Homily for Palm/Passion Sunday, Year B
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

Passing from one celebration to another,
from palms and branches let us now make haste, O faithful,
to the solemn and saving celebration of Christ’s Passion.
Let us see Him undergo voluntary suffering for our sake,
and let us sing to Him with thankfulness a fitting hymn:
Fountain of tender mercy and haven of salvation:
O Lord, glory to You!

(lyrics: Motet for Passion Sunday, composed by Frank Ferko)

We are, on this day and even in the past hour, passing from one celebration to another.

The culture around us has been “celebrating” a jelly beans-and-marshmallow-peeps laden Easter since the last red heart-shaped box of chocolates left the grocery store check-outs on Valentine’s Ash Wednesday. Advent calendars as a lead up to Christmas have developed a sort of cultural adaptation, but the lenten fast…not so much.

But here we are, Church. We are waving our palm branches and processing with Hosanna’s one moment and the next, standing in the midst of a recitation of the Passion Gospel where our voices, too, echo the crowd’s changing refrain from messianic adoration to the leering cheer of condemnation, “crucify him.”

This jarring change of destination is one that we instinctively do not want to travel. We yearn for a different changing of celebrations that is more palatable, like the smooth transition from candy hearts to chocolate bunnies. We’d much rather have the loud chorus of “Hosanna” shift to “Alleluia!” again. But there is still a road that needs to be traveled, friends. And just because we choose not to walk it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

This walk through Holy Week with Jesus is a narrower path that will make us confront our fears, that will rend our hearts, that will change our song from one of selfish expectation to one of soul-wrenching injustice…eventually overcome and transformed by unbounded, unfathomable love. We are, indeed, passing from one celebration to another: one which starts with shouts of human-initiated hope for tangible triumph and the other which culminates with God-initiated salvation for hearts broken open. Participating with the crowd in the first triumphal entry requires very little of us. The second walk to the cross demands much more. It requires us to risk our human comfort as we walk together into God’s vision of divine mercy and grace. That transforming love wasn’t free, painless, or socially supported. It was costly, excruciating, and solitary. It was, and is, the gift to surpass all gifts.

Being truly present with Jesus through the journey of this Passion narrative changes us, in ways that we cannot know right now. That’s perhaps the most frightening part for us, if we’re honest about it. We like to have control. We know the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection so we can control how much of it we deeply experience. We have faith to proclaim Easter even in the midst of Lent. But we don’t know what shifting our other life priorities aside and centering the celebration of Jesus’ outpouring of love, his betrayal, his humiliation and death will mean for us. Where will we be during Holy Week? What roads are we willing for our hearts, minds, bodies and souls to travel not out of convenience or even obligation, but out of love?

It’s not a rhetorical question.

We will choose every day this week what we do with this passing of holy time demarcating a Holy Week. On what images will our hearts and minds be fixed? Where will we put our bodies? With whom will we journey in solidarity of spirit as we honor Jesus’ journey of suffering and death at the hands of humanity, the very people whom God loved so much that he came to join with, live with and love profoundly, even to the point of death? Will it be with the disciples? With Judas first sharing bread with Jesus and then in his betrayal; With Peter in his denial; With Mary his Mother in her anguish; With secret followers like Joseph of Arimathea carrying a broken and beaten body to a tomb that had been dug for another; With Mary Magdalene in both grief and belief even while others disbelieved her resurrection witness? With those who, like Jesus, are oppressed at the hands of earthly powers and subjected to injustice and violence in this world and yet stand firm in the hope of God’s salvation which is beyond human understanding?

Wherever and with whomever we journey in this solemn celebration, we will be changed.

Transformed.

I opened today and will close again with the words of a choral anthem that I sang one Palm/Passion Sunday well over a decade ago now that forever altered my experience of this entry into Holy Week. The composer, Frank Ferko, wrote this motet based on a Byzantine chant for Palm Sunday vespers, sung as the sun sets on the day of triumphal entry and we begin this journey together into the depths of Holy Week. And we will journey together, if we choose to. I need you. You and I need all the others making this journey as well. So, I invite you to choose to make the journey and share in solidarity this solemn and saving celebration of Christ’s Passion. And together, we allow ourselves and encourage one another to open to transformation…to walk through the valley of the shadow of death into the unknown mystery so that we can be Christ’s transforming presence in this world, in all the spaces, places and people in need of divine love, mercy and grace. In that divine love dawns the light of resurrection.

Passing from one celebration to another,
from palms and branches let us now make haste, O faithful,
to the solemn and saving celebration of Christ’s Passion.
Let us see Him undergo voluntary suffering for our sake,
and let us sing to Him with thankfulness a fitting hymn:
Fountain of tender mercy and haven of salvation:
O Lord, glory to You!