Perhaps the clearest note of Palm Sunday is that of rejection. On the one hand, there is the obvious rejection that runs through all of today’s service. During this liturgy we have twice acted the part of the crowd in Jerusalem. Using their words, we have made two demands. The first we said in the Parish Hall, when we shouted ‘Hosanna’, which means ‘save us’, ‘save us now’, to Jesus. The second was just minutes ago, same crowd, probably about the same enthusiasm, but ‘Hosanna’ had become ‘crucify Him!’; and instead of talking to Jesus, we were talking about him. That’s because Jesus had not done what was expected from him and wanted from him. He had not delivered to the crowd’s satisfaction.

This is the great rejection of Palm Sunday, the one that continues every time we discover that life is not the way we want it to be and move our attention from Christ to some one or some thing that might offer quicker—and more pleasant—relief from whatever we think ails us. This rejection is what ties our lives to the life of that crowd in Jerusalem; and makes every day a potential Palm Sunday. It can help us to see who we are, and who we need to become.

But there are some other rejections going on in this story as well, not rejections of Jesus; but rejections by Jesus.

By looking at what our Lord disavows—by listening to his Word of ‘No’ rather than our own, we can perhaps move more deeply into the mystery of his passion.

The first rejection occurred in Gethsemane. |While Jesus was being arrested one of the disciples drew his sword and began to fight—and Jesus said ‘No’ to that. Jesus rejected that. He did this from choice, not from weakness—if he had chosen the way of armed rebellion, Jesus quite likely could have won. ||Remember his temptations in the wilderness; the one when Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus would but worship him. The disciple who drew his sword in the garden is offering a similar temptation. It is the temptation to use whatever methods are handy and effective in order to reach a desired end. In Gethsemane, Jesus is invited to use violence, to use the way of the world—and so protect himself and his mission. It is when Jesus rejects this invitation to violence that his disciples flee, and he taken by force.

Later, as Jesus is on trial before the Chief Priests, Herod, and Pilate, we see his second rejection. All of these, representing both Israel and Rome, demand of Jesus a legal defense—they are asking him to come aboard, to play their game. ||And by his silence Jesus again says ‘No’. Remember, this is the same Jesus who has so often baffled and bested the same scribes and Pharisees, who has so many times turned accusations into opportunities to teach, and who has, with apparent effortlessness, avoided every legal and rhetorical trap the very cleverest of his enemies had set for him. Jesus doubtless could have offered a wonderful defense. He could have turned their stones, their weapons, into his bread, his own defense. But, instead of that, there is silence—his rhetorical genius stands mute. And so the Son of Man is found guilty and sentenced, once more, the victim of methods he chooses not to use.

Jesus’ final rejection occurs on the cross. In words almost identical to those of the tempter, the crowd taunts—"If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself." When he first heard them, the words were "If you are the son of God, throw yourself down." (from the pinnacle of the temple). The point is the same—give us a sign, give us a show. Compel us to believe by the magical, by the miraculous.

And in a final sign of what his life and his death are really all about, Jesus refuses, again by silence, this last opportunity to use that power the world craves. So, forsaken at last even by God—with absolutely nothing to offer but himself—the Lamb of God cried out, and died.

With that cry, Jesus has rejected every form of coercive power available to him. He has rejected the power of armies and swords; the power of persuasion, argument and rhetoric; and finally the magical, ostentatious, and spectacular powers of another reality. None of these is part of bringing in, or living out, the Kingdom of God. All the sources of power that hurt, that force, that compel—these are denied—these are denied even if used for the very best, the very highest, of goals.

The real point is that, once these are rejected, there is nothing left but love. All that remains is total self-giving love in obedience to the Father. And if we Christians ever, for an instant, wonder what we mean when we talk about love—remember—this, this cross and God incarnate hanging upon it, this is what we mean. Anything less is useless romanticism.

And one of the things we learn from the cross is that we are given one instrument, one tool, one weapon if you will, with which to be the continuing physical presence of Jesus in the world. We are given love, and we are shown what that love looks like. We are not, thanks be to God, left with only our own ability to love. What we are given is our own willingness to love, joined with Jesus’ love, strengthened and renewed by His love. And the cross is always the model.

Remember, the cross is not an isolated abhorrent anomaly; it is not some rude interruption in the movement from God to us. Instead, it is the culmination of Jesus’ life and ministry—for in that cross we see who Jesus is and who he calls us to be. We see love that has nothing to offer but itself—no armies to lead, no bureaucracies to help, no magical rabbits to pull out of hats; only love that gives itself until everything is gone and then keeps on giving. This is what life is really all about. Behold, the power of God.

All that is left is love, after everything has been done, and after everything else has been rejected, all that is left is love—this kind of love. And that is enough.

We had a sort of Readers’ Digest Condensed Version of that conversation Sunday, when, with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we see God’s offering of himself, and, with the story of the Passion, we see humanity’s answer to that offer. Point, counterpoint.

Throughout Holy Week that movement is made more clear, and is painted in richer and deeper colors. Today, Maundy Thursday, we hear another part of that same conversation; different in its content, but still revealing the same movement.

It begins at the table, where Jesus—as he had done so often with the disciples—presides at a common meal, most likely a Passover meal. This meal, like all meals, but definitively so, was holy; it was sacred.

It was tied inextricably to Israel’s story—the story of God’s great saving acts in history. The story of the deliverance from slavery in Egypt was told, and remembered, and made real and present. In this way Jesus and the disciples, like all of Israel, joined themselves, through time and space, to Moses and to all of the mixed multitude that had left bondage behind and begun a new journey, in hope, to the home that God had promised them. This was the decisive act of God’s covenant with Israel, a covenant that, from this night onward, Christians would call the Old Covenant.

This is because Jesus does something different on this night. When it came time for the familiar blessing over the bread, (when the matzah was broken) Jesus added something—just a few words:

He said, "this is my body which is given for you, do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, to the blessing over the common cup at the end of the meal, Jesus added, "this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood". Momentous additions to a prayer older than memory. Words that changed everything.

After the resurrection and Ascension, as the early Church began its life, these words persisted and guided that life. Even though they didn’t understand what was going on at first, the disciples remembered what Jesus had said and done; and, much more importantly, they obeyed, they did it.

They remembered—and they followed his command. Gradually, they learned.

To their wonder, they discovered that their was Lord present with them in a special, intense, and unique way when they gathered to break the bread and share the cup.

They discovered that Jesus had not left them isolated, he had not left them alone. In this great gift given on the eve of darkness, in the bread and the wine, he had provided a means by which they could indeed be with him, and share—among themselves and among any who would come—his presence, his power, and his love.

This is what Jesus did on his final night with his friends—all of his friends, remember, Judas was still there—he gave them a gift, the gift of himself, the gift of his presence, of his love. This is what God does during Holy Week, this is God’s constant word to us throughout this sacred time. He is with us, and he offers nothing less, and nothing other, than his presence.

This is what he offered the crowd as he entered Jerusalem. This is what he offered to the Chief Priests, Herod, and Pilate. This is what Jesus is continually offering to us—himself. Himself in the sacrament of the Altar, himself in the hearts of his faithful people, himself in the face of friend and stranger, himself in the most exalted places in creation, himself in the small, quiet depths of our souls.

This gift of God’s own self is God’s word to us throughout Holy Week. We hear it over and over. It is constant, it is unchanging—then, and now.

But the human word back to God during these sacred days is hardly constant, and it is always jarring. The ‘hosannas’ of Palm Sunday quickly turn to demands to "Crucify him". And the gift of Maundy Thursday, the gift of the his presence in the breaking of the bread, this too is answered with rejection. We will close this service by quietly stripping the Altar, and leaving everything bare for Good Friday. That’s because, immediately after the meal, one of those who had shared the table with Jesus slips out and deals quietly in blood and silver. Within a few hours Jesus is arrested, and the passion begins. God offers himself, and we respond—sometimes with excitement and jubilation—this time with betrayal and even death. Point, counterpoint.

I think it is fascinating that the exact reasons for the rejection are never given. We are not told in any detail why the crowd turned on Jesus so quickly in Jerusalem, and Judas’ motives, a matter of endless speculation, are never completely stated. There is probably great wisdom here.

If we knew why, we could take that reason and distance ourselves from it. ‘Not me; I wouldn’t do that’. But we don’t know why they did it.

If we can assume anything, it is that they all wanted something different from Jesus than what he gave—they wanted other gifts, gifts they had decided they wanted more than they wanted something as vague and insubstantial as "this is my body". Perhaps they wanted what the world wants; perhaps they wanted a life that was easier and more ‘successful’ than the life they saw in Jesus. Who knows what they wanted?

I suspect we do. I suspect we know. I suspect that we each have our own personal counterpoints to both Jesus, and the Father’s, constant offering of themselves, and to their persistent call to follow.

If the glory, the irony, and the tragedy of Maundy Thursday—of Jesus’ gift and his betrayal, if these tell us anything, they tell us that this conversation between God and us continues, in less dramatic but no less important ways, even today.

In a moment, we will go forward to receive the gift Jesus gave on the night he was betrayed, and then we will remember that betrayal. Point/counterpoint. Then it will be our turn.

But there is a time for words, and here are a few words about Good Friday. First of all, the crucifixion is about God. It is about who God is, and what it is like to be God, and what God thinks about us, and the lengths God will go to in his ancient and ongoing search for us and love for us.

And the crucifixion is also about Jesus. This is the glorification of Jesus, his triumph. The crucifixion is about what it means, and what it looks like, to live perfectly both in the image of God and in the real world. The crucifixion is about faithfulness to the will of the Father, and the consequences of sin—of our sin, and of the sin of the world. It is about what happens when God is God and we are, well, who we usually are.

And the crucifixion is also about all of creation. It is about the separation that had existed among God, the natural world and human beings. The crucifixion is about the mystery of sacrifice and, through that mystery, the healing of those ancient wounds and divisions. Make no mistake—every Good Friday, we behold events of truly cosmic proportions.

All of that is real, and true, and, taking the long view, all of that is what is most important. But there is at least one other part of Good Friday that is also true, and real, and important in a slightly different way. For Good Friday is about us, about us individually—it is about who we are whose we are. I want to look at that a bit today.

My way into that this year came from, of all places, Phillips Brooks’ great Christmas hymn, "O Little Town of Bethlehem". There is a line in that hymn that always touches me, and it came to the fore as I was thinking about Good Friday. The line is "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight". We all know that hymn, and that line, and these words are certainly powerfully true at Christmas time.

But they are even more appropriate today. And they can be words of judgment; they can be words of hope—words that can bring the Cross home to us in, perhaps, a different way.

In our Story, the story that defines who we are as Christian people, the story that begins, "In the beginning..." in the first Chapter of Genesis, in that story the cross is the answer. It is the answer because it faces directly the most ancient and the deepest questions and fears our story raises—questions and fears about how humanity’s estrangement from God can be restored to unity, questions and fears about whether human life, our lives, limited and defined by sin, alienation, and death, can have meaning and hope; questions and fears about how God will bring healing and peace to an humanity, and to individual human beings, (that’s us) scattered and separated by pride, self-will, and a vain struggle to make ourselves the center of the universe; questions and fears about the possibility of the mending of a creation gone terribly wrong and out of control.

The cross, for all its horror, brings to those questions and to those fears—hope, and promise, and the ultimate picture of what it looks like for the true power of God to say "Yes" to the world’s violent word of "No".

Here, death and sin are vanquished. Here, God chooses weakness and sacrifice as the cure for the creation’s brokenness; here, the veil of mankind’s sin that had separated heaven and earth is torn, and unity begins to be restored.

These are the hopes and fears of all the years that are met, and restored, at Golgotha, the place of the skull. These—and no others.

Now, the fascinating question that the Cross ask us is simply this: Are these our hopes and fears? Is this what we most long for, what we most care about, what we most desire, what we would name as most important? Not in the abstract, not when we are feeling especially religious, but day in and day out. What are our real hopes and fears?

Are they about this harsh business of where we stand, in all of our specific and individual humanness, in the real depths of the soul we carry around within ourselves day by day, where we stand in that way in the sight of a loving but just God? Or has the unholy trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil so captured our imaginations and consumed our priorities that our deepest hopes and fears are of another sort altogether?

What do we hope for most passionately? What do we fear most deeply?

Perhaps judgment for our lives lies in whether or not our own personal hopes and fears are in fact met here. If our deepest hopes and our darkest fears are not met by the cross—by self-giving love that abandons everything, even life itself, for the sake of obedience to the Father. If they are not, then we are grasping at false, indeed vain, hopes; and we are preoccupied by shallow fears that will none the less consume and conquer us.

After all, Christ died on this cross to break the curse of evil, and to vanquish it once and for all. If we are not all that much concerned with the power of evil, in our world or in our lives, then we can neither comprehend this, nor can we make it our own. Our attention will simply be focused elsewhere.

That is the challenge of the Cross to us, today. This moment will only speak to us at a level of depth if our deepest selves are attuned to what this is all about. If not, not; and then we might need to take another look at what is going on within us.

The hopes and fears of all the years are indeed met at this moment. What about us; what about ours? In that we find judgment, and challenge, and true hope.

The Lord is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!

This year, I moved into Easter through those three lessons we just heard. It’s a good way to get there. Those readings talk about the three things Easter is about, and we need to hear them all, all three, if we are going to grasp even the beginnings of a complete vision of this great festival. Let’s look at the lessons, starting with the Gospel, and with Mary.

All four Gospels say it was Mary Magdalene who saw it all, who was at the cross and saw Jesus die, who watched his body carried to the tomb and who came back to that same tomb and saw it empty. Mary saw it all, and what Mary saw makes very clear the first thing Easter is about. Easter is about Jesus. It is about a particular man who really lived and who really died, and who lived and died in a very particular way. Easter isn’t about Spring (especially today, and, by the way, do you realize that, for just about a majority of the world’s Christians, Easter comes in the Fall—they are south of the Equator), it isn’t about seeds coming to life or bunnies or eggs or the immortality of the soul or any such. It’s about Jesus of Nazareth who Mary saw die and whose dead body she watched and touched (and, believe me, folks back there knew dead, they knew it real well; it is kinda hard to miss), and that same person who was alive again—not by nature, but by the supreme action of God the Father.

That’s what Easter is about first and foremost—and we have to begin where Mary began, with the acute and overwhelming particular-ness of the resurrection. God didn’t raise just anybody; God hasn’t raised anybody since.

In raising Jesus, the Father is vindicating just exactly that specific way of living, and of dying, that was Jesus. There is nothing general or all-inclusive in the event of the resurrection (although there is in its consequences). It is about Jesus. That’s what the witness of Mary insists. That is the first thing about Easter that our lessons proclaim. Easter is, above all else, about this man, and no other. It is about Jesus.

That’s the first thing, the part Mary tells us. But if we stop there, all we have is history, and that’s not enough, not enough to matter much at all. So we also have that wonderful section from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, where he tells us the second thing Easter is about. Paul is talking about Easter, and about Baptism, (which is really the same thing as talking about Easter) and he tells the baptized in Colossae that they have died, and that they have been raised with Christ. There is an absolute reality here—through their baptism, the essence of what happened to Jesus has happened to them. (That’s why we try to have baptisms on Easter, to help us remember this).

But today Paul isn’t talking to the people in Colossae. Today Paul is talking to us. He is saying the second thing that Easter is about, the second part toward a complete vision. He is saying that Easter is about us. The past cannot contain it—and that particular life and death and resurrection that happened to one man, this is also ours, not by nature or by merit, but as a pure and gracious gift of God. We have died, we are raised with Christ. That’s who we are.

But this reality can just sit there, waiting—being true, but not making any difference. So, Paul gives us some Easter orders, "seek the things that are above". Set you mind on those things.

Now, this is not about becoming some kind of silly, scatterbrained, head in the clouds, super-pious sort of cartoon character. It’s about paying real and serious attention to the spiritual realities of our world, and of our lives.

It’s about reaching for, and embracing the reality of God’s love, and of God’s gift to you of the same new life he gave to Jesus. To set your mind on, to seek, the things that are above, this means to reach for the resurrection, not as an historical claim about somebody else, but as that reality which defines you, which says who you are first, before you are all the other things you also are. It is about taking it personally, and making it personal. "Seek the things that are above", Paul demands, "set your minds there", notice, and grab on to it as if it matters the most—because it does.

That’s the second thing Easter is about, it is about us.

But even that is not enough, and if we stop there we still haven’t gone near far enough, and our vision remains incomplete. So we hear the first reading, the one from Acts, which is part of a sermon by Peter. Now, Peter was a witness to the Resurrection, he knew that Easter was about Jesus, and, finally and after considerable pushing, he also discovered that it was about him, too. But for a while Peter was pretty much willing to stop there. The resurrection might be about Jesus and Peter, and it might even be about people who were like Jesus and Peter, but that was a far as it went.

Until now; until the time of this reading. Right before this, Peter has learned—again the hard way, (which was just about the only way Peter ever learned anything)—Peter has learned that the Gentiles, the despised others,

the ones outside the covenant and outside the promise and outside the limits of real human decency and discourse, these unclean gentiles are as much the objects of God’s love and concern as were Peter and the people who were like Peter and that Peter liked. So Peter, the faithful, observant, Jew who had never let anything unclean come close to him, is preaching to the gentiles, and telling them that the message sent to Israel was also the message for them, and that Jesus was for them just as much as Jesus was for anybody.

So Peter shows the third thing that Easter is about, if we are going to have a complete vision. First, Easter is about Jesus. Second, Easter is about us. Third, and just as centrally, Easter is about them. Easter is about the others, the ones on the outside, the ones who do not belong. Not just people who haven’t heard about it; but more especially the ones we would never consider telling—because they wouldn’t understand, or they wouldn’t fit in, or they just don’t belong. Easter is for them, also. And if we leave Easter with Jesus and do not make it our own, or if we make it our own and then keep it to ourselves, if we do any of those things then we have been unfaithful to this most glorious of feasts, and we have embraced an defective vision.

It’s all there in those three readings we heard. Easter is about Jesus, it is about you, and it is about them. In other words, Easter is about history, it is about faith, and it is about mission, all of those are needed, all of those, together, just begin to give us the whole picture.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!