The Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson, Easter Sunday 2012
How the mood changes in such a short time in this liturgy for Palm Sunday: The Sunday of the Passion. We begin with shouts of “Hosanna to the Son of David, Hosanna in the Highest,” and not even a half hour later we shout “Crucify him!” That isn’t exactly the way it happened. There were several days between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, but on that first Good Friday the memory of Palm Sunday was still fresh.
And while we are not told, in that original Holy Week there must have been some who shouted Hosanna who did not shout “crucify.” Certainly Mary, the mother of Jesus, didn’t shout “Crucify,” nor Mary Magdalene, or John, the beloved disciple. The other disciples didn’t shout “Crucify him” because they didn’t stick around for that part of their Lord’s life. They were too afraid for their own safety. One of them, Judas, actually betrayed him and another, Peter, denied ever knowing him. So while they did not shout “Crucify,” their part was just as bad.
Thus, what we do today in the liturgy is not intended to be an exact re-enactment of the events of Palm Sunday and Good Friday. It is a memorial of those events and it points to a theological reality. Whether or not Herod or the disciples or anyone else in the crowd shouted “Crucify him!,” they all had a part in his death. And whether or not you could bring yourself to shout the words “Crucify him!,” you and I and every person who has ever lived or who will ever live are responsible for his death. We shout “Crucify” not because we want consciously to crucify our Lord, but because we recognize our guilt. “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon Thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied Thee: I crucified Thee.”
Yes, 2000 years ago the Roman government put Jesus to death, the religious authorities insisted on it, and the crowd went along, as crowds tend to do. As Frederick Buechner says in Wishful Thinking, “Two of the noblest pillars of the ancient world—Roman law and Jewish piety—together supported the necessity of putting Jesus Christ to death in a manner that even for its day was peculiarly loathsome.” Yet, if we lay the blame on them or on anyone else, we have missed the point. They represent all of sinful humanity, and therefore they represent every person. “Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee. I crucified Thee.”
All four accounts of the Gospel—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—teach us about the entire earthly life of our Lord, but they all make it clear that the main reason for Jesus’ life was his death. He came to redeem the world through his death for our sins. Pay attention to the eucharistic prayer, which is said every day of the year, with the exception of Good Friday. That prayer is the consecratory prayer at the heart of our worship in which we recall the passion and death of Jesus for our sins, and that is the heart of the Christian faith.
There are people, influential people, today who would like for the Church to forget about this aspect of our Lord’s life—the aspect that he was born in order to die for us, the idea that our sin is a barrier between us and God and that atonement for our sins needed to be made in order for there to be a reconciliation between us and God. But if we were to forget that part of the Gospel we would be removing the heart of the Gospel, and if you remove the heart you have nothing left. Of course, the heart is love. Lancelot Andrewes, in 1597, said “(Jesus) was pierced with love no less than with grief, and it was that wound of love which made him so constantly to endure all the other….Christ pierced on the cross is liber charitatis, ‘the very book of love’ laid open before us.”
On this Palm Sunday we are given the opportunity to look at the passion and death of our Lord Jesus in order to prepare us more fully to enter into it on the actual day, this coming Friday. It would be good for us all to contemplate the reality that Jesus was crucified to atone for the sins of each one of us. Why did Christ die? He died for me.
Sermon preached by The Very Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
Palm Sunday
20 March 2016