Palm Sunday A, April 13, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew §1 – congregation is seated

¹¹Now Jesus stood before the governor; and the governor asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus said, “You say so.” ¹²But when he was accused by the chief priests and elders, he did not answer. ¹³Then Pilate said to him, “Do you not hear how many accusations they make against you?” ¹⁴But he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge, so that the governor was greatly amazed. ¹⁵Now at the festival the governor was accustomed to release a prisoner for the crowd, anyone whom they wanted. ¹⁶At that time they had a notorious prisoner, called Jesus Barabbas. ¹⁷So after they had gathered, Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to release for you, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” ¹⁸For he realized that it was out of jealousy that they had handed him over. ¹⁹While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.” ²⁰Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed.²¹The governor again said to them, “Which of the two do you want me to release for you?” And they said, “Barabbas.” ²²Pilate said to them, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” All of them said, “Let him be crucified!” ²³Then he asked, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be crucified!” ²⁴So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.”²⁵Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”

Meditation I

This year, in conversation with the members of Emmanuel’s Worship Commission, I decided that I want us to abstain from engaging in the custom of reading the Passion Narrative as a play script with members of the congregation taking various dialogue parts, and the congregation as a whole representing the crowd. I cannot imagine how it is edifying – that is, how it might provide moral or theological instruction that would build up the body or how this practice might glorify God in any way. If any of you in the congregation are longing for a greater voice, more participation in liturgy, a deeper involvement in the narrative of salvation history, this turns out to be a most terrible place to start. No good can come from imagining ourselves as members of an angry mob. No good can come from re-enacting the highly implausible scenario that Pontius Pilate or any other Roman authority would have even permitted a crowd to gather in the occupied capital of an occupied country during the time of a great feast celebrating the notion of freedom from oppression, freedom from economic and political enslavement. Nor would a Roman governor give people a vote about whom to crucify.

Biblical scholars have known for a long long time that “the evidence explicitly and definitely points against any representative Jerusalem crowd shouting for Jesus’ death.”¹ And yet, churches all over the place blithely carry on this libel in the name of tradition or custom or piety. I think that it does not honor God’s Holy Name or God’s Holy People.

A few weeks ago I came across an article published by Biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan that he wrote when I was a little girl. He was writing at Loyola University in Chicago, just a few miles from where my family lived when my dad was in seminary. My guess is that my seminarian father knew about Crossan’s work because I grew up understanding it. The article is about Christian anti-Semitism. Crossan wrote, “the often-repeated statement that the Jews rejected Jesus and had him crucified is historically untenable and must therefore be removed completely from our thinking and our writing, our teaching, preaching, and liturgy.”² Yet, here we are, 50 years later – the Passion narrative being proclaimed throughout Christian churches, today and this coming Friday, during our Holy Week, with scant attention to the libelous and deadly consequences to Jews. Indeed, it’s their blood which is on our forebears and on us. Let’s not get it on our children. Let’s agree to stop using guilt as a motivation to love.

Passion Narrative §2 – congregation is seated

²⁶So he released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified. ²⁷Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. ²⁸They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, ²⁹and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” ³⁰They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. ³¹After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. ³²As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross.

Meditation II

There are two literary parallels in this portion of the Passion Narrative that I’d like you to notice. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus was proclaimed to be King of the Jews at his birth by the magi and mocked with that same title at his death by the Roman authorities – by Pilate and by the soldiers. From the perspective of the magi, the wise ones, Jesus represented wisdom. From the perspective of Pilate, the megalomaniac, Jesus represented madness. It’s the same title looked at from two very different perspectives, through two very different lenses. Of course, from Pilate’s lens, Jesus had “demonstrated the symptoms of a madman…not only might his [disruptive and physically violent overturning of the tables] … in the Temple have indicated this but, from what we can determine, during [Pilate’s audience with Jesus], Jesus behaved in a perplexing and abnormal fashion….Indeed, in the Gospels Jesus displays a lack of concern for his own fate that typified the mad in literature of the day.”³ Cambridge University scholar, Justin Meggitt notes that given the Roman government’s failure to execute any of Jesus’ followers in the aftermath of Jesus’ crucifixion, it seems unlikely that they took Jesus seriously as anything more than a nuisance.⁴ Boy, did they miscalculate.

The other parallel that I want you to notice is a little more subtle. Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry the crossbar for Jesus’ crucifixion. The word that gets translated “compel” means pressed or forced into service, and it is only used one other time in the Gospel of Matthew, in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in the part where he taught about maintaining one’s own dignity in the face of oppression and violence. Jesus taught that if someone compels you to go one mile, go the second mile as well. Bishop Barbara Harris says that taking up and bearing a cross is carrying a burden on behalf of another for the love of God. Simon of Cyrene has become an example of how an ordinary person, even when pressed, can share in and relieve the burden of another, and maintain his or her own dignity in the midst of degradation and violence.

Passion Narrative §3 – congregation stands

³³And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), ³⁴they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. ³⁵And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots; ³⁶then they sat down there and kept watch over him. ³⁷Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”³⁸Then two bandits were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. ³⁹Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads ⁴⁰and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”⁴¹In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, ⁴²“He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. ⁴³He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son.’” ⁴⁴The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way. ⁴⁵From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.⁴⁶And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”⁴⁷When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “This man is calling for Elijah.” ⁴⁸At once one of them ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink. ⁴⁹But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.”

Meditation III

I’d like to invite you to reflect with me on darkness – the darkness that, from noon on, came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. Matthew, the Evangelist, wanted to make sure we understand that this was the day of the Lord. Matthew knew his hearers knew the prophet Amos, who wrote, “Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?…[and] On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.”

The whole land responded to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. All creation testified to Jesus’ importance – the remarkable star at his birth, the stormy wind and the crashing sea silenced at his command, the fig tree withered by his anger, the midday darkness at his death. The universe itself, God’s whole created order, mourned at Jesus’ death. It was as if God’s whole created order was remembering the formless void – the deep darkness that preceded the light. I imagine that the mourning was so profound that the created order may have been longing for the time before light. I imagine that there has been a time in your life when you mourned so intensely that you wished that the darkness would swallow you up. I have.

There is a way in which darkness can be so merciful.⁵ Perhaps God darkened the mid-day sun because its light was too bright – too harsh. In the garish daylight, the last hours of Jesus’ life would have been too horrible to see clearly – it would have been too horrific to take in Jesus’ agony. Perhaps the darkness mercifully kept Jesus from seeing the bandits who taunted him and the curiosity of the bystanders watching him die a gruesome, torturous death. Perhaps the darkness was God’s way of protecting Godself and others from seeing too much. Perhaps there has been a time in your life when darkness saved you from seeing something that would have been too painful to bear. There has been for me.

Or, perhaps darkness was God’s way of stopping the show that the powerful were putting on. Perhaps darkness was God’s way of turning the lights out on “The spectacle of crucifixion, which long functioned for [Rome] to beat down courage and resistance”⁶ in people who were poor and oppressed. Perhaps it was God’s way of stealing the show, a way to counter the “theatrics of terror” that public execution represents — a sign of God’s immense displeasure with the executioners, as well as a sign of hope for Jesus’ faithful followers that his execution was not going unnoticed by God. Perhaps the darkness was a sign that creation was about to begin anew – again – that God the Creator was about to begin an entirely new day.

Passion Narrative §4 – congregation stands for this portion

⁵⁰Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. ⁵¹At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. ⁵²The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. ⁵³After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. ⁵⁴Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

Meditation IV

The other evening during Central Temple’s Friday Shabbat service, Rabbi Berman offered some thoughts on Science and Passover, and I offered some thoughts on Science and Resurrection in a dialogue sermon as a part of our two congregations’ collaboration in the fantastic Science and Spirituality series. Those of you who were there heard me talk about how much I think we need the interplay between science and religion to make meaning and to make sound moral choices. What I asserted is that resurrection is not science. Resurrection is art. This portion of Matthew’s Passion Narrative – this stunning description of the immediate consequences of Jesus of Nazareth breathing his last breath – and the immediate consequences of his resurrection, that is, the resurrection of many — reminds me of a Jackson Pollack painting. When I mentioned it to Nancy Granert, she immediately thought of Hieronymus Bosch. You know, whether you are looking at a Pollack or a Bosch painting, you’re not likely to ask, did that really happen? is that true? Could that be replicated? Can it be proven? Resurrection is not science. Resurrection is art. Matthew is painting a picture for us – his scene of the death of God’s beloved Son. We must ask, what do we notice? What else do we notice? What speaks to us? And what difference does it make in how we will live?

Passion Narrative §5 – congregation stands for this portion

⁵⁵Many women were also there, looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him. ⁵⁶Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. ⁵⁷When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. ⁵⁸He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. ⁵⁹So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth ⁶⁰and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. ⁶¹Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb. ⁶²The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate ⁶³and said, “Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ ⁶⁴Therefore command the tomb to be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, ‘He has been raised from the dead,’ and the last deception would be worse than the first.” ⁶⁵Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.” ⁶⁶So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.

Meditation V

You know, this is the first time in the Gospel of Matthew that Mary Magdalene is mentioned. It’s at the cross. She’s among the women who provided for Jesus – financially and emotionally. The verb for provided is from the same word from which we derive the word deacon. When lists of women are mentioned in all four Gospels, Mary Magdalene is listed first in all but one instance.⁷ Mary Magdalene was the leader of the women who provided for Jesus. She was the leader of the women who stayed at the foot of the cross when the others had fled. These women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus (and his brothers James and Joseph), and Mary the mother of John and James, the sons of Zebedee, were the ones who heard Jesus cry out his despair that God had forsaken him. These were the ones who saw him die, and these were the witnesses who saw where Jesus was buried.

They stood by the cross; they sat by the tomb. Matthew doesn’t record their words. Perhaps they were speechless with grief. No, they don’t have speaking parts, but their actions speak, don’t they? And although the stories they told were not explicitly attributed to them, the account is clear that they were the key witnesses. They model for us fidelity and courage, and above all steadfast love. If we keep our eyes on them, they will show us how to navigate this coming Holy Week and beyond.

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