Why do we tell this story over and over?
Every year, we arrive at this Sunday morning – we wave palm branches, we process through the church or through the city streets, not just telling the story in words, but participating in it, re-enacting it, as if Jesus were right here with us. For a little while, we imagine Jerusalem, first as a place of celebration and uncertainty – children shouting hosannas, and people throwing their cloaks on the road for him. We sing hymns and call Jesus King.
And every year on this morning, we move on this day from the joy and triumph of that procession to the desolation of the Passion story. We leave the bright day for the dark night. We stop in at Jesus’ last supper with his friends, we sit with him in his vigil in the garden, we witness his betrayal and his arrest and his crucifixion. We walked through it all this morning, in the procession of the palms the one more, extra-long Gospel reading, and then we will keep telling it all week, returning here for Maundy Thursday, for foot washing, the stripping of the altar, the overnight vigil in the darkened church. We will return on Good Friday for the Stations of the Cross, and on Holy Saturday.
We tell this story all week, not just this morning, and we tell the story every week, all year round:
Take, eat, this is my body.
Drink, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant.
The telling of this story never ceases.
The words have become part of our collective memory, our shared spiritual language – thirty pieces of silver. You Judas. Not my will, but thine be done. We are carrying our crosses. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why do we tell this story over and over?
It is uncomfortable, it is difficult, it is dark in the midst of spring flowers. It is the story of a peaceful revolutionary, of a beloved carpenter’s son, a poor man who “stood against the kingdoms of this world,” as theologian Marcus Borg wrote, a man who dared to tell the empire that it was wrong, and cruel, and violent, and it is the story of that empire responding by killing him cruelly and violently.
Why do we tell a story that is this painful?
We tell the story to remember. We tell it that we don’t forget that Jesus was not only the Son of God, the Messiah, but he was also a poor carpenter’s son – as Marcus Borg put it, he was a man from a “marginalized social class in a marginalized village in Galilee.” He was an unlikely prophet who frightened the powers-that-be because he had the challenging idea that everyone is worth being loved, that everyone is blessed, that even the poorest and most outcast and misfit and vulnerable, the youngest and the oldest among us, and everyone in between, the seemingly unredeemable, are children of God, and just as important as those with wealth and authority and power, whether it is political or religious or social. The powers-that-be responded by pushing Jesus out, by arresting him, mocking him, dehumanizing him, and finally killing him outside the walls of the city, exiling him even in death.
So telling and listening to Jesus’s difficult story reminds us that we, as faithful people following his teachings, must listen also to the voices of those marginalized people who have struggled to be heard. Jesus’s story must be told because their stories must be told – if we silence history, if we ignore the voices of those who struggle, who grieve, who have lives we may not understand or agree with – if we turn our eyes away from their pain, we close our eyes and ears to Jesus’s teachings, and we risk becoming Rome, responding in fear rather than compassion, in violence rather than in communion, because that maintains the status quo – it keeps order.
The Reverend Veronice Miles writes: “Remembering Jesus’ teachings amplifies the voices of those who suffer… because remembering… helps us resist becoming preoccupied with money, position, [and] power… and invites us truly to notice those who cry out as though with Jesus, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’”
Jesus taught us through his life, his death and his resurrection what it means to work toward a kingdom in which no one is exiled, where no one is suffering, where no one’s stories are unheard. We tell his story, this week, every week, to make space for the stories of others, to remind us how to listen, to remind us how to love, and also to remind us that we too are heard, always, and are forever beloved.
Amen.
Sermon given on Palm/Passion Sunday 2023, Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Va. Image: Gaudenzio Ferrari, Stories of life and passion of Christ, 1513.
Lectionary reading: The Passion of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew.