I had just taken a brief break from preparing for today’s sermon when I saw her walking up the path to the retreat house. To be honest, my head was in the space of Mark’s Passion account, and my first reaction was annoyance, to think of this visitor as a distraction in a week lacking in precious time. Then, the doorbell rang.
I descended the stairs, admittedly, with a sigh and grumble to myself, and I answered the door. “I need someone to talk to,” she said. She was seeking spiritual guidance about a distressing situation in her life and feeling devastatingly alone. She didn’t know where to turn except to a priest. That’s why she came looking for me.
I found myself moving from an intellectual reckoning with Mark’s Passion account into reality. We sat and talked. I offered whatever meager words I thought might help and prayed with her, but, ultimately, nothing was resolved. We were reduced to silence before the mystery of human pain and lingering problems. There were no clear answers, but both of us knew to trust in God’s loving care, which transcended anything we could understand.
And suddenly, it occurred to me that this woman’s finding me was not what I thought it was initially. It wasn’t a distraction from more important work that I had to do. It was, in fact, a deeper revelation about the Passion story that I had been mulling over in my head that morning. The woman’s situation was not a life or death matter, nor was it acute trauma. But it was, nevertheless, real human pain, which is always an echo of the suffering of Christ’s own Passion. The woman who sought me out, unwittingly, had brought me into the story of Jesus’s final days.
Which is precisely what St. Mark does in his own way. In the original Greek, Mark shifts his tenses, rather bewilderingly, between past and present. Linguistically, Mark is trying to bring us into the unfolding of Jesus’s Passion. In a literal look at Mark’s original words, we would become dizzy as we moved between the millennia of linear time. And this prevents us from easily extracting ourselves from the story.
For me, a woman whose ringing of the doorbell began as a seeming interruption in a busy week became a visible reminder that it’s impossible to compartmentalize Jesus’s Passion. There’s no way to hermetically seal his suffering and death in intellectual head space and then move on with the rest of our lives. His suffering and death, as well as his rising and glory, intersect with our embodied lives. It’s as if we were there with him on the cross, or standing by mocking him, or crying with the women at the cross, or running with the other disciples, away from his pain. And of course, we are there, even in this very moment. We’re at the cross with Jesus in Jerusalem. We’re in the crossfire between Israel and Palestine. We’re standing amid the rubble of a terrorist attack in Moscow. We’re at the hospital bed with a loved one dying of cancer.
On Palm Sunday, we’re faced with a theological dilemma. We recognize with awe and reverence that Jesus’s Passion is only his. It’s something we will never experience as he did; it’s his unique Passion that is tied up with the world’s salvation. “Never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine,” is how one hymn puts it.[1] And at the same time, Jesus’s suffering and death are ours, too.
But the greatest temptation as we begin Holy Week is to pretend as if we can remove ourselves from this story and put it at a safe distance. We can easily lie to ourselves, saying that because Jesus is the Christ, our own suffering can never be talked about in the same sentence as his. A woman’s distress that brings her to a priest is not worthy of being mentioned in the same context as Jesus’s own suffering. And then it’s a slippery slope, for our own sinfulness becomes nothing like the sinfulness of those who betrayed him. Our own fickleness is never like that of the crowds. Our mockery of the way of love is never in the same league as those who jeered at Jesus.
The dissonance of today’s liturgy reminds us that pride can become the source of our estrangement from Jesus. It’s what made me grumble as I descended the stairs to answer the ringing of a doorbell. Pride would deviously compel us to elevate Jesus’s suffering to such an extent that it has nothing to do with us, and then it’s only one small step for us to refuse to let him wash our feet, too. It’s only one small step not to let him love us and forgive us.
If Jesus came to save, then his Passion weaves in and out of our own lives. A hurting woman with her tears coming up the path to the retreat house has everything to do with our Lord’s Passion. Our own loneliness has everything to do with the world’s Savior hanging on a tree and crying out of sheer abandonment to his Father. Christ’s utter silence in the face of the powers of this world, a silence even unto death, is our own uncomfortable, anguished silence in the face of the mystery of suffering.
When we refuse to recognize that Christ’s own suffering and death intersect intimately with our own lives, we refuse, in some sense, God’s gift of salvation. But when we accept that we can never take ourselves out of his story, because it’s also our story, we see that suffering is an indispensable part of the Christian journey. We acknowledge in awe and silence that our salvation comes not as a triumphant erasure of evil and suffering but as a gift that meets us in spite of it and within it. The ultimate answer to the mystery of grief and pain is God’s wordless answer, which comes in the form of an empty tomb, standing silent on Easter Day. And that empty tomb will testify that, once and for all, the victory has been won, not on the world’s terms but on God’s.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
March 24, 2024
[1] “My song is love unknown,” Samuel Crossman (1624-1683), #458 in The Hymnal 1982