A Sermon for Passion Sunday

(Audio MP3)


(Scripture reading is the Passion Sunday narrative from St. Matthew)


I'll tell you upfront that I don't like suffering very much. I've got a strange fear of needles for one, and when I visited the doctor down in Oakland a few weeks ago a kindly, middle-aged woman took one look at the pasty, white-faced expression on my face and offered to hold my hand as the nurse drew my blood. As a general rule I don't like seeing the red stuff -- could admittedly never be a doctor -- and avoid these pin-pricks whenever possible.

As modern day people, we are rather turned off by suffering. Pain is something that should be remedied quickly; not something to linger over, certainly not something to celebrate. We still put people to death in some parts of this country but we long ago gave up on public execution. We'll take our violence suffering-free thank you very much, on the big screen, in 3D IMAX, the way Hollywood intended! Real physical suffering means you take two Vicoden and call the doctor in the morning.

And yet this is Passion Sunday. Passion not in the romance novel kind but from the Latin "passio" suffering. We heard today about the Jesus who was humiliated, tortured, flogged and crucified. It all ends on the Cross -- a likely place given the powers involved, but one you'd think the followers of Jesus would as soon forget. Even a resurrected Christ is better off without the Cross right? It's just about the worst imaginable way to die. In those old black-and-white war movies a firing squad can at least look a bit glamorous -- a cross never is. What power is there in a cross other than the power to torture and mutilate and kill? Wouldn't we all be a bit better off without dwelling on it so much?




But the earliest Christians adopted that terrible device as an emblem of their Lord – a God who suffered like they did. Jesus was not the first person to die on the cross and certainly not the last. The cross was a reality of life for those who opposed the power of the Empire. History is populated by other people who died just as painfully. A century before the time of Christ 6,000 followers of the gladiator Spartacus were crucified along the Appian highway – they were left without even the dignity of burial. A few decades after the death of Christ, the vengeful Roman army would sweep into Jerusalem and perform similar mass crucifixions and would level the city so well that, in the words of one ancient historian, “there was left nothing to make visitors believe the site had ever been inhabited.”

In the Imperial provinces of Spain and in Italy and in North Africa, in the Greek Diaspora and in Asian Minor, everywhere that the Empire spread its reach and everywhere people opposed it came the Cross. Make no mistake of how the Early Church felt about the Cross. This was not an abstraction or a point of theology. It was a cross on which their friends and neighbors died, it was a cross that greeted them when the left a city, the body of some criminal or ideologue or traitor hanging limply in the sun. It was the cross that stood on the walls of the Holy City, a symbol of nothing but death.

By my count there are two fundamental and unchangeable elements in the Gospel accounts. They are the prophecy of the coming of the Messiah by John the Baptist and the Crucifixion. Like bookends, one holds up the beginning of the story and the other cements its final act. We don't think on this much – Jesus' words of social justice make much better crowd-pleasers from the pulpit. But the substance of the parables and sayings changes dramatically from Gospel to Gospel – the Cross is the same. Jesus' miracles are secrets in Mark and public signs in John, the cross is the same. Jesus' preaching on the social order of the “Kingdom of God” morphs and develops from one narrative to the other, and is totally omitted in some. The Cross remains.
We can ask many questions about this truth. We can turn up our nose in disgust at it, as Paul knew many would, but there is power here. But what kind of power is it? What is the power of the Cross that Paul extolled until he was blue in the face?

It had been Cross that first felt the blood of Christ. And in some difficult and hard to comprehend way, it was the Cross that saved them. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Those are the words of Paul to the Christians in Colossae, expressing a theology that fills every page of the New Testament. That somehow, through being born like one of us, suffering and dying like one of us – like the rebel slaves who fought with Spartacus, like the Zealots who bled out at Masada, like the petty thieves who went desperate for a loaf of bread – our God has saved us. Through being like them, through hurting in the way that they hurt, through dwelling in the muck of history -- our God saved us and redeemed us.

Through the mystery of this death, our God has saved us. Know that for the early Jewish Christians this was a radical realignment of belief and action. The temple which represented the Covenant with God and the removal of sin, the temple, which had been destroyed and rebuilt more than once, was destroyed finally and rebuilt eternally on the Cross. To the Gentiles, this was something unheard of, a God who dwelt in the trash-heap of the world, the lowest of the low, and thereby overcame the world and all it stands for. Through the cross, Paul says to the Galatians, “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

As I said, we are not very good at suffering. We live in a world of 40-hour work weeks and high-tech medical care and dozens of brands of over the counter pain-killers. We are good at filing down the jagged edges of life and cushioning ourselves against the pain of absence and emptiness and loss.

The power of the Cross it the power to remember suffering, it is the power to acknowledge and embody it. We may be troubled by the Cross. That's fine. It is and has always has been troubling. And it is exactly because of this that the Crucifixion of Jesus still retains its power. The powerful and the mighty may grow easy with the outward forms of Christian religion, they may attend Sunday services and give a mite to the collection plate, but they will never accept the Cross. The world of flat-screen TVs and Porsche roadsters does not accept the cross. The world of drive-thru Happy Meals and your-way-right-away does not accept the Cross. Cannot and will not and thus cannot understand, cannot empathize with a suffering world. The Cross is the eye of the needle, the sacrifice of the world's arrogance that the rich young man cannot accept -- that's why Paul says that when we preach Christ crucified it is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." There are parts of our world that will always reject it.

And we live in that world. If the thorn of drive-thru happiness didn't pierce my flesh as much as anyone I wouldn't be searching for a way to pull it free. The Cross is just such a remedy.

We must continue to look to the Cross, not turn away from it or cover our eyes to its sorrow because we need to see it, now more than ever. It is a suffering God that helps us to suffer with the millions, billions in fact, who go hungry each night and who long-ago lost hope. It is in the Cross that we are bound to their anguish and fulfill the commandment of our Lord to "weep with those who weep."

But the Cross does not end in sorrow and anguish -- although our Early Christian fore-bearers understood the significance of a suffering Messiah -- they saw something else as well. They looked to the Cross as a point of revelation. "He humbled himself...even to death on a Cross." God's suffering, God's free choice of death -- a fate he shared with thousands of others -- provided a witness to the Love which God embodies and the Love God reveals to the world. Jesus himself foreshadows this revelation long before he is shackled and led off to judgment. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." Christ's offering of himself is the greatest love -- the love of God for a sinful people who "know not what they do." They are a people who do evil to themselves and to each other, a people who starve hundreds so that dozens can revel in plenty, a people who find countless reasons to hate each other and few reasons to love, a people who stone their prophets. A people just like us.

Into that broken world came a God who took on that human nature in order to redeem it, who accepted the cruelest of fates in order to underline the point -- that even in the darkest valleys of our sinfulness the love of God can still shine. "Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man," says St. Paul again in Romans "...But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."




"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" says the author of 1 John. "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son..."

Today is a day for passions of all kinds. For the Passion of Christ who suffered as one of us, who binds us to our neighbor in suffering and leads us toward solidarity with all the people of God who journey through this sorrowful, tragic but wonderful life. And It is also passion of another kind. A passion for US. A passionate love for a broken people, an incarnate God loves us whether we ask for it or not, who cherishes us whether we fight against it or run for the hills. A God who seeks us without resting, without ceasing, a God who loves us in death and through death, to the day of Resurrection.
Amen.