Homily for Palm Sunday

Homily for Palm Sunday

March 28, 2021
Psalm 22
OL of the Assumption, Bronx, N.Y.                                                          

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Ps 22: 2; Mark 15: 34).

Isenheim altarpiece (Matthias Gruenewald)

Echoing Ps 22, Jesus cries out on the cross in what seems like despair.  They’re the last words he speaks in Mark’s Gospel until after his resurrection.  It’s rather a different record than that given by either St. Luke or St. John.

Ps 22 records the sufferings and disgrace of a just man.  So does the 1st reading this afternoon, which is one of what are known as the “servant songs” from the prophet Isaiah.  Both Ps 22 and the 4 servant songs foretell the passion of Christ in some detail, the sorts of prophecy to which the Risen Christ alludes when he speaks with 2 disciples on the road to Emmaus on the day of his resurrection (Luke 24).

Both the psalm and Isaiah also speak of the confidence in God of the person who’s suffering:  “I will proclaim your name to my brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you” (Ps 22:23).  “The Lord God is my help; therefore I am not disgraced” (Is 50:7).  Jesus also had that confidence in his Father, without which he would’ve fled from being arrested and put on trial.  His Father, therefore—who allowed him to feel so abandoned—vindicated him by raising him from the dead.  Our 2d reading last Sunday, from the Letter to the Hebrews, reminded us that Christ had “offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (5:7), i.e., God delivered him from death thru resurrection.

Did you wonder in the last year whether God has abandoned us?  Without doubt, March 2020 to today has been a very discouraging year for humanity.  New York has suffered as much as anywhere from the pandemic.  But besides that, people in too many places to list continue to suffer religious persecution, ethnic and racial discrimination, the violence of civil war, gang violence, violence from drug lords, and political oppression.  Just this morning, 2 terrorists blew themselves up at the entrance of a cathedral in Indonesia.  Our country remains susceptible to gun violence from deranged individuals.  In our country we use abortion to eliminate hundreds of thousands of people every year.  Other forms of illness and death—cancer, heart disease, car accidents—remain with us.

Where is God?

He’s in the same place he was while his only Son was dying on the cross.  In his First Letter, St. Peter wrote to early Christians:  “Christ suffered for you and left you an example, to have you follow in his footsteps.  He did no wrong….  When he was made to suffer, … he delivered himself up to the One who judges justly.  In his own body, he brought your sins to the cross, so that all of us, dead to sin, could live in accord with God’s will.  By his wounds you were healed” (2:21-24).

Thru whatever agonies, pains, and losses we’ve experienced in the last year—or at any time in our lives—we’re following in the footsteps of God’s Son.  Unlike us, he was completely innocent of any sin and didn’t deserve to suffer anything.  But in his incomprehensible love for us, he chose to accept all the risks and terrors of the human condition, however unjust, so that he might be truly and entirely one of us and might take us to himself.

He will take us to himself to “live in accord with God’s will.”  His wounds and his death are our healing, our redemption.  Therefore we prayed in today’s Collect, “Graciously grant that we may heed our Savior’s lesson of patient suffering and so merit a share in his resurrection.”  Amen!