Palm/Passion Sunday Matt 21:1-11; 26:14-75

March 24, 2002 The Rev. Beth Ernest

Preaching during Holy Week has never been easy for me. For the first several years of my ministry I could count on being quite sick by Good Friday, usually with a bad case of some bronchitis or severe cold, brought on by multiple worship services, late hours, and high expectations. Later in my ministry it went to sheer exhaustion, especially the year I was in my 41^st week of pregnancy, worked until Good Friday, and delivered on Easter! But in the last years, this physical demise and exhaustion has seemed to give way to spiritual decline and exhaustion. I am beginning to realize that this is because Holy Week asks the tough questions of us, and, if we are honest, demands tough questioning of God, questioning we are not always ready to do, perhaps suspecting that God is not about to give us verbal answers, or easy answers, or any answer we would want to hear; indeed, we may well be left with our questions on Easter morning. Such deep, spiritual searching is not for the weak-hearted.

But if any time of the church year is the time to demand answers from God, this is it. Jesus did not shirk from confronting his own demise, even as he submitted to it. He fought his purpose in the garden, "Let this cup pass from me!? He assailed heaven’s gates from the cross, crying, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Ps 22:1). Indeed, why? Can we be as honest? Can we reach inside and cry our misery from the gut? Or do we race from Palm Sunday’s smiling faces to Easter’s glorious trumpet tunes, glad to escape dealing with the questions that bring doubt and sadness, fear and pain?

My own Holy Week questions deal with the hard facts of life as I see them: namely, our own human ability to sleep while our God suffers on our behalf, and the seeming ability of God to sleep while humanity suffers. As perturbing, irritating and shameful as the first question is, we can at least mutter such excuses as, "yes, we fall away God, we let you down, and sleep on our shift, but we are human. We drop the ball. We lose hope. After all, ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’ Please forgive us." As much as we can shake our heads—tsk, tsk—at those disciples asleep in the garden after their full meal and multiple glasses of rich, Passover wine, we can also identify with their human frailty.

So, too, the crowds, who begin the week as adoring fans and end the week either scattered, or curious spectators of the public punishment of three convicted felons.

Palm Sunday, celebrating Jesus’ triumphal entry into the capital city of Jerusalem, is a day of happy cheers and good vibes, from the disciples who had waited for their day to come and from the crowds who were excited to welcome a known healer, teacher, holy man, and now, the one who has raised Lazarus from the dead, into the city. The Roman yoke will certainly be broken now, and maybe the religious establishment can be brought down a peg or two! Hence, a lot of hoop-la occurs. People do love a party, especially at festival time when there are guests in town and more than the usual bustle. But always on Palm Sunday there is an undercurrent of "will it last?," on the part of the people, and, "Is it safe to nab him now?," on the part of the religious authorities. And we know that as this final week progresses, Jesus sees people misunderstanding him, betraying him, and then, all abandoning him, many mocking him, as he moves irrevocably towards the cross.

But somehow, too, we can understand all that.

We hear the reproach of Jesus, "So, could you not stay awake with me one hour?" and we regretfully acknowledge our sin and shortcomings, praying that we will find courage to follow the difficult path, should it be demanded of us.

No, it is the second question of Holy Week that causes the more worry, at least to this preacher. Namely, why does it seem that God sleeps while the innocent suffer in a million, daily crucifixions worldwide? Yes, Jesus rose from the dead after three days. But three days of death would be a relief to many of our world citizens, who seem condemned to live out a whole lifetime of torment. To some of you, this may seem like an irreverent, inappropriate question, even sinful to utter. But who among us has never uttered that agonizing question, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" "…could you not stay awake with me one hour?" one day? One marriage? One growing season? One illness? One invasion? One war? One generation?" God, are you sleeping?

Jesus, having seen and even expected human indifference and weakness, now questions God the Father. Though Jesus understood the game plan, he seems to question the referee.

A couple of years ago I read an article by Murray Joseph Haar, a Jewish convert to Christianity, a man who is now, in fact, a Lutheran pastor. Haar’s family was all but destroyed at Auschwitz, and for years, he could not believe. His God had died in the death camps. Where was God when the chosen people were crucified, gassed, wrenched from their homes and loved ones by a madman? Why had God forsaken them? Haar came to know that questions such as the one shouted from the cross, are holy questions. He writes this:

Friends, this is not "gentle Jesus, meek and mild." This is not the Jesus sitting on the donkey, waving politely to the crowds. This is the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, this is the one who came to do business, the one who demands action for those he dies to redeem. The one who is willing to break the gates of hells and pound the gates of heaven on our behalf.

Or as the Negro spiritual says, "Ride on, King Jesus, NO ONE can a-hinder him!"

This past weekend I sent out the readings for Holy Week by email (you will see they are also in the bulletin) and suggested that they be used for devotional reading during the week. I also encouraged us to think and pray for the Christians of Palestine, India, Pakistan, China, and various regions of Muslim Africa where safety is precarious, and persecution and intimidation commonplace. And why stop praying there? We could include the street children of Africa, the millions suffering with AIDS worldwide, Indian Hindus who live in fear of Muslims, Indian Muslims who live in fear of Hindus, the dislocated, the aged poor, and on and on and on the list goes. We cannot pretend our world is not in deep pain, for we feel it now as Americans as we have never felt it before.

The suffering of this world go on. Granted, not like the crucifixion of Jesus Christ where the sins of the whole world and all time hung on his shoulders—and indeed, we cannot even imagine the burden of that sin—but suffering just the same. Evil is present and does everything it possibly can to destroy the good and maim the body and deaden or twist the soul. Be it the mass murders of the Jews sixty years ago or the bombing of churches in Pakistan, or the killing of Brazilian street children, or the mother strung out on crack cocaine who injures her own child or the starvation of any number of peoples on this globe, the suffering of the innocent persists.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Can we be emboldened to ask that holy question by the Son of God who asks it for us? If you are familiar with the psalm from which that question actually comes, Psalm 22, you will remember that the Psalm speaks quite vividly of the suffering that Jesus Christ endured during his trial and crucifixion—he was despised, mocked (v.7), his bones were broken (v. 14), his clothing divided by lots (v. 18). In the Psalm, the righteous one is beset at every turn, asking Where is God? It is a Psalm of lament every good Jew knew by heart, just as we know the 23^rd Psalm by heart. When we begin that psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd…", we automatically hear the last verses, "and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever." It is as if we cannot separate the beginning from the end. So is Psalm 22 for the Hebrew mind. It is argued that when Jesus uttered the first line, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," that already the answer comes with the question. Here is the end of Psalm 22:

I believe as much as I'm standing here that the end of Psalm 22 will win out: God shall triumph--in the end. Sometimes I don't know why I believe that--maybe to keep from giving up or going insane in a world where reading the newspaper is an act of faith. And let's face it, it's easier to believe that God will triumph someday in the future than it is to believe that God will triumph right now, when we need it most. Maybe Jesus knew that God would triumph three days hence. Maybe that's why he shouted Psalm 22. I hope he did, for it might have brought comfort to him in his final, painful hours.

But if he didn't, if he was shouting the holy question, the ultimate question of faith, then he's one of us. Fully God, yes, but fully human as the Apostle's Creed teaches: "conceived by the Holy Spirit... crucified... dead...and buried." Or as Isaiah said it: "Surely he hath born our grief and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted" (Isa 53:4).

Let us not breeze through this Holy Week on our way to Easter Sunday without asking some tough questions of God. Let us bring all our sorrows and our grief and ask holy questions of the One who gave us life. Let us ask God to stay awake and heal his weary world. Amen.