Embracing sacrificial love
Palm and Passion | Mark 11:1-11, Mark 14:1-15:47
ONE WEEK IS NOT ENOUGH
One week is not enough
to say what needs to be said,
see what needs to be seen,
learn what needs to be learned.
It is hardly enough time to
prepare for what’s coming
or know why it matters.
We start with palms and hosannas
and end in death, confused
and distraught, like it is we
who have just lost a son.
As if our grief could surpass God’s.
One week is not enough mourning
or learning to live like this.
To find joy
again
in anything.
Or do we simply jump ahead to
the good news? That God has other plans.
We don’t have to feel this way.
Shed the pain for something more
comfortable, a blanket of intoxicating
joy. Let’s stay here forever. Nevermind
what they say. We can just be happy.
One week is not enough discipline
to really take root. We need
to work at this a little longer.
I’ve learned about myself, others,
the world—how can we just
stop
here?
One week is not enough separation
from our normal lives. From
the racing anxiety to numb distraction—
you gave me pause
and I stopped.
I want this. More. And I want more
This.
Quiet.
Slow.
I don’t have enough of this.
There is a battle in my heart.
And I have drawn you all in. Most have come willingly. But it is one that I think needs to be articulated.
What are we to do with Holy Week?
We have a week’s worth of action and four days worth of liturgy. We literally skip over three days of material. The material that reveals why Jesus dies. But that’s only if we come to every liturgy. Few Christians anywhere do.
Most come to the Sundays only, which brings that four days down to two. So, if we do the math, that means we shove six days of action into one Sunday.
And that one Sunday is not the one most people come to! Attendance doubles for Easter. So even when we plan for Sundays, half of the people will get 1/7 of the story. The end. Or, really, the end not being the end.
We show up for the last ten minutes of the movie and expect it to be the essential part. That’s a lot of pressure on Easter.
I used to invite us to give this one week to God. That honestly, one week and about one hour a week the rest of the year is not a lot. But even that feels insufficient to the task. Because the story leading up to the story is invaluable to seeing what we experience in Holy Week.
What we need to know:
We need to know who is rejecting Jesus (hint: it’s not the crowds!),
Why (many leaders feel threatened by his theology and its implications), and
Who is doing this Passion stuff (religious leaders try him, Roman soldiers torture him, and the Roman government executes him).
And as long as we pretend this isn’t about Jesus’s message (of freedom, equality, hope, and service to the weakest members of our society — granting them status and freedom they don’t have now) and its political implications for the people of every time (like freedom, equality, hope, service, and granting status) we can’t understand why people sought John the Baptizer in the wilderness three years earlier—for what? This freedom.
And why thousands followed this rabbi around, trying to catch a spare word or bringing their sick loved ones to him. Why people outside the faith come to him.
And from the moment he dares heal somebody on the Sabbath, Defenders of Tradition try to figure out how to stop it. And it doesn’t take long for them to decide that killing him is an option.
This Week:
So when Jesus mocks Rome on Palm Sunday, makes a huge scene at the Temple on Monday, humiliates religious leaders on Tuesday to the delight of thousands or tens of thousands of people making their pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, we are confronted with a dangerous truth.
That Jesus is popular. His politics and his theology are popular. Most of these people have only heard about the healings. They are now hearing the grace of God.
It is the Word drawing the people in.
And the Word is offering massive change to the people who long for precisely that.
As for people in power, nothing is more threatening to their power than feeding the starving and treating our neighbors like human beings.
This is the message we skip.
When we go from Hosannas to Crucify hims. We miss the reality that these are different people. It isn’t “humanity” shouting. It isn’t us.
The people shouting “crucify!” are people choosing to believe that if they keep their neighbors poor, Rome will keep them (the powerful) from being poor. They are like the poor whites in the post-Reconstruction era choosing a more tolerable poverty with racism over equality for all and an end to poverty as they knew it.
We skip this message so that we can just get to the crucifixion. To feel the searing pain of sacrifice and the love for all humanity. So we can feel the intensity of mourning and loss personally—and also keep it theological. About salvation in an abstract sense. Not a lived sense. A tangible sense. Like in our hopes and ambitions for this week in this year. We could know that grace, too!
We skip this message to focus on the crucifixion. And yet, half of Christians skip over that, too.
Only Resurrection.
What is it to live in only the resurrection? How can we be people of faith if we only hear a message of Jesus’s rising?
I want to think it would be a message of greater hope. Of new life and trust. That people would hear this message as more than aspirational and inspirational, but of true and lasting change in our lives.
But how can we have this without the crucifixion? Is it not, just ongoing life? If we don’t go through death, isn’t this just…eternity—without the change? A vampiric undeadness?
Death is the means of transformation. How the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. And why we die to ourselves to rise in Christ in baptism.
Eternal life requires death. It requires we face death.
Easter without Good Friday reinforces a lie. And Good Friday without Easter denies the most important Christian virtue: hope.
And both Easter and Good Friday without the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, his teachings and miracles, and his journey to Jerusalem is empty religion.
And Christianity without a willingness to follow Jesus on that journey is the way of death.
As the prophet declares in the first chapter of Isaiah, the heartless offerings are a burden to God.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
—Isaiah 1:15
One week is just not enough.
Not to convey the story. To learn what we ought to do/be/become. To change our ways.
It also isn’t enough to change all of the things. The broken lectionary and the malformed liturgical priorities. We can’t overhaul centuries of tradition in the next five days.
Nor can we expect our faith to expect so little of us and us so much of it.
Jesus isn’t safe; but he saves us. Restores our humanity. Joins what we tear apart. And loves what and who we detest.
And he shows us that the path of new life begins with us—our turning ourselves to God. Our taking on those healing hands, and offering them up. As the very least of us. In hope and love.