Palm Sunday always brings some sort of a shock, doesn’t it? We come to church for the joyful procession, the hosannas, the palms we keep year round to decorate and bless our houses, some may come here to see the donkey, and it’s all good and happy, and then we enter into the building and sit to listen to this long Passion narrative, which if pay enough attention, may well shake us to the core. Matthew sets the tone right at the beginning of our passage, reporting Jesus’s words: I am deeply grieved, even to death, remain here and stay awake with me.
And so not only do we know that something terrible is going to happen, but we hear our Lord himself asking us to stay put, not to be passive spectators but letting our hearts be touched and our souls be awakened – and that’s exactly what we are going to do throughout this Holy Week, today being only the beginning of our time spent with Jesus in his suffering and death.
Now as we’ve just mentioned the first thing we can notice about this long passion narrative, is that indeed it is long. Actually, we have read this morning almost a third of the whole Gospel according to Matthew, the passion representing 30% of the whole book – and it’s the same in the three other Gospels. In fact, the Passion according to John is more like 60% of the whole book. But all four Gospels lead to this, building up towards this moment with increased tensions between Jesus and his enemies, prophecies and teachings about the cross and Jesus’s sacrifice. And the evangelists do that because they want us to know that the Passion is not only a big part of the story, it’s also a very important part of what Jesus does for the people, the climax of his work. In our Creed, we simple say about Jesus that he was made man, was crucified, died and was buried, because we are called to believe that this part of his life matters so much, even more than all the rest of his ministry.
And we need to be reminded of that often because sometimes we start to see Jesus like a lot of non believers see Jesus, thinking that Jesus was a kind man who did great things for people and taught beautiful things about God, and then it’s so sad he was arrested and put to death, like it was so kind of accident. But the truth is that the Christian teaching says otherwise from the beginning, from the beginning Christians have said that Jesus’s cross gives meaning to everything he has ever done. This is what Paul tells the Philippians in the epistle we have just read, he says that Jesus’s life was like a voluntary dive into suffering.
(…) though he was in the form of God,
[he] did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave
(…) he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Jesus chose being with us over the perfect life He had with the Father, and he chose not just “to be” with us as a master or a King, he chose to be counted among the least and the last so he could be close to each one of us and suffer with us and for us.
Because the thing is, suffering is such a big part of our lives, isn’t it? Suffering is such a big part of our lives. We may keep running from it, avoiding it or even fighting it, it’s always there, right? There is of course the suffering of the world of which we are more aware than ever, and the big trials of life, the losses, the diseases, the tragedies that keep happening around us and sometimes to us, and then there is also, hidden under the surface, the everyday relentless weight of weariness, disappointments, shame, rejection, guilt, fear, anxiety, you name it. Suffering is such a big part of our lives, even as we keep trying pushing it away.
In fact, it’s possible that suffering is one of the main reasons we go to church, because we seek comfort, and hope, a way to cope. On the other way around, suffering is one of the main reasons people don’t believe in God, they say they can’t believe a loving God would allow so much evil and so much suffering. But Jesus, and many have noticed he is the only religious figure to do that, Jesus gets to know everything about human suffering, not theoretically, but in his flesh. And not just the unbearable physical suffering of the cross, but also, we have heard all it this morning, the rejection, the betrayal, the bullying, the shame, the fear.
There is this prayer Jesus says on that evening about this “cup” that he would rather pass and not drink from. It has often been identified as the cup of God’s wrath in the Old Testament, and many believe Jesus died “to pay the price” for our sins, as if he had to absorb all of God’s anger. But the theologian Henri Nouwen identifies this cup as the cup of sorrows, and he says we all have a cup of sorrows and possibly the world itself is a cup of sorrows. Those sorrows that are a consequence of our sin, not a punishment for individual transgression, but they exist because we don’t know God. We experience pain, anxiety, death because we are separated from God. But Jesus takes the cup and, as he did turning the water into wine, his first miracle, he does on the cross his last miracle. Jesus takes the sorrows of sin and suffers them all. Inhabiting the worst of pain with divine majesty, the cross becomes the most perfect expression of God’s patience, compassion, self giving, the unleashing of his forgiveness and the great manifestation of his love.
And it’s so important for us to hear that, because again suffering is such a big part of our lives. And most of us, we just keep running from it as something we need to avoid at all costs – mostly because we don’t know what we do with it. In our culture, suffering is just wasted time and wasted energy, when we could have done something otherwise meaningful. And yet, if we decide to respond to Jesus’s invitation, to remain with him and stay awake as he experiences deadly grief, we can understand that suffering can also become a meaningful part of our life as the cross was for Jesus’s ministry. Our losses, diseases, tragedies, and even the everyday weariness, disappointments, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety. Its not that we like or we seek suffering, but with and through Jesus, we can learn to walk through it with patience, humility, compassion, and so turning even terrible things as an opportunity to forgive and to love and be reconciled with God – and this is what we call the work of Redemption. The most important work indeed.