Mary or Pilate - Palm Sunday 2023

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Palm Sunday, April , 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

As Rowan Williams has pointed out, there are just two people other than Jesus mentioned in the Apostles Creed: Mary and Pilate. They represent two paradigmatically different ways of seeing and being in the world. Mary, of course, is a sign for us of the co-operative, open-handed, kenotic, self-emptying “yes” to God’s graced presence and action in our lives, that we might be drawn, dragged, into ever deeper union and communion with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit; that Christ might come to be born in us in the manger of the heart; that we might with Paul say, “It is no longer I, but Christ in me who lives.” Or, “Let the same mind be in you that is in Christ Jesus,” as Paul sings in the Kenotic Hymn of Philippians 2: 5-11. Pilate, by contrast, is a powerfully familiar sign to us of all the ways we resist love when it comes into the world. All the ways we say no to God’s presence and action in our lives and our communities. Pilate stands for grasping, holding on, and maintenance of the status quo; for the world of neatly ordered, genteel inequality, and the choice to put ourselves–the world with I, me, mine–first.

Just as none of us are 100% Marys or 100% Marthas but combinations of both (we are all active-contemplatives and contemplative-actives), so too are we each a fragile co-habitation of Mary-like yeses and Pilate-like nos. And the purpose of Church–why we come every Sunday and why each liturgy in Holy Week is so precious and important—is that we might reduce this “double-mindedness” (as James calls it) and bring it to a singular focus. With Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane we pray that God’s will, not our self-protective grasping and exploitation of others, might come to be born in us: not my will, but your will be done. The call is always to be single-minded–to see and act from the eye of the heart that knows only love, only the loving, life-giving, and liberating way of Jesus as its ground and expression. “And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.” Just Jesus.

Palm Sunday is perhaps the liturgical action in which we see this contrast between my will and God’s will, between Mary’s yes and Pilate’s no, between palm fronds waved in celebratory welcome and spear tips sharpened in order to eradicate a threat most clearly enacted. It’s jarring. It’s disorienting. It cuts us to the quick. And it’s meant to. We see both the human capacity to co-operate with grace for the building up of God’s Kindom, and our stubborn weddedness to patterns of acquisitive, defensive self-regard and maintainence of existing power structures from which we benefit and profit. Both the “Hosannas!” and the “Let him be crucified!” come from these very lips. Both “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” and “I do not know the man!” sit uneasily in the depths of each human heart. 

Powerful is our ability to consent to God’s presence and action in our lives. Equally powerful is our ability to maintain the human-created nightmare we see about us: climate change, racial violence, structural inequality. If we think that it’s the “Jews who killed Jesus,” not only do we blithely perpetrate centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism, but we miss the whole thrust of the Triduum: “I have seen the enemy and it is us.” Mary and Pilate. Wholehearted, surrendered yes and recalcitrant, stiff-necked no. Fragile palm fronds waving at the gates and adamantine spear tips glistening in Golgotha sun. Discipleship begins with bearing this doubleness as the cross of the human condition and opening to God’s saving grace from the depths of our need.

All of this would be rather hopelessly unbearable were it not for the Resurrection, which reveals to us that our captivity to patterns of fear, scapegoating violence, and self-protection don’t have to have the final say in who and how we are individually and corporately. There is another way to see and be in this world that it might come to resemble a wedding feast with everyone invited from the highways and byways in attendance, not a single invitation marked “Return to Sender.” 

Resurrection is what allows us to honestly and unflinchingly acknowledge, release, and be healed of these harmful patterns. Fear, death, hardness of heart, our imprisonment in self-seeking and obliviousness to the plight of neighbors and the cries of the good earth, do not have final and lasting dominion over us. These Pharaohs are petty little tyrants when contrasted with the goodness, love, mercy, and justice of the God whose deepest desire is to make God’s home among mortals, to dine with us, to share God’s very life with us: “Oh! What a beautiful city!”

The question to hold silently this week is whether we are each willing to come undone in love that something other than what we see on the news might come to be born in and through us. Can we see the ways in which our little nos hinder God’s grace in our lives and the world? Do we have the courage to look steadily in the mirror and take a hard look at the way we bar Jesus’ entry into the Jerusalem of the heart? Can we utter the little Palestinian teenager’s world-changing, Theotokos yes? The Anglican priest and poet Malcom Guite, in his “Sonnet for Palm Sunday,” puts it like this:

Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,

The seething holy city of my heart,

The saviour comes. But will I welcome him?

Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;

They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,

And think the battle won. Too soon they’ll find

The challenge, the reversal he is bringing

Changes their tune. I know what lies behind

The surface flourish that so quickly fades;

Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,

The hardness of the heart, its barricades,

And at the core, the dreadful emptiness

Of a perverted temple. Jesus come

Break my resistance and make me your home.

To the gate of my heart, to the doors of this Cathedral begging humble entry… Jesus comes. Will it be Mary’s yes or Pilate’s no? Will we welcome–day by day, person by person, encounter by encounter, moment by moment—with palm fronds, or defend, parry, and pierce with sharpened spears? Siblings in Christ, let us not be double minded. Let us see, name, and release “the self-interest, the fearful guardedness, the hardness of heart, the dreadful emptiness of that perverted temple” with I, me, mine enshrined at its center… No. No more of this. For Jesus,  King of Kings and Lord of Lord, comes. Your will not my will be done. Maranatha. Maranatha. Maranatha. Come, Lord. Come, Lord Jesus.  Yes. Yes. Yes. “Break my resistance and make me your home.” Amen.