come, all

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

PALM SUNDAY (April 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Isaiah 50: 4-9a

Psalm 31: 9-16

Philippians 2: 5-11

Matthew 27: 11-54

 

I have always claimed that I never refer to or repeat my old sermons, and I hold to that claim. There is though no doubt that on Palm Sunday, if I preach at all (and if we had the full liturgy I would not) that I come perilously close to it.

For 36 years, as a friend reminded me this week, I have at this liturgical celebration focused on my belief that this is the Sunday we celebrate getting it wrong. Or, more precisely, we celebrate our encounter with Jesus despite getting it wrong.

Perhaps I should explain. But I do want to address a misconception first. An awful lot of Christians get excited because they discover that a handful of passages, like the so-called “servant song” that was read from Isaiah just now, appear to predict the future Christ as narrated in the Christian gospels. I feel we need to be more honest. The gospel writers turned to passages like these and framed their Jesus stories in the terms of the constructs they found there.

Certainly Jesus was a servant like no other. Self-sacrificial, suffering, loving. Whatever Isaiah’s vision was about, it's wonderfully matched the first Christians’ experience of Jesus. But Isaiah had neither crystal ball not even divine insight, at least in so far as such insight provides unambivalent interpretation. Jews and Christians will and should interpret Isaiah’s poem very differently.

Paul, utilising a poem that he in turn may have either written or stolen - acceptable in days before intellectual property acts - sees this in terms greater still. This is the one who strode across, as it were universes, yet he so empties himself of all that he can be that this week we see him executed on a cross. He empties himself, as Wesley put it, of all but love. And we are the beneficiaries of that love, for it draws us mysteriously, inexplicably into the heart of God.

So why for 36 years have I taught that this is the Sunday we get it wrong? We stand with the crowd, and the crowd alas are terribly wrong. We stand with the crowd today and we will stand in the crowd on Friday. Samuel Crossman, in the seventeenth century, got it so terribly right. “Then crucify was all our breath, and for his death we thirst and cry.” It is thus because we look for a saviour in the glamour of human kingship: a Trump, a Putin, a Jacinda, a Kennedy. The radical shifts of politics left and right across the globe and across institutions in recent years suggest we live in an era desperate for salvation.

And always we will be let down.

Until after Good Friday. And it is to the depths of that day and its implications that we are invited to travel in our readings and in our liturgy this week, even if it is in shadow form. In that way we can find the God who dies for Ukrainians, yet also for Russians trapped up in someone else’s war, who dies for transgender persons, but also for women fearing that some transgender persons may just be exploitative and predatory persons dressed in another guise, who dies even for what are now called CIS White Males like me who are only too aware that some of the accusations directed at us ring only too truly.

So in this week of the passion we are invited to know that there are no limits, nor party politics, neither male nor female Greek nor Jew, slave nor free capable of blocking out the irrepressible love of God.