What if all the rest was up to us? 

What if?

Only Questions: A Good Friday Sermon

This sermon was preached on Good Friday, April 19, 2019, at Christ Episcopal Church in Alameda, CA. 

Shortly before condemning Jesus to death, Pilate asks him–and thus unknowingly asks God–a bitter, heartbreaking , fundamental question, one that humanity has likely been asking from the very beginning: “what is truth?”

He receives no answer.

There is no answer to give that could be encapsulated into words. Truth, the very embodiment of Truth, is a bruised and battered face staring back into his own face, and it is beyond articulation.

Like Pilate and everyone else who participates in the crucifixion of God Incarnate, we are deep in a mystery now, a place where words are largely inadequate, where answers are few, where only questions prevail. We must tread carefully, for this is terrifying holy ground we stand upon today, Good Friday, and we should not profane it with endless speculation.

We are at the foot of the Cross, gazing up at Jesus, who in turn gazes back at us, blood and tears streaming down his face—and in this place, tidy, insightful observations about the nature of God and clever turns of phrase about sin and forgiveness and sacrifice all dry up like chaff and blow away in the wind.

The Cross rejects every attempt to understand it fully. It is not a place for self-assured theologizing or domesticated spiritualizing. It is a raw, awful, unspeakable place in which we find ourselves.

Last night, on Maundy Thursday, Jesus told us to love one another, and we did so. We washed one another’s feet and broke bread together with the best of intentions. We perceived that this was the proper way to live, to care, to be present in God’s kingdom. And on Easter we will no doubt come back together as a people renewed and forgiven for all the times we have failed to love, returning to our senses after this day of desperation and horror, and we will recommit ourselves to the fullness of life that God offers freely in the light of resurrection.

But today we are no-place. Today we have murdered the very best of our intentions to love. We have traveled to the Place of the Skull, the place where confidence is shattered like bone. Today we stand at the farthest point from comfort, the place where Jesus, God-With-Us, He who was the smiling babe in the manger, the youth in the temple, the wise teacher on the mountain, the Holy One, cries out to the Father for some sign of presence and receives…nothing. No answer. No words.

And in that silence we know what it is to forsake and to be forsaken.

Yes, we are deep in a mystery, one so strange and terrible that any attempt to sort it out, to prod at its depths, to explain it, results in cheap, brittle platitudes.

Think about of all the things that you should never, ever say when someone has experienced a great loss in their life: things like

“It’s all part of God’s plan.”

“Everythinghappens for a reason.”

“When one door closes, another one opens.”

These are things we say to each other that are usually more about soothing our own sense of confusion and fear rather than simply being present, deeply present, to the pain of another.

And yet these trite, hollow, inadvertently callous attempts at comfort are exactly what we so often apply to our encounter with Jesus on the Cross. We want to justify this awful thing, to make sense of it, to assure ourselves that God knew what God was doing the whole time. We approach Golgotha and see the crucified Christ writhing in agony and fear, and we say, to Him, as we do to others: “everything happens for a reason! Your suffering is part of God’s plan!”

And these words are like yet more nails, hammered and stammered into the endless void of His suffering.

The Church has done this since the beginning, in various ways. It’s only human, perhaps. We don’t like sitting with questions, and we rely too much on explanations.

Some of us want to reason the Cross away as God’s clever, elegant, brutal plan to atone for our sins, to make proper restitution for our brokenness, as if the cosmos were constructed like an accounting system or a court of law.

Or, equally tempting for some of us and yet equally limiting: we confine the Cross to the realm of  human political drama, as if Jesus was nothing more than an enlightened social justice prophet murdered by “conservative” religious authorities and imperial forces—those bad, unenlightened others that of course look nothing like us. As if the Cross was merely an unfortunate byproduct of a backwards political system rather than what it actually is: the fundamental, unanswerable question at the core of all the pain which we experience and inflict upon each other.

Every time we try to reconstruct the Cross in a way that suits us, in a way that provides easy answers, in a way that excuses us from the narrative, we are simply building another instrument of torture to re-crucify that which we cannot understand.

No more of this, I ask you. No more. Lay down your easy theories of atonement that taste of sour wine; stop casting lots for your competing theologies of the Cross. For one day, let us stop trying to figure it out. Look into the face of Christ crucified and let Him be all that He is, uncertain and frightening and heart-rending, the face of Truth.

And let that wordless recognition of Truth, terrible as it may be, let it be enough today, because it is all we are given. Just as with Pilate, Jesus has no further answers for us.

It is called Good Friday because it is God’s Friday—the day in which God presents us with a mystery, a deep mystery, a Man who is on a cross for reasons so strange and intimate that they are as distant as an all-consuming black hole, and yet as close as our own breath.

And yes, we know in our hearts that there is more to the story, and that perhaps soon, very soon, we will fumble our way toward the answer of the empty tomb and the radiant joy of something entirely new. But not now. Not yet.

What is truth, we ask? Look at the Cross. It is staring us in the face, wordless and unutterable. Approach it cautiously, without certainty. Touch it if you dare; look into the void and see God staring back at you. Today, this is all we have.