Today is Palm Sunday which marks the start of Holy Week in the Church’s calendar. But today is also the second Sunday of the season of Passiontide, a season of the Church’s calendar that runs from the fifth Sunday of Lent until the eve of Easter Day on Holy Saturday. The reason for the season of Passiontide, the reason it’s given that name, is that as we go through these two weeks, and especially as we go through Holy Week, the readings in the Church’s lectionaries describe the last days and hours of our Lord’s earthly life and ministry and so they turn our thoughts towards what we call our Lord’s Passion, his suffering and his death on the Cross.
As I’m sure we all know, the word ‘passion’ refers to intense emotions and feelings and so it’s a very good word with which to entitle the last days of our Lord’s earthly life because, as we go through the Gospel accounts of these days, there’s no doubt whatsoever that Jesus did show some very strong emotions. In doing this, what comes very much to the fore is Jesus’ humanity. But that’s only to be expected. As this morning’s reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians tells us; Jesus,
‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.’
Or, as we read in the Letter to the Hebrews,
‘…he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.’
We acclaim Jesus, and worship him, as our Saviour, our Lord, and our King. But, as these readings make clear, he was also every bit as human as we are. We see Jesus’ humanity very clearly in the Gospel accounts of his last few days and perhaps where we see it most of all is in Jesus’ passion, the deep emotions he showed as he went through his last days and hours of earthly life. And so what I want to do today is to reflect on some of the emotions Jesus showed at this time which show that he was like us in every respect because they’re emotions we all show in our lives. And I want also to offer some reflections on how we, each in our own way, cause Jesus’ Passion to be re-enacted today through the way we might cause others to go through their own passions.
In the three-year cycle of readings we use in the Church, this year is Year C, the year of Luke, and so I’ll begin with Luke’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
We’re not really told much about Jesus’ state of mind as he approached Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday, but it’s hinted at in his refusal to silence his disciples who were acclaiming him as,
“…the King who comes in the name of the Lord!”
That’s an acclamation with clear Messianic meaning, and Jesus wasn’t about to refute it. For one thing it was true, but it must have pleased Jesus that some people at least did recognise who he was, he wouldn’t have been human if that hadn’t pleased him. So the first passion we see in Jesus is joy, happiness, and isn’t that just like us when we’re praised? We all like to be valued by others and we like to be given recognition and praise for what we’ve done; it makes us happy. But how willing are we to make others happy by praising them? How willing are we to give others the recognition they deserve? Isn’t it often true that we can be more ready to criticise people for their failures than to praise them for their successes? How often are we like those crowds on that first Palm Sunday, ready to praise someone one day, only to criticise and denigrate them the next?
The next passion we see in Luke’s account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is great sadness. Luke tells us that Jesus wept for Jerusalem because the people didn’t recognise him for who he was. As this was just before Passover, Jerusalem would have been filling up with pilgrims, so Jesus was crying for Israel as a whole, not just for Jerusalem. He was crying for the people he came to save but whom he couldn’t, because they wouldn’t listen to him. And aren’t we the same when people we love don’t listen to us when we’re trying to help them? Don’t we feel sadness when we can’t make people see sense and see the error of their ways? Don’t we sometimes feel like crying for them, and perhaps do cry for them? But how often have we made people cry for us because we wouldn’t listen to them? How often do we make Jesus cry today because we still won’t listen to him?
The first thing St Luke tells us Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem was to go to the temple and there we see another great passion of Jesus – anger. This anger of Jesus’ was a righteous anger, a justifiable anger. He was angry because the temple traders had turned God’s house into a “den of robbers”. And it was an anger directed not just at the traders but at the temple authorities too. They allowed this crooked business to go on, perhaps even taking their ’cut’ from the profits. And we can get angry at this kind of thing too, can’t we? Angry at being ‘ripped off’, to use the modern term, because that’s undoubtedly what the temple traders were doing to people. We can be angry when we see corruption in high places, the corruption of those in authority. And how many of us have been and are angry when we see the Church being turned into a business with money making and money saving as its overriding goal? We can be angry at all these things and with good reason. But how often do we make people angry, and rightly angry, by our own corruption? We might not think we’re corrupt but we are all selfish in so many ways and what is selfishness other than another word for corruption? How many times have we been in a position, for example, to take more than we should, and have done, without thinking, perhaps not even caring, that our taking what we want has been at someone else’s expense? At those times, couldn’t Jesus’ righteous anger be directed at us?
The next great passion we see in Jesus is his ‘agony’ in Gethsemane. Luke tells us that Jesus’ was in such anguish that
‘…his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’
This may be taken as a literary device to show the extreme torment Jesus was in but there is a medically recorded condition in which extreme anguish or physical strain can cause small blood vessels to burst and for blood to then mix with sweat, so whichever way we want to take this, Jesus was experiencing great passion at this time. We may not have gone through such extreme passion in our own lives, but we will all have gone through times when we’ve been in mental and emotional turmoil, times perhaps when we’ve been faced with decisions we didn’t want to make or times when we’ve known that we’ve had to do things that we didn’t want to do, so we do know something about the passion that St Luke calls Jesus’ agony. We know how terrible a passion it is. But how many times have we put others through this kind of passion? How many times have we asked or expected others to do something difficult or unpleasant simply because we didn’t want to have to do it ourselves? How many times do we put Jesus through this agony again because of our sinful ways?
Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane ends with his arrest. But then we see another kind of passion in Jesus, a very important passion, but one that’s often not recognised, and that’s the passion of inactivity. Throughout his ministry Jesus had been a man of action. He went here and there preaching and teaching, healing the sick and proclaiming the kingdom. But from Gethsemane onwards Jesus isn’t active, he’s passive.
He changes from the one who does to one who is done to. He changes from a man of action to a man of passion. We all know what this kind of passion’s like because we experience it every time we have to wait on others. We experience it when we’re on hospital waiting lists, when we’re waiting for someone to come and repair our washing machine, or whatever else it might be. We even experience it standing in a queue at a supermarket checkout. And on the whole, this is a passion we don’t like because we all want to be in charge of our own lives and run our lives to our own schedule, don’t we? But how often do we force this passion on to others by making them wait on us? We do it every time someone is relying on us to do something for them, and we delay in doing it. We don’t like it ourselves, but we can do it so often to others. And we turn Jesus into a man of passion again too because whenever we don’t do in our lives what he asks us to do, we make him wait on us.
In Luke’s account of Jesus’ death on the Cross, there is no cry of, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, but I’m sure we all know the passion of feeling that we’re alone and have no one to turn to for help. The passion Jesus felt at that moment the sins of the world that he was carrying for us on the Cross, separated him from his Father. This is a terrible passion, perhaps the worst that we can ever experience because included in it is the pain we feel when death separates us from our loved ones. It’s a passion I hope we wouldn’t wish on anyone but isn’t it a passion we do visit on others when we don’t do what we can to help them? If someone asks us for help and we don’t help, don’t we make them feel abandoned as Jesus felt abandoned on the Cross? And if we do that to others, don’t we put Jesus through this passion again?
In these Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Passion, we see just how human Jesus was because in them, we can see the same passions we experience. And just as Jesus had to battle through these passions, we have to battle through them too. Jesus had to go through his Passion to experience the glory of the Resurrection and that’s true for us too. But if we can go through our own passions in the way that he did, without losing faith and without losing sight of the glory beyond the passion, and perhaps in particular, if we can go through our passions without inflicting such terrible passion on others, like Jesus, we can look forward to the glory that lies in wait for us, beyond our own passions.
Amen.
The Propers for Palm Sunday can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 