On Palms and Necessity

There is probably no other question that gives me pause than this one: Was it necessary that we kill Jesus of Nazareth?  Today we celebrate Palm Sunday and physically and vocally enact the procession to Jerusalem.  We will cheer Jesus on, lay down our garments, and applaud; and then when he fails to live up to our expectations, we will turn on him and yell "crucify him" just that quick.

I don't question God's wisdom as wholly beyond anything we can grasp in this world.  As is asked of Job, "where you there when I laid the foundations of this world?"  No, I was not there. Yet, when we sing "were you there when they crucified my Lord?" Yes, I was.

I remember Barbara Brown Taylor's words: I am not in charge of this House, and never will be. I have no say about who is in and who is out. I do not get to make the rules. Like Job, I was nowhere when God laid the foundations of the earth. I cannot bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion. I do not even know when the mountain goats give birth, much less the ordinances of the heavens. I am a guest here, charged with serving other guests—even those who present themselves as my enemies. I am allowed to resist them, but as long as I trust in one God who made us all, I cannot act as if they are no kin to me. There is only one House. Human beings will either learn to live in it together or we will not survive to hear its sigh of relief when our numbered days are done. 

With a posture of humility, can we say the Cross a stumbling block or a stepping stone?  Maybe it is not either-or, but both-and.  While I stumble at the sight of the Cross, I also find it to reveal a truth about who we are and how we are wired. At our crudest, when something disrupts our sense of well being, power, or prosperity, we seek to be rid of it.  The commerce of the world supports this reaction and gives us the tools to make such removals expedient. 

I find comfort in the three Solas of faith as I wrestle with the dappled wonder of divinity as well as the broken travail of finitude. Grace alone, faith alone, and Word alone.  These are my stepping stones when I stumble.  

Perhaps this is where we find the heart of the Cross:  in being emptied of this life, in being emptied of our very own selves in God (I must decrease, He must increase as John says).  In emptiness we find resurrection and new life, freedom and resuscitation.  I like, once again, how Barbara Brown Taylor describes our awareness, our honest posture in faith:  If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?

I am certainly dumbfounded.  God's power comes in what appears often as weak, foolish, and lowly. That is a counter-intuitive wisdom that rings very true.  How can we posture ourselves this coming Holy Week to find that power in what appears weak, foolish, and lowly?  As we move through stations of the Cross, foot washing, Holy Communion, and tenebrae there is the same truth sprinkled again and again:  Salvation comes in all the tight places where our lives are at risk, regardless of how we got there. 

Salvation happens when we use a key to open a door we could have locked instead.  Sometimes that key is a human hand extended in love; sometimes that key is water, bread, wine, oil, tears or barrenness.  This is the Way, the way of life, and only God truly knows how it works.

A prayer from Walter Brueggemann:

Holy God--in this precious hour, we pause

and gather to hear your word--

to do so, we break from our work responsibilities

and from our play fantasies;

we move from our fears that overwhelm

and from our ambitions that are too strong.

Free us in these moments from every distraction,

that we may focus to listen,

that we may hear, that we may change.

Amen.