Sermon on the Sunday of the Passion, Year A: What is the Passion?
Matthew 11
Philippians
Matthew 26
The story of the palms and the crucifixion in today’s readings is, as you might note, properly called the Passion. We’ve heard a version of it every year, and we’ll read a different version of it again this coming week, in another of the gospels. By and large, though it’s the same story. We devote a lot of time to this story, reading it out in some detail, twice.
But this story is not the most important. It is not the climax. That we celebrate next week with Easter. Yet the Passion helps us better understand the Easter story. The “Palm Sunday” with its palm parade merely introduces us to the greater story, whose name in contemporary language might seem confusing. The word “passion” today might mean any powerful feeling, even if it is an opposite —to love someone passionately or to hate someone passionately, both work. But in the original Latin, “passio” means suffering.
And that is the irony of opposites in today’s readings, Jesus enters Jerusalem as a prince, parading as a star; he leaves Jerusalem as a condemned criminal, marched to the place of his execution. From the height of praise possible in the world, to the lowest position of punishment in this world. Paul’s letter to the Philippians today helps somewhat with the greater understanding of this part of Jesus’ story. Paul says, as best he can with his limited understanding, that Jesus was God in human form.
And instead of acting like a powerful being, who can destroy cities with fire and plague, Jesus was a simple person, the lowliest of the low humble, as insignificant as a slave, the least regarded human being. And Jesus suffered death on a cross, the death of a despised criminal, again, the lowliest of the low.
I love the phrase that Paul uses, “he emptied himself” -- a phrase I think of during the Eucharist as the wine is poured out of a cruet, but the wine does not disappear, it goes into another vessel, a chalice. And there it is transformed: the wine becomes the real presence, a saving grace, beyond human understanding. The blood, the life, poured out upon the cross gives us a new understanding of this world.
There is something more important than obedience to the world’s laws and rules. Those rules can, in a moment, be flipped and used against one, bring down the high to the low. Jesus was in this world to lead us on the way to a better world. Paul is asking us to have the same mind as Christ Jesus. And that sometimes means standing up for what is right rather than what is legal. The story of the cross is our hope against hope, our confidence and vindication, our victory in defeat.
So let every tongue confess that Jesus Christ, a convicted criminal, is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Written for the parish of St. James & St. George 2020 April 5
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