Questions: Is this a day for rejoicing while parading around
with long green leaves from exotic climates in outrageous joy? Or is it a day
for bracing ourselves to hear the story of horrible injustice?
Answer: Both.
Unless we hold the extremes together in our hearts and
minds, we cannot get past either our desire for a victorious knight on a white
hourse coming to save us or God’s foolish way of showing us ultimate love. True
power is in weakness. True power is in dying.
Today is not simply both because “some people” won’t come to
hear the Passion story on Good Friday (a convenient explanation). Rather, we
honor two realities at one time at the start of Holy Week so that we can better
recognize what we human creatures repeatedly mistake for wisdom. When the rabbi
we love rides on a donkey into the city of ultimate power, it is not a moment
to breathe a sigh of relief but to hold our breath.
Some believe the triumphal
procession of Jesus into Jerusalem is modeled on the Roman triumph, yet the
triumphant processional entrance of a king or conqueror to take possession of “his
city” is well known to nearly all ancient societies. . . . Julius Caesar enters
marked with sacrificial blood, a “god for a day” . . . accompanied by armies,
banners, music, and horns.
Jesus’ triumph could hardly be more
similar and more different. Jesus is not yet marked with sacrificial blood, but
will himself become a sacrificial victim. He is not accompanied by conquering
armies, stallions and chariots, but rides a colt. As homilists, we should help
our congregations see how Mark has traced a continuous path for Jesus’
triumphal steps: into the city, into the temple, out of the city, and into a
tomb. – Jeffrey VanderWilt
Palm – Mark
11:1-11
Passion – Mark 14:1-15:47
Erik Erikson, the theorist who
wrote about eight stages of human development, described the first crisis human
infants confront: trust versus mistrust. Babies see and feel their caregivers
holding, feeding, bathing, and comforting them, and they begin to understand
that they can rely on these other beings. It is the caregiver’s touch, smile,
and eye-to-eye contact—the caregiver’s face—with which the infant connects most
intimately.
. . . Martin Luther, about whom Erikson wrote a
psycho-historical biography, suggested that the best benediction to use at the
end of Mass is the Aaronic blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord
make his face shine upon you; the
Lord lift up his countenance upon you,
and give you peace” (emphasis added). We see—and touch—the face of another, and
in so doing learn to trust the other.
When Jesus cries, “My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?” he echoes Psalm 22, but he also expresses the cry of
any person who has felt the searing pain of abandonment. There are times when
the darkness is unbroken by the kind face of a caregiver.
On the Sunday of the Passion,
particularly in the Year of Mark, we behold an abandoned, frightened, and
ultimately defeated Jesus. And he beholds us in our own abandonment, our own
despair.
. . . We don’t pretend on this day
that we don’t know the end of the story. Even in Mark’s gospel, which ends with
Jesus’ followers running in fear from the news of the empty grave, we are given
the hope of resurrection, the promise of Christ’s face in the darkness. – Stephen
Crippen
Isaiah 50:4-9a
The Suffering Servant gives us a stark image of the
victim, the one being bullied, the one who has no voice and cannot find
justice. It is the image of the crucified one and also the creatures–human and
non–who stand little chance of thriving where there is no champion to take
their side. This image can help us see how important it is to “contend”
alongside the one who is abused.
How we are to stand with those in need is the concern of
the epistle to the church in Philippi.
Philippians 2:5-11
The key phrase is “let the same
mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (2:5). It links the exhortation to
good behavior (e.g., v 3, “Do nothing from selfish ambition”) to the nature of
Jesus as one who could have been equal to God, but “emptied himself.” The Greek
concept is kenosis, or “pouring out,” a reference to a divestment of power,
authority, or status. – Jeffrey VanderWilt
Stephen Crippen is
a psychotherapist and a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, Washington.
Jeffery VanderWilt,
author of Communion with Non-Catholic Christians (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical
Press, 2003), teaches at Santa Margarita Catholic High school in Southern
California.
Homily Service 39, no. 5 (2006): 9-17.
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