Palm Sunday – 13 April 2025

As Christians we can try to come to terms with our discomfort over the cruelty and brutality of Christ’s passion by telling ourselves that really, at heart, it was a divine mystery, that Christ freely chose to be crucified for reasons known only to the mind of God.  But that is not true.  Christ did not want to be crucified anymore than you or I would.  The Gospel tells us that in Gethsemane he sweat blood at the thought of what was about to happen.  No, Christ did not choose to be crucified.  Rather, he chose to be faithful, even if it meant being crucified.  It is that fidelity that saves humankind, not the suffering to which that fidelity led.  The crucifixion was purely and simply human violence, at its most brutal, most mindless.  Christ was really only one among hundreds of millions over the centuries who have fallen victim to human violence.

That is what disturbs us about this Passion narrative.  We see ourselves: we see our human nature pictured there.  We see a picture of people just like us: honest, sincere, intelligent people, grown so dull, so insensitive that they are capable not only of violently destroying one another, but capable even of doing so easily, even with a sense of having acted rightly.  The Passion narrative shows us a human society grown comfortable with its brutality, a society capable of executing the Son of God, and doing so quite legally, quite respectably.  A society capable of congratulating itself afterward for having done what had to be done.

Certainly, it is true since then humankind has grown some.  We have at least recognised that Christ is the Son of God.

Humanity is at least no longer proud of what it did on Calvary.  But on the whole, we are today only a little less comfortable with evil than were the crowds in Pilate’s court.  Far from being outraged by brutality, we actually entertain ourselves with it, in hour after endless hour of mindless, heartless television.  We are only a little more sensitive than was Pilate to the presence of God in the people we hurt physically, emotionally, economically.  We are only a little more willing than was he to involve ourselves in the risky process of preventing that hurt.  We today still approach Christ and one another forearmed with a set of expectations and demands.

And as long as the one we approach fulfils those expectations, meets those demands, we are accepting enough.  But let him/her deviate just a little, let him/her be something other than what we want, and we are still brutally quick to crucify.

Over this Holy Week, as we retrace the events of the last few days of the life of Christ, let us honestly determine to keep strong in our own lives the meaning of the palms.  Because if we do not greet one another with the palm, we shall surely do so with the Cross. Fr Andrew