Palms or Crosses?
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Palm Sunday by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
I remember back in Philadelphia–where the shad bushes and forsythia cram the hillsides for Holy Week and the magnolias always seem to unfurl the afternoon of Easter Vigil–watching a young teenager during the Palm Sunday Service. I should presumably have been listening to the sermon, but I was engrossed in watching this young fellow as he silently gathered up people’s palms from the surrounding pews and plaited them into perfect little crosses. It struck me then, as now, as the perfect embodiment of the strange doubleness of Palm Sunday. His folding fingers knew what his conscious mind did not. On the one hand we wave our palms, shout our “Hosannas!” and welcome this curious washing and feeding Servant-King into the Jerusalem of the heart as Lord of All. On the other, we just as heartily bellow, “Crucify Him!” as the liturgy moves from improvised street theater agitprop meant to highlight the difference between Godly and Herodian power to a ghastly enactment of the power of the crowd in their addiction to mob violence in the crucifixion. Palms and crosses. How quickly our fronds turn to spears.
Rowan Williams in his book Tokens of Trust–an exploration of the Apostles’ Creed writes,
Only three human individuals are mentioned in the Creed, Jesus, Mary and Pontius Pilate: that is, Jesus; the one who says ‘yes’ to him; and the one who says ‘no’ to him. You could say that those three names map out the territory in which we all live. Through our lives, we swing towards one pole or the other, towards a deeper ‘yes’ or towards a deeper ‘no’. And in the middle of it all stands the one who makes sense of it all. Jesus—the one into whose life we must all try to grow, who can work with our ‘yes’ and can even overcome our ‘no’.
Mary, by the utterance of her graced “Yes!” at the Annunciation gives birth to the child Jesus–reminding us of the purpose of a truly human human life–to give birth, by our co-operative consent to God’s presence and action in our lives to Christ in the manger of the heart. Pilate, of course, is the embodiment of a powerful “No!” to God in Christ. Mary’s yes, and Pilate’s no. Palms and crosses. How quickly our hosanna fronds turn to crucify him spears.
This, as Williams points out, is “the territory in which we all live.” And Palm Sunday holds up for us the human-all-too-human reality that we move between yes and no on a daily, even moment by moment, basis. Peter is a perfect example–”Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” He, in typical Peter fashion, is all in. His yes is unequivocal. Once and for all. And yet, not too long after the cock crows three times, Peter says, “I do not know what you are talking about!” warming his hands around the middle-of-the-courtyard fire.
The two thieves hanging beside Jesus mark out this same territory as well. The one derides Jesus with a mocking, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” The other, somehow given the grace to enter with his wholehearted yes even into this mostly grisly and chaotically unhinged of deaths prays, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” “Today,” Jesus responds, “You will be with me in Paradise.” Or, in my favorite Russian mistranslation of those same lines, “Today you are with me in Paradise.” Even hanging there… God’s new thing, the new song sung. Tears turned to dancing. The instrument of death revealed as the Tree of Life. Golgotha turned Eden. Mary and Pilate. Yes and no. Fronds and spears. Crosses and Apple Trees.
Giving birth to Christ in the manger of the heart, learning to live from that sacred ground where every bush is a burning bush and life is one long Alleluia! for all that is is the work of a lifetime. Chad Thralls writes in Deep Calls to Deep,
When we judge the world around us, we assert that it fails to conform to our standard of what we want it to be. We reject it as it is. To accept the world is to move through it without immediately labeling, judging, or categorizing it. It is to encounter it directly without the filter of the discriminating mind.
The simple fact is that our life in any given moment is exactly what it is whether we happen to like it or not. Our resistance to our life just as it is–a desire that it be other than what it is–is precisely what separates us from the peace that passes understanding, the graced ability to open to, and be with, whatever arises and find ourselves always already sheltered in the crag of God’s indestructible love, standing unshakably on the strong rock where true joys are to be found regardless of chances and changes of life. The chancy circumstances of our life may not change, but our relationship to them does. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane shows us this dynamic in a most visceral fashion. Sure of his impending death and the pain and suffering that will inevitably ensue, he pleads, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.”
Our epistle from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians reminds us that we are to “have the same in us that you have in Christ Jesus.” Our purpose in this life is to put on the mind of Christ, to make his life our own, that in some small way his love for us might live in and be expressed through us. Slowly, slowly, slowly, one little mustard seed of a yes to what is at a time, His mind, his warm embrace of all that is just as it is, becomes patterned in us. We release our grasping, exploitative, tight-fisted grip on the common purse. We release our judgements, requirements and demands, and let grace pour us out as loving awareness–acceptance of, and bended knee obedience to–the present moment.
When I was first taught to pray, the prior told me , almost as an afterthought muttered under his sour coffee breath, “Look. Prayer boils down to Jesus’ words on the Cross–‘Into your hands I commend my Spirit.’ Start your prayer time with that, and God will work in you what work God needs to work in you.” Methods, techniques, and approaches to prayer vary widely and change over the course of our lives, but gradually our prayer gets simpler and simpler, more and more we do less and less and God in Christ through the Holy Spirit becomes the primary actor in our prayer– “Not my will, but your will be done. Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Without this fundamental disposition, our life is characterized by the quiver of fear, the gnawing sense of scarcity and lack. We live lives of triggered reactivity–blown this way and that by every puff of wind. Into your hands I commend my spirit, this surrendered yes to God, the willingness to float on the ocean of love that is our true nature breeds not passivity, but compassionate responsiveness to each situation. Accepting the situation as it is shows us how it might skillfully be changed, made to more resemble God’s dream for it. But commending ourselves to God is the ground. Otherwise, we just perpetrate the contagious toxicity of the fractious and divided world we see played out on Twitter every minute of every day. Thomas Merton–speaking of the transformative potential of making our whole life a yes to what is writes,
He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
“Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me” (Rev. 3:20). He comes riding on a colt towards the gate of the heart. What will it be? Mary or Pilate? Palms or crosses? Yes or no? Reaction or responsiveness? Purse-clutching tight-fistedness or open-handed pouring out? Fearful contagion or perfuming love? What shape will your life take as you journey with Jesus to and through the cross this week? What word is on your lips right now?