Where is this all leading again?

On Sunday, I got to thinking about the terminology we use to describe the day’s liturgical significance. You may have noticed that this day is referred to as both “Palm Sunday” and “Passion Sunday.” Someone asked me recently why this is the case. The two seem as though they should be separate events. The more I pondered this, I realized that in fact, the event of Jesus’ passion can never be taken apart from his royal entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. In the Gospel accounts, Jesus is welcomed into the city as a king in the royal line of David. Several textual details attest to this: the waving of palm branches, the shouting of Hosannas to the “son of David”, the spreading of cloaks on the ground before him, and even the donkey itself on which Jesus’ rides, all hearken back to the Israelite kings of old. Likewise, the people clearly seem to understand Jesus’ symbolic actions. They are not just welcoming him as a popular traveling teacher, but indeed as the long-lost Davidic king returned to take back his throne!  

From here, as most of us may recall, the scene turns increasingly sour. Jesus–as king–pronounces judgement on his own people for their sin (instead of the cruel Romans who were oppressing his people), an act which soon leads him to his crucifixion. This then, is the content of Sunday’s Gospel reading.

For the New Testament writers, the term “Gospel” was not an abstract concept. It had a real, concrete, Old Testament context. Originating from Isaiah and Micah (both of whom Mark quotes as he begins his Gospel) the word itself meant more than “good news.” It was good news about something. What that good news was, according to the prophets, was that the long lost king would one day return to Jerusalem from the desert, and once there, he would go to the temple and then take up his throne. Isaiah also gave some new information. For those who read the prophet aright, the king returning home would be God himself (Is 40).

So what does this suggest about why it is that the Church sees Palm Sunday and the Passion as liturgically inseparable?  Simply this: Jesus’ kingship can never be separated from his crucifixion. According to the Fathers of the Church, the cross was indeed Jesus’ kingly throne, from which he poured himself out in ultimate service to his people–both those who accepted him as king and those who did not. After all, what king (or president) only serves those who support him. Jesus’ kingship is universal, and he demonstrates this by accepting the legal punishment for those who would fail to heed his words and take up arms against Rome. He likewise suffers the same death that would befall many of his followers later on. Jesus’ message is clear, and it resonates with the readings of Palm Sunday; if you will be courageous enough to follow the true king, there will be consequences to pay; there will be crosses to carry.

As much as we want to label it merely Palm Sunday, get our free branches and then go home and shape them into little designs and forget about it, the message of Palm Sunday is one that’s hard to ignore. We stand for an almost excruciatingly long reading of the Gospel account of Jesus’ Passion. Why? Simply so that every time we look at those pretty palm branches that we picked up on the way into Mass, we might remember where it all led.

 

Letters from the first book

For the last few days, the weather around our house here in Colorado has been gorgeous; a welcome relief from what has been one of the harsher Rocky Mountain winters in recent memory. This sunshine and warmth, along with an early arrival of daylight savings time have combined to make me deliriously happy this week. I awoke this morning however, hoping for a balmy morning run, to find the temperature quite chilly and the familiar feeling of snow in the air. This reality (that it’s really only mid-March, and not mid-May as the recent weather had suggested) reminded me of an important truth this time of year. Nature itself was reminding me that despite the feeling of spring that had permeated the latter part of the week, spring had not yet arrived. Not coincidentally, I needed a gentle nudge from mother nature to remind me likewise, that Easter had not yet arrived, and that we were, in fact, still dwelling in the relative darkness of lent.

There is a great deal of wisdom in the Church’s liturgical calendar. Vigen Guroian, a Armenian Orthodox theologian (and gardener–not coincidentally) muses about the apt chronological construction of the liturgical calendar. He says,

I have begun to understand the wisdom in the Armenian Church’s stubborn persistence in celebrating Jesus’ birth and baptism together on the sixth of January, as was the ancient practice. Jesus’ birth shines light into this darkling world and commences the death of Death itself. His baptism reveals this world’s true Maker and Ruler and the path of repentance, self-renunciation and sacrificial love that each of us must travel to inherit eternal life. In the same manner, by our personal baptism we not only receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and adoption as sons and daughters of God; we also recapitulate Jesus’ crucifixion, death burial and resurrection. (The Fragrance of God)

Likewise, St. Gregory of Nyssa reminds us that,

the Sun of Justice rose in this cruel winter, the spring came, the south wind dispelled that chill, and together with the rising of the sun’s rays warmed everything that lay in our path. Thus mankind, that had been chilled into stone, might become warm again through the Spirit, and receiving heat from the rays of the Word, might become again as water leaping up into eternal life. (From Glory to Glory)

Our disconnectedness from the created world confuses not only our senses but also our spiritual sensibilities. Could it be the Church understood that the rhythms God built into the earth actually serve as reminders of Him; signposts directing and constantly calling us back to Him? If the Fathers of the Church and the ancient rabbis were correct, then God really wrote two books of Scripture. The first, they claimed, was the book of creation itself; a book which actually teaches us how to better read the second book, that of the written Scriptures.  It’s no wonder then, that the Bible constantly evokes natural metaphors (“the just man is like a tree planted by water…” Psalm 1, “Consider the lilies of the field” Matthew 6:28, etc.).

So I’m grateful. As much as I’d like to go out for a long bike ride, or take my kayak out on the river today, I can’t. The time will come, but it’s not yet. We know indeed that just as surely as the leaves will return to the trees, the crocuses bloom with colorful buds, and the rivers run full again in April and May, that the same Christ who died on a cross on Good Friday, like a tree shedding its leaves and heading for its yearly death, will return renewed and glorious on Easter morning. Really, it seems that the brilliance of God’s created world is that everyone who has seen a tree which appears to die in the fall and knows that come spring, that tree will be resurrected to life once again, has been prepared for the mystery of the cross. Coincidence? I think not. As Jesus said, foreshadowing his own Eucharistic sacrifice, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat.”

 

The art of seeing

Reflecting on 1 Corinthians 11, the thought of St. John Chrysostom, and the life of Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta, my friend and mentor Tim Gray recently said to me that “the art of seeing the body of Jesus in the bread should train us in the art of seeing the body of Jesus in the poor.” Profound, no? This reminded me of one of Chrysostom’s homilies; a reflection on Matthew 25:

Would you honor the body of Christ? Do not despise his nakedness; do not honor him here in church clothed in silk vestments and then pass him by unclothed and frozen outside. Remember that he who said, “This is my Body”, and made good his words, also said, “You saw me hungry and gave me no food”, and, “in so far as you did it not to one of these, you did it not to me”. In the first sense the body of Christ does not need clothing but worship from a pure heart. In the second sense it does need clothing and all the care we can give it.We must learn to be discerning Christians and to honor Christ in the way in which he wants to be honored. It is only right that honor given to anyone should take the form most acceptable to the recipient not to the giver. Peter thought he was honoring the Lord when he tried to stop him washing his feet, but this was far from being genuine homage. So give God the honor he asks for, that is give your money generously to the poor. God has no need of golden vessels but of golden hearts.I am not saying you should not give golden altar vessels and so on, but I am insisting that nothing can take the place of almsgiving. The Lord will not refuse to accept the first kind of gift but he prefers the second, and quite naturally, because in the first case only the donor benefits, in the second case the poor gets the benefit. The gift of a chalice may be ostentatious; almsgiving is pure benevolence.What is the use of loading Christ’s table with gold cups while he himself is starving? Feed the hungry and then if you have any money left over, spend it on the altar table. Will you make a cup of gold and without a cup of water? What use is it to adorn the altar with cloth of gold hangings and deny Christ a coat for his back! What would that profit you? Tell me: if you saw someone starving and refused to give him any food but instead spent your money on adorning the altar with gold, would he thank you? Would he not rather be outraged? Or if you saw someone in rags and stiff with cold and then did not give him clothing but set up golden columns in his honor, would he not say that he was being made a fool of and insulted?Consider that Christ is that tramp who comes in need of a night’s lodging. You turn him away and then start laying rugs on the floor, draping the walls, hanging lamps on silver chains on the columns. Meanwhile the tramp is locked up in prison and you never give him a glance. Well again I am not condemning munificence in these matters. Make your house beautiful by all means but also look after the poor, or rather look after the poor first. No one was ever condemned for not adorning his house, but those who neglect the poor were threatened with hellfire for all eternity and a life of torment with devils. Adorn your house if you will, but do not forget your brother in distress. He is a temple of infinitely greater value.