A Sermon for Palm Sunday
Isaiah 50:4-9; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 14:1-15:47
Wim Wenders’ The Salt of the Earth, a bio-doc about the photographer/photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, opens with images Salgado made of the Serra Pelada (“Naked Mountain”) gold mine in Brazil, and the sounds of Salgado’s reflections on his experience. We first see the photographer’s stunning black-and-white images, then his face, also in black-and-white, and sometimes as a reflection on the photographs themselves, while we listen to his narration:
When I reached the edge of that enormous hole, every hair on my body stood on end. I’d never seen anything like it. Here, in a split second, I saw unfolding before me the history of mankind. The building of the pyramids. The tower of Babel. The mines of King Solomon. Not the sound of a single machine could be heard. All you could hear was the babble of 50,000 people in one huge hole. Conversations, noises, human sounds mingled with the sounds of manual labor. I had returned to the dawn of time. I could almost hear the gold whispering in the souls of these men...
The images are overwhelming. And the description, at least at first, only intensifies the confusion. When Zoë, my daughter, and I first saw the film, we could not figure out what it was that we were seeing or how it related to what was being said about these thousands upon thousands of mud-caked bodies swarming in this enormous wound in the mountainside. Eventually, it became clear, and when it did, the images somehow seemed even more mysterious.
All this earth had to be removed. It’s not all gold. The guys had to climb small ladders, leading to bigger ones, to emerge at the top. All these men together formed an extremely organized world but in complete madness. You get the impression they're slaves, but there wasn’t a single slave. They were only slaves to the idea of getting rich. Everybody wanted to get rich. There were all sorts: intellectuals, university graduates, farm employees, urban workers—people from all walks of life were trying their luck. Because when you’d hit a vein of gold everyone working that little section of the mine had the right to choose one sack. And in that sack that they chose—and this is the slavery aspect—there might be nothing… or a kilo of gold! At that very moment one’s freedom was at stake. Men who come into contact with gold can never leave it.
Something similar happens to us today, I believe, on Palm Sunday, at the end of Lent and at the beginning of Holy Week, at least in this sense: as we hear the passion narrative from Mark’s Gospel, we’re made witnesses of a witness, confronted by the mystery of an experience that is not ours but nonetheless somehow involves us. Of course, we’re familiar with the story of the passion, at least its broad strokes. Historically speaking, we know what happened; and liturgically speaking, we know what is going to happen in the coming days: the jubilant entry to the city; the clearing of the temple; the last supper; the agony in the garden; the betrayal and arrest; the trials; the condemnation; the crucifixion; the burial. Still, we need this liturgical cycle to return us again and again to this story, precisely because we do not yet know what we need to know the way we need to know it.
Bad readings of Scripture leave us with the impression that what happened to Jesus in Jerusalem was obviously shameful, obviously a sham—as if everyone were acting in bad faith or possessed with evil spirits. This is precisely the impression that Gibson creates in his Passion of the Christ. But the Gospels tell a more troubling story. No matter what we’ve heard, the passion is not The Greatest Story Ever Told, not the Last Battle between Good and Evil. It’s the unfolding of everyday petty jealousies; religious fervor and political savvy; predictable crowd dynamics and all-too-familiar fear of the police; common cruelty; common cowardice; confusion and uncertainty; and, most of all, stupidity. St. Paul says that if the rulers of this world had known what they were doing, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8).
Jesus’ arrest, trials, and execution—remember, those are the terms the authorities want us to use—happened naturally, not supernaturally. It’s easy to overlook the fact that almost nothing is said about evil or the diabolic in the passion narratives. This is especially surprising, and all the more revealing, in Mark, which from the first focuses on Jesus’ conflict with Satan and the demons. At the beginning of the Gospel, he defeats Satan in the wilderness. And he drives out whatever unclean spirits he encounters on his journey to Jerusalem. But once he has reached the city, he falls into the hands of powerful men—their agendas, their ambitions, their fear of the mob. And everyone else, including those who love him best, find themselves at a loss about what to do to save him. Just so, the Gospel confronts us with a terrifying truth: Jesus’ life ended as it did, not because the powers of evil overcame him, still less because God forced it to happen for the sake of accomplishing a predetermined “plan,” but because ordinary human beings, including the faithful ones, could not imagine an alternative to the injustice they found themselves enacting.
We need to feel the weight of this truth. People condemned Jesus, and required his death, or failed even to try to save him from his sufferings, not because they despised him, but because they were so afraid of their own death or the end of their way of life that they could not see what was happening to him as anything but unavoidable. A few, perhaps, gloated in Jesus’ sufferings. Some, no doubt, wanted to see the end of his ministry. But most, I’m sure, admired him, or at least regarded him with respect. It’s not hard to imagine what the ordinary folk in the city and the outlying towns must have said to one another after they heard the news. I can see them shaking their heads in disbelief: “It’s too bad, really. I’m no fan of Pilate or Herod or Caiaphas, as you know. But at the end of the day, what else were they going to do?” “It’s not right. It’s not right. But he did push it too far, didn’t he?” “We should’ve said something, done something. But what?” Not everyone cried, “Crucify him!” But did anyone cry, “Do not crucify him”? Judas was paid to betray him. But no one tried to buy his release. No doubt, some in the circles of power, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, did not agree to Jesus’s condemnation. But even they seem to have been more or less resigned to Jesus’ fate. And those outside the circles of power, including his disciples and his family, surely felt something of that same helplessness. Peter was not the only disciple to deny him. Perhaps that helplessness, that sense of inevitability, is the “slavery aspect” of the passion narrative? What is it that we hear whispering in their souls?
Today’s OT reading, and the Psalm, speak in the first person. Liturgically, they are meant to be heard in Jesus’ voice. He is the one who says, “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheek to those who pulled out the beard.” He is the one who says, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble… I have become a reproach to all my enemies and even to my neighbors.” So read, these texts witness to the mystery of incarnation: Jesus, the Word, does not become a human being, one more among the many, but assumes to himself humanity itself. He is, we confess, human in every way that we are, except for sin. He is not simply another person. He is God, the Son, and taking on our creatureliness he creates a relation to us that is utterly unlike any other relation. As I said last time, nothing happens to God; God happens to all things; therefore, in becoming “flesh,” God alters reality from within its deepest center, its innermost depths, opening it up fully to God and so to its own essence, its own fulness.
The apostolic witness returns again and again to this astounding claim. “All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in[i] him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16-17). “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you will also be revealed with him in glory” (Col. 3:3-4). “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20). Today’s NT reading, the Christ hymn from Philippians 2, stands in this same line:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death--
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
As you know, this passage can be and often is taken to mean that Jesus had to give up the form of God in order to be found in human form. But that wrongly assumes a competition between God’s being and ours, as if for Jesus to take on our likeness he had to disfigure himself. The incarnation is not a humiliation for God. It is revelation. So, perhaps in spite of what we’ve been told, kenosis is not emptying but filling and fulfilling. In St. Cyril’s words, God the Word does not empty himself of his fulness but in his fulness descends into emptiness and fills it with himself. Jesus does not “scale down” his divinity in order to make his humanity viable. His humanity is viable precisely because it is fully open to his fulfilling communion with the Father by the Spirit.
This is the critical point: becoming “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” the Son did not alter himself in the least, did not become less or other than he always was and is and shall be. As the Fathers taught us, he became what we are without ceasing to be who he is. In him, the divine neither recedes nor dominates and the human is neither diminished nor overwhelmed. Taking on humanity, he is not stripped of his dignity as God; instead, he dignifies us, exalting our nature, revealing that a slave, even a criminal slave, is no less human, no less worthy of honor, than a lord. As St. Anselm says, “In the incarnation of God it is understood that no humiliation of God came about: rather it is believed that human nature was exalted.”
The wonder is that Jesus, the Beloved, not only shares with us what is his, but also includes us in who he is. He identifies with us so completely that he cannot be known apart from us anymore than we can be known apart from him. And because of how he suffered, we can partake in his life and in his death, not merely imitating his example but sharing his experiences, co-existing with him, so that no line can be drawn between his being and ours. We can come to know Christ, as St Paul did, in the “the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10). And we can come to partner with him in his mission, completing the work he has given us to do. That is the promise of Holy Week: not only recalling what happened to Jesus, not only giving thanks for the victory of God in his sufferings, but also bodying forth our calling to share in those sufferings and that victory.
In The Salt of the Earth, Salgado recounts his time with the Saraguro people in Ecuador. He says he learned from one of them, Lupe, that according to their legends, “God, in the image of Christ, was to return to earth to observe them to decide who’d go to heaven.” Lupe was convinced Salgado was Christ. “He seriously believed that I’d come as a special observer to report ‘up there’ about their behavior.” Later in the film, Salgado recalls his time among the Coptic Christians in the Sahal region of Africa during the famine. He remarks on their humility, how they would not cut in line for food or water even with a dying child. And he explains how they died not from starvation, but from parallel diseases after their bodies had been weakened by malnutrition and dehydration.
Seeing these images, hearing these stories, I could not help but grieve that after all this time, most of us who identify as Christians have still not understood that we are the image of Christ, not observing others, deciding who goes to heaven, but serving them so that their lives are opened up to the God who is not far off and whose kingdom is always at hand. Holy Week is a reminder that God is always working, doing what only God can do. But it is also a reminder that we are called to join in that always-ongoing work, working the works of God (Jn. 9:4), the works we were created to do, the works prepared for us from the foundation of the worlds (Eph. 2:10). We’re not meant to remain witnesses of the witness; we’re meant to take in the experience, to absorb it and be absorbed by it, so that we’re transfigured by the mystery. As Rahner said:
What took place in the very depths of reality (whether we realize it or not) through the incarnation of the Son, his death and his resurrection, may be rendered present to the spirit of man also through the word of his messengers, and may be received in a spirit of obedience and faith into the very center of man himself, into that dimension in which he is free to be whoever he will be, and so who he ought to be.
That, and nothing less than that, is God’s prayer for you; I can hear it whispering in your souls. Christ has died; Christ is risen; therefore, be free, be who you are, be who you are called to be.
