Jesus Coming to Make His Home in Us

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Palm Sunday, April 5, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

Here we are on the cusp of Holy Week, on the cusp of where your true joy is to be found, at the beginning of the journey into love, of putting on the mind of Christ, of becoming a little more like the one we follow after and call, “Lord.” 

That’s really what the journey of Holy Week is all about--making the life of boundless and boundary-crossing love we see revealed in the person of Jesus Christ our life. All the liturgies point us away from Holy Week being a spectatorial “observance” and towards an actual participation in the life of Christ, and the embodiment--not just with our lips, but with our life--of what it looks like to live as/from/for Love.

So it makes sense that as we are about to embark on this journey into belovedness that we might be that boundary-crossing blessing and belovedness for others, that we get a clear, indelible picture of what this wondrous love looks like when it comes into the world and takes on human flesh. And of course, the once-and-for-all, unique manifestation of what God looks like in human form is Jesus Christ. He is the perfect icon of God, the unblemished impress, the one who in his utter transparency toward the will of the Father reveals for us the grand scope of our calling as human beings. For as we grow in closeness and companionship with Christ, we actually become more and more human, more and more the unique, unrepeatable, precious child of God God intended us to be. The journey into love and the journey in being fully human are one and the same.

One of the most important things about Palm Sunday is that it shows us exactly what kind of King Jesus is. Our usually grand processions on Palm Sunday with palms imported from Texas, fancy incense from Holy Cross Monastery, copes and Eucharistic vestments can sometimes obscure the truly humble nature of what we see when Jesus comes into Jerusalem. Unlike the Roman Imperial powers who enter into the city with their war horses and chariots, with their trumpet fanfares and banners, with their phalanxes of soldiers demanding obeisance from the crowds at the tip of a glittering spear, Jesus enters on a borrowed donkey. His trumpet fanfare is the off-key hooting and hollering of the common people. His banners are whatever anyone can cut from the trees to wave. His finery is a roughly woven cloak tossed over the back of a donkey.

Jesus is showing us the true nature of Lordship, what the real King of Kings actually looks like. We associate Kings with those who seek power, prestige, and possessions at the expense of everything else. We associate Kings with those who maintain their always tenuous grip on power with a culture of fear and the use of force. We associate Kings with the craven need for praise and adulation, with the pointing of the finger and accusation, with the scapegoating of certain people or groups to keep people huddled in fear of the other. 

But everything we see about Jesus tells us that this is not what the King of Love looks like. The so-called kenotic hymn from Phillipians 2: 5-11 captures this beautifully:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.

This was one of the earliest hymns of the Church, sung centuries before the development of the Creeds, the Chalcedonian definition, or the doctrine of the Trinity were hammered out under the pressure of the Holy Spirit by faithful, thoughtful, people of prayer. Jesus comes to show us that self-emptying love, release, letting go and letting be, surrender, and humble servanthood are the hallmarks of who we are called to be. And the call to us nothing short of astounding--”Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” We are not to admirers of Jesus. We are be not merely friends (though that is a good place to start). We are not to accumulate knowledge about Jesus. We are to become Him. The same mind, the same heart. We are to see with His eyes and ears, touch with the same hands, and  walk with His feet towards the margins in encounter with the least of these.

Now, nobody needs reminding that  this is not an easy task, and our Passion Gospel sets this difficulty squarely before us. There is much in us that rebels against letting go, serving others in love, going towards those from whom we have been conditioned to recoil, touching those whom we’ve been told are untouchable. Judas and Peter both remind us of this. Judas sells Jesus out for thirty pieces of silver. Peter denies he knows Jesus out of fear. The crowd gets swept along in a frenzy of lynch-mob violence calling for blood under the delusion that if they just get rid of this trouble-making rabbi peace will be maintained. 

The poet Malcolm Guite writes of this in his Sonnet for Palm Sunday: 

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.

Self-interest, fear, hardness of heart, and the perversion of the temple with the self--my wants, my requirements, my unquestioned prejudices and preconceptions--at the center. One look at the world right now shows this to be true, doesn’t it? There are countless examples of self-emptying love in the midst of this pandemic: doctors and nurses who willingly put themselves in harm’s way on the frontline of the fight against this virus, companies retooling their factories to provide necessary medical  supplies to meet projected shortages, National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers working to build new facilities in record time, elected officials doing what is in the best interest of the common good and making difficult decisions. 

But there are also different responses: pointing the finger and casting blame, scapegoating, hoarding up of supplies and price-gouging, the deliberate flouting of regulations because we think we’re invincible and don’t want to be inconvenienced by the fact of our solidarity with all of humanity.

Former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams writes in his beautiful little book Tokens of Trust, 

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’.

We are faced with a rather stark choice. To say “yes” to Jesus--like Mary at the Annunciation, or to say “no” to Him like Pilate. And the truth is, as Williams points out, we swing between the two. But the choice is always ours. We can choose to co-operate with the love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit with the little mustard seed of our “yes,” or we can utter the “no” of self-interest, the “no” of fear, the “no” of hard-heartedness. We can realize our interconnected implicatedness in the lives of others, how we are members of one another and stand together in the steadfast, persevering solidarity of bearing each other’s burdens, or we can huddle up in the self-enclosed fear looking out for number one. This is the choice we face individually on our journey into love throughout Holy Week, but also as a nation in the weeks and months to come as we face the current public health crisis.

The Chinese Christian artist He Qi has a beautiful print of Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. What I love about her print is that Jesus (who looks a lot like  a Chinese woman) is depicted coming straight at us, on an inexorable collision course with the viewer. It powerfully brings home the deep meaning of this day. Will we barricade ourselves against this love that wants to cleanse the temple of our hearts, or will we fling open the doors and let him live in us? Guite’s poem ends with a heart-rending prayer to this effect, “Jesus come/Break my resistance and make me your home.”

Seated on a donkey, pure love, forgiveness, joy amidst the swift and varied changes of this world, is trotting towards the Temple of the Heart. He is pilgrimaging to us. In order that He might be in us, for us, and make a way ahead of us. Make this the day, make this the week, a time when that love makes its home in you. Fling open the doors and welcome Him in. Let yourself be loved in loving and then be that humble, open-handed love pouring itself out for others. Hosanna in the highest!