SERMON PREACHED
AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI
PALM SUNDAY (April
10th) 2022
READINGS:
Isaiah 50: 4-9a
Psalm 31: 10-18
Philippians 2: 10-18
Luke
19: 28-40
Picture yourself, not as the Beatles might
wish, in a boat on a river, but tucked
up in a single bed, waking up, slowly becoming aware that your house was
shaking, that the windows were rattling, that rain was lashing them. Picture the
discovery that when I – for yeah it was me – dared to emerge from beneath the
pillows, that visibility was little more than a couple of metres and the sound
was all but deafening. Actually it was yards, not metres, because metrics were
yet to be introduced in New Zealand but never mind that. The shady form of the
tall matai tree, just visible through the driving rain, was thrashing wildly. A
few moments later, as I watched, there was, just audible above the sound of
howling wind and torrential rain, a sharp crack, and half the tree split away.
Terrified (if I recall correctly, but probably) I scurried through the house, but
there was no one there. I was home alone, and to an eight year old boy it
seemed the world was ending. I scurried back beneath the pillows and the
blankets and desperately hoped I would be safe.
An hour or so later, after my mum returned –
she had been taking my dad to the railway station ten kilometres away – we set
out to get me to school. We lived up a long dirt drive, and our progress was
soon stopped by a fallen tree. As we got out of the car to see if we could
clear our path another fierce crack sounded from behind us, and a large
macrocarpa fell behind the car, trapping us. Clinging to swaying trees we made
our way back up a path, up a steep hill, and back to the house. We were barely
holding our own against the wind, barely able to open the door of the house.
The wind screamed as the door was forced shut, and the house continued to shake
for several hours.
The power was out, but as the morning wore on,
the transistor radio brought reports of a ferry struggling at the entrance to Wellington
Harbour. The day of course was April 10th, 1968, the ferry was the Wahine,
and it was 54 years ago today. I got a day off school. Fifty-one people didn’t
make it home that night, and two died subsequently from the trauma. A fifty fourth
person died at home, killed by a sheet of flying corrugated iron.
Obviously, I tell the story because today is
the anniversary of that day. Obviously too I tell it because it was a dramatic,
almost apocalyptic moment in a child’s life. I was terrified. And perhaps that
is the tenuous yet very real link with the events of Jesus’ entry into
Jerusalem. There was no terror then, except perhaps in the heart of Jesus, who
almost certainly knew, though not I think in a crystal ball-gazing kind of way,
that things were turning to custard.
As Dr Gillian Townsley reminded us in this week’s Gospel
Conversations, Luke is careful to tell his version of the story in such a
way that the central paradox remains: Jesus is in control of the very events
that are conspiring to destroy him. Whether by pre-arrangement or by some sort
of supernatural knowledge he knows the availability of a donkey. Deliberately
it seems he emulates the triumphant entrance to their hometown of great
warriors. But his donkey is not a majestic horse, the prisoners that he will
take in his procession are invisible to the human eye – for few of us, especially
those of us of European descent, will ever see or understand whatever it is
that makes up the spiritual world. The crown he will soon wear is not a laurel
wreath but a brutal crown of thorns.
From the beginning of Luke’s story the author
has told us that things will be upside down: the mighty torn down, the humble
uplifted. The religious leadership of Russian Orthodoxy might do well to remember
that, as they champion their obscene hero’s attempt to ride to Kyiv and Odesa and
Mariupol. Whatever the outcome of these bitter bloody weeks the contrast with
the entry to Jerusalem could not be more stark, and to say otherwise is to
defecate on the gospel.
Ironically the crowd who gathered around Jesus
on this day were expecting a Putin, a Glorious Leader. Dear Leader in various shades,
but a Putin or Kim Jong-un nevertheless. The lies of a leader who claims that
he is liberating his nation from the threat of a neighbour that he deceitfully labels “Nazified,” these are the cries of the demonic. For evil
will take human form. In the form of powerful military leaders it often has, the
more powerful the more corrupt. Putin’s march of shame joins that of his
predecessor Stalin. It joins, ironically, that of Hitler, of Pinochet and Pol
Pot, of Napoleon, of Nero, of a thousand other tyrants through time.
Today you and I are in the crowd expecting a
triumphant hero who will impose justice and peace. Yet justice and peace grow only
from love. The Second Person of the Trinity emptied himself, remember, of all but love. Jesus knows we will
be amongst those who, disappointed, cry for his blood in just a few days’ time.
Because we do that. Perhaps not dramatically, bawling “crucify him,” but subtly
we will all, as Paul puts it, “fall short of the glory” of the one who empties
himself and become one of us. We will all fall short of the standards of the one
who, in Wesley wonderful words, empties himself of all but love. Gender aside,
few of us will be with the powerless women as they wait, weep.
For only the powerless women, with no standing
in society, wait at the cross, and later come back to embalm the body. Only the
powerless. Luke doesn’t give us a glimpse of an empty tomb, but when a stranger
breaks bread on the road to Emmaus the resurrection rumour begins to burst out,
and the powerless begin to rumour hope in human darkness. Later we would
distort that powerlessness into power, though I suggest in the twenty first
century that obscene reversal is being torn from us, and soon we will be left
only with whispers of love. But for now that’s another story.
As Mark’s telling of the gospel story makes
clear over and over again, that story can only break out after God’s
self-emptying love in Jesus has descended into the deepest hells of human existence,
the Mariupols and Auschwitzes, the sinking ferries and advancing cancers. My temporary
terror 54 years ago today was trivial, though disturbing enough at the time.
But this week we are challenged to get just a glimpse of the journey from the
adulation of the crowd to what Isaiah calls the pulling of the beard; a glimpse
of the loneliness, the taunting, the physical and above all spiritual agony of
the coming days of Jesus.
Because – and herein I offer a sneak preview –
it is in the deepest and deeper than the deepest of darknesses that
resurrection light will burst.
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