Abstract
This Sunday marks the midpoint of the Season of Passiontide, the name given to the last two weeks of Lent that increasingly focus on the suffering of Jesus, culminating in his crucifixion which we will commemorate this week on Good Friday.
Today, traditionally called Palm Sunday, is associated with the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. The Gospels tell us that he was surrounded by excited crowds waving branches and proclaiming him the promised Messiah. This story has been immortalised in the well-known hymn which will be sung today all over the Western world:
All glory, laud and honour
To thee Redeemer King,
To whom the lips of children
Made sweet hosannas ring!
Thou art the King of Israel, Thou David’s royal Son, Who in the Lord’s Name comest,
The King and Blessed One.
Our Scriptural focus today is on suffering: from the Psalms, a cry of anguish from someone at the end of his tether physically, emotionally and spiritually; from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, one of the famous Suffering Servant songs, from Philippians, the poetical passage about the humbling of Christ to the point of death before his subsequent rise to glory; and from St Matthew, the last part of his account of the Passion of our Lord.
Altogether they form what’s known as The Liturgy of the Passion, which can also be integral to the worship on this final Sunday in Lent. For the suffering and death of Christ is as important as the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. They sit together really. As another well-known Palm Sunday hymn puts it:
Ride on! ride on in majesty!
The winged squadrons of the sky
Look down with sad and wondering eyes
To see the approaching sacrifice.
Holy Week, which begins today, is more important than any other time in the Christian Year, including Christmas. You could dispense with the Biblical stories of the Bethlehem baby without jettisoning your Christian faith. I’m not suggesting we do anything so killjoy-ish. It’s just that you could dispense with Christmas and still have Christian belief.
But it’s very hard to see how you could dispense with the events of Holy Week and continue to call whatever form of spirituality you’re left with distinctively Christian faith and worship.
The story of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is constitutive of Christianity. It’s central. We’ve six days before us until this time next week when we will celebrate Easter Day. And they aren’t empty days.
As Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem where he was to suffer and die, so today we are invited to enter into a week of profound encounter with the story of his passion and death.
In many churches up and down this land and beyond, people will gather this week to sing the great hymns of Lent and the Passion and to listen to the account of the final days of Christ’s life: his Last Supper with his disciples, his agony in Gethsemane, his arrest and trial; his agonising death by crucifixion. In some churches, chapels and altars will be stripped bare on the evening of Maundy Thursday in preparation for the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. It‘s a solemn week, thick with foreboding and impending doom. And I suggest that we miss something very important if we fail to engage with it.
Throughout this week we’re invited to give the story of Our Lord’s Passion time: time to permeate our consciousness; time for reflection, for contemplation, for calling to mind its significance. In sharp contrast to this, today’s society is generally characterised by freneticism and rush. We can be in so much of a hurry that the significance of things can wash over us without penetrating our psyche and shaping our souls.
Mentally and emotionally, we can side-step our pain, divert our attention consciously or unconsciously from difficulty and distress. Sometimes this may seem the only way to stay on the right side of sanity. But sometimes, paradoxically, our health depends on facing facts squarely and looking difficulty and distress in the eye.
Holy Week is an invitation to this sort of honest engagement with messy reality. It’s an opportunity to slow down; to engage with the Christian story of brutality and horror; agony and death. At the centre of it there’s a pain-racked Christ who plumbs the depth of suffering and death itself. There has been much theorising about this over the centuries, most of which has inevitably been culturally conditioned.
But I wonder if the Passion of our Lord has resonated so powerfully with people down the ages in large part because pain and death are ubiquitous in human experience. The world we inhabit is shot through with it. Not suffering and death necessarily in the same brutal form as Christ’s—though some of it might come near to it. Much of the time we may seem personally protected from the worst of its reality. And yet we need only switch on a television or pick up a newspaper to be left in no doubt of the relentless agony of millions and the sordid brokenness of the world we inhabit along with everybody else.
Holy Week offers us the time and the means by which we may contemplate the dark side of human nature that potentially lies just below the surface in us all: the destructiveness of envy and hate; the will to power at the expense of someone weaker; the incubation of petty meanness as well as the harbouring of a grand grudge—aspects of our humanity that we may manage successfully to hide from others and ourselves, but which we may, at some time or another, be called upon to face for our own health and that of our communities.
Put this way, Holy Week may come as something of a gift to us, especially if we contemplate our less attractive characteristics within the context of a worshipping community that is dedicated to the good. For this can provide a necessary container for thoughts and emotions that might prove overwhelming when contemplated alone.
This is because a worshipping Christian community also contains within it the grace of hope, forgiveness and new beginnings. As such, the church is the community of the Resurrection even when, perhaps especially when it is commemorating the last dark days in Christ’s life, and the death out of which the newness of life that we will celebrate next Sunday somehow sprang.
The challenge of the Holy Week on which we are now embarked is to keep faith with the reality of suffering and horror and death, at the same time holding in creative tension the hope that by God’s grace health and life and the ultimate beauty of things may yet prove stronger.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul.
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.. . .
May Emily Dickinson’s poignant little verse of hope carry us through Holy Week—and beyond.