Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday, is a strange day. At Holy Comforter, we process through a long Narthex to the symbolic Jerusalem of the Sanctuary as our children wave palms for passing pilgrims hailing Jesus as their true and rightful king.
Just as quickly, we are confronted with Mark’s Passion Narrative, a Narrative that Borg and Crossan remind us has everything to do with the confrontation of Jesus’ passion for God’s reign of justice and Caesar’s passion for the domination and power of Rome. With breathtaking speed the exuberance of the parade turns to tragedy and we soon find ourselves at the foot of the Cross—in the presence of a man who gave everything for God, for the truth, for the sins of the world, for you and me. That’s the power of the passion of Jesus–it exposes our human capacity for both self-giving love and violent betrayal with immense depth and complexity.
We are being invited to walk differently this week–to walk as if this were the holiest week of our lives. We walk in the steps of Jesus’ suffering and bring ourselves as best we can to that place where we can be still and take in the mystery of a man, dare we say it, of a God whose love for you and for me transcends the worst that we can possibly do.
The power of participating in the liturgies of this week, especially the three Great Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Day of Resurrection, is that we recover our conviction that God suffers from the inside of the human journey as one of us. There is on Maundy Thursday, the experience of companionship, breaking bread together and seeing one another as brothers and sisters who share in the Agape feast of Christ. There is the humility and care of serving one another in the washing of feet. There is on Good Friday the mystery of undying love made tangible on the hard wood of the cross for the sake of the world. And beyond suffering and death there is Easter–the transforming evidence that the worst that can happen to us in this life is never the last thing that can happen. Jesus takes our human nature through the experience we call death and shows us beyond it, in ways we might never have dreamed, there is resurrection life here and now. It is this story, this inbreaking reality, that Holy Week proclaims.
