Have we ever, in our lifetimes, wanted Jesus to be with us more than we do right now?
One of you, ten of you, maybe all of you could identify a day or a week or a year in the past, or you could imagine a time in the future, when you personally needed Jesus even more. A day of immense loss. A week of harrowing tragedy. A year of awful disappointments. A long season of sorrow and heartbreak.
But now, today, just about everyone is having a hard, profoundly sad, distressingly anxious, powerfully grievous time. This whole community of St. Andrew’s: we want Jesus. And we want him now.
Well, Jesus is here. Today is Passion Sunday, or Palm Sunday. Sometimes we call it Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. It is the day when we celebrate that Jesus is here when things are at their worst. Passion: from the Latin passio, a word that simply means, “suffer.” But is it okay if we rename this Sunday Compassion Sunday? “Compassion” means “to suffer with,” and we want Jesus to suffer with us. We call it Palm Sunday often enough, dropping the Passion bit, a happier title. How about Compassion Sunday? Yes, of course we can call it Compassion Sunday. We can call it We Are a Hot Mess and We Need Jesus Sunday, if we want to. Jesus is here, so that’s cause for celebration, and we can name this party whatever we like. How about this: Let’s call today Hosanna Sunday. Hosanna is a Hebrew word that means, “Save us.” Save us! Yes! Save us, Jesus. We pray that. We pray it fervently. Today is Hosanna Sunday.
Our forebears in the faith greeted Jesus with shouts of Hosanna as he entered what we now call the Old City of Jerusalem, from the east, from the direction of the Mount of Olives. Tradition says he came through the Golden Gate, the door that the Messiah was expected someday to enter, the door that was boarded up for exactly this reason, hundreds of years ago, and remains firmly closed today. They shouted Hosanna! as he entered. Not, Hooray! Not, Yippee! But Hosanna.
Hosanna is joyous, but it is also a plea. It is a joyous plea: You, oh! you, oh it’s good you are here, please save us! If we hold still and listen to their cries of Hosanna, and if we hold still and listen to our own anxious hearts, we can hear the frantic worry behind the rejoicing. Why are we frantic? Maybe it’s because even as we are welcoming him into the city we can see that he is really not the kind of savior we might have hoped for: he is on a donkey, not held high among a glittering array of royal servants and banners and weapons. His very presence communicates a worrying, unnerving message: “I am not here to overcome the powers of this world in political triumph,” he seems to say. Or we could hear the message the way our first prayer this morning says it, “He went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and he entered not into glory before he was crucified.”
You see, to save us, to be here with us, Jesus has to get very close to us, so close that he experiences himself the worst that Sin and Death have to offer. For we are surrounded by these Powers. We sin. This is a hard truth, one that we maybe don’t hear very often in mainline Protestant pulpits. Our sins are many and varied: the smallest individual act of selfishness, intergenerational family conflict, structural racism, mass genocide. And we die. Sometimes, even often, we die at each other’s hands. So for Jesus to be close to us, he has to get very, very close to Sin and Death. To defeat those powers, he first has to succumb to them.
And so it is that we want Jesus to be with us today, and we want him to save us, but to do all this for us, it will cost him everything. He overcomes Sin and Death by going through, not around them. He shatters our pattern of oppressor and victim, our long, millennia-long history of oppressors and victims, by being the one pure victim who takes everything we’ve got, and suffers, and dies, so that sin and death lose their power, and new life emerges here and now. Here: in this community, in the room you are in right now, participating in this service. Now: not just in long-ago Jerusalem, but in every New Jerusalem where the resurrection is announced, first to oppressors, and then to their victims.
And what is “Resurrection”? Easter is still a week away, but it is not too early to answer that question. All of Holy Week is focused on it. We do not pretend, today or this week, that Jesus is in Jerusalem and moving through his death and resurrection again. The whole story is present to us this whole week. “Resurrection,” then, is this Good News: this community is close to Jesus; Jesus is close to this community; and so this community is not about sin and death. This community is about the risen life.
So, because Jesus is close to us, we are close to one another. We take care of each other. We pray for each other. We hear the grief of friends, and hold them close in our hearts, if not for a little while in actual hugs. We also forgive one another, and ask forgiveness. When we are wrong, we say we are sorry. We fight for justice in these little ways first: justice between me and the friend I hurt; justice and truth in the smallest zoom call; justice and peace in our prayers for and alongside each other.
And then, because Jesus is close to us, we are close to this frantic world. We shout Hosanna to Jesus on behalf of the whole world, and we shout it until we are hoarse, if we have to. Hosanna!, we shout to Jesus. Hosanna! for the poor and the unsheltered, hosanna! for the furloughed and the unemployed, hosanna! for the health workers working around the clock, hosanna! for civil servants and old folks sheltering in place alone and scared kids and sad graduates and and and and and… Hosanna! for everyone. Save us, save us, Jesus! That is our joyous plea on this Hosanna Sunday, the ultimate celebration of the Now and the Not Yet.
Jesus is here. He can hear us. He is with us. You will find him in your own heart, and in the work of your own hands. And so I shout to you: Hosanna in the highest!
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Preached on Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, Year A, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, April 5, 2020.
Matthew 26:14-27:66
Work consulted: Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Dartman, Longman and Todd Ltd., 1982).