Palm/Passion Sunday

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Palm/Passion Sunday
PROPER: A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: March 28,1999

TEXT: The Passion Narrative - Matthew 26:36-27:66
"But Jesus was silent." . . . . "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

ISSUE: The crucifixion of Jesus is intended to totally dishonor and humiliate him. It is meant to negate the meaning of all of his ministry. As an honorable Mediterranean man he remains silent without complaint. His only utterance according to Matthew's account is the opening passage of Psalm 22. The human Jesus stands fully assured through the ordeal that God is with him. The post-Easter appreciation of Jesus' crucifixion is that he died for our sins, but the human Jesus also significantly died on the cross to express his complete belief, confidence, trust, and loyalty in God who loved the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus stands firmly and silently against the injustices of his time. Claiming him as Lord, we stand with him against the secularist culture of our world.
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Today we gather to meditate and reflect upon The Passion Narrative, as it is told in Matthew's account of the Gospel of our Lord. Most of us who have regularly gathered over the years to appreciate this awesome and awful story are consoled by the belief that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. His death takes away the sins of the world. We see gathered before him humanity at its worse, and from the cross comes a great, if not mystical, appreciation that Jesus reveals the forgiving love of God. As theologians, biblical scholars. preachers, and you all gathered reflect on the story, we see Jesus as the great sacrifical victim. He is the Lamb, the human sacrificial lamb, of God that takes away the sins of the world. He is a victim. He is victimzed by Judas the betrayer. He is victimized by fleeing disciples. He is victimized by Jewish and Roman authorities. All of this horror taking place around the Jewish Passover feast where lambs were slaughtered as an offering to God for a kind of appeasement, and celebrating Israel's release from bondage in Egypt came to mean for Christians that Jesus is the victimized lamb who dies to forgive sins, and who enables us to feel release from the bondage of sin and separation from God. He offers himself silently for the slaughter. He is seen in retrospect as the suffering servant.
As we once again reflect on these early Christian understandings of the crucifixion of Jesus, and rejoice in the awesome beauty of the story we may well feel a sense of warm personal relief and personal coziness. Jesus died for my sins, and now I am right with God and the world. We can surely rejoice in that liberation.
There is still another understanding of the crucifixion that we need also to appreciate. We must also try to understand what the crucifixion was about from a more history point of view. In retrospect, we see the death of Jesus as salvific, salvation. But what of Jesus himself? In his very humble ministry, did he see himself as the mighty savior of the world? Was that the interpretation of his own work? Would there be a crucifixion if Jesus were seen merely as one whose ministry was solely a matter of forgiving sins that people might merely feel good about themselves? Why do Romans and Jewish authorities join forces to condemn him to the most humiliating form of death. Crucifixion was used for major capital crimes, not for religious offenses. It was used to totally discredit and dishonor a person's cause as a leader of people against the government and against systemic evil.
Crucifixion publicly humiliated a person and dishonored them. Jesus, although we dress him up with a loin cloth, was crucified naked, totally dishonoring and humiliating him. Not only was nakedness dishonoring, but if he were truly of God, God would not let this happen to him. If Jesus were be a sweet and lovely religious man he would not have come to cruxifixion. We have to remember some of the things that Jesus taught. He talked and taught about the blessedness of the poor: Blessed are the poor, or honorable are the poor. He embraced the Samaritan outcasts and entered into a relationship with them. People who were poor, sick, alone, were embraced by him. Women were given by Jesus a new status. He said things like: "The last shall be first, and the first last. Honorable and blest are those who seek, hunger and thirst for righteousness. Honorable and blest are those who suffer persecution for what is right. He taught parables that were great reversals. The prodigal son is taken back into the community and restored to an honorable position. The laborers who come last get the same wage as those who bore the heat of the day. These were threatening stories to the powerful and the rich.
In Jesus' time the large majority of people were poor, very poor. They died young. Many infants died, around 40 percent. A poor man or woman might live to be 26 years of age was old. Only the rich, a very small percentage lived to three score and ten. All the poor had one-third of the wealth, while about two percent of the rich held two-thirds of the wealth of the land. (Marcus Borg Lecture) Jesus had been a follower of John the Baptist who had been an anti-temple establishment preacher in the wilderness. John was martyred for it. Jesus knew well the teachings of the Jewish Torah that called for justice and fair treatment of the poor, which often included certain years for forgiving debts, and restoring lands. Jesus was not only healer and wonderfully loving and fuzzy guy. He was a social prophet and a critic of of the politics of the culture and of the Temple-establishement that abused people. He dared to challenge them in the Temple by upsetting the tables of corrupt money changers. In the story of the Raising of Lazarus you have a story in the Gospel of John about how Jesus was raising up the dead, the poor were the living dead, abused and vicitimized.
Unless we appreciate the humanity of Jesus, seeing him as a truly great man and prophet, we miss just how great he really was. As a man, it is not likely that he saw himself as the lamb of God, as some divine figure. He saw a corrupt world and dared to challenge it.
He maintains honor in his trial and crucifixion by remaining silent. That's how a Mediterranean man held onto his honor and dignity in the face of injustice and oppression. Matthew is telling us, even though he was being so totally dishonored, he died in an honorable way, because he was an honorable man. He was a great man! What's more, Jesus cries from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This psalm is not the cry of a beaten man. It is the words of Psalm 22. When you read the psalm in its entirity it is the words of a man who is badly beaten down by his enemies and his world. But in the Psalm he is confident that God is with him always from the beginning of his life to the end of his life. "I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born; you were my God when I was still in my mother's womb. . . . . I will declare your Name to my bretheren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you. . . . . . For he does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty neither does he hide his face from them; but when they cry to him he hears them." (verses10, 21, 23)
Even in the face of crucifixion and death, Jesus believes God is with him and God's justice and righteousness will prevail. Jesus is seen, and is a great man on that cross, and we must not minimize his real greatness. He is not just a victim; he is a martyr. He is a hero. And God knows the world needs some real heroes. Jesus did not live just to die. He lived to transform the world into the world of God's justice and righteousness.
We can go home today rejoicing that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. So be it. But we also must remember too that Jesus confronted the injustices, the cruelty, the abuses, the corrupted us of power and wealth in the world. Jesus was crucified, martyred for that very cause. Following him were great men and women in the history of the church who also died, not to take away sins, but to bear witness to God, and God's justice in the world.
As we embrace a forgiving Lord, I hope that we can also embrace a courageous Lord who lived and died for justice. We live in world that teaches us to be aggressive, achieveing, proud, affluent, climb the ladder to the top. Be competitive and make a good appearance. Be individualistic, take care of yourself, and consume all that you can get you hands on. That's quite at odds with the courageous Jesus who lived and died for the last, the least, and the lost. . . for the depressed, the oppressed.
I praise God that my sins have been taken away, but now can I walk courageously with the Jesus?