The Rev’d Armando Ghinaglia
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
March 28, 2021
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This Palm Sunday, we’ve entered into Jerusalem with Jesus, we’ve heard the crowds herald his coming, we’ve heard them call out to him as the Messiah. But by the end of our gospel reading today, we’ve reached his passion, crucifixion, and death. Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter.
It’s notable that, with just one exception, all of Jesus’s male disciples have fled. Only the women remain: “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome,” and “many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.” The men have all felt the need to abscond, to save themselves. And I don’t mean that meanly or irreverently. Maybe they were afraid they were next. That’s certainly possible. Maybe they just couldn’t bear the sight of their friend strung up on a tree. How many of us could?
But the women—the women stay. And even though they are at “a distance,” they are “looking on.” They have not turned their eyes away from his suffering or the suffering of the world. More than that, as we hear in Saint John’s version of these events, Jesus’s own mother is there, looking on with them. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.”
That should sound familiar to us. After Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, demanded that he be brought back to Chicago, where she insisted on showing his mutilated body to the world: “Let the people see what they did to my boy.” “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
Their call to us, as with any memorial erected to remember suffering, is one and the same: “Look and see.”
But looking and seeing aren’t enough by themselves. The Romans looked and saw. The white men who killed Emmett Till looked and saw, too. Throughout history and even now, plenty of people look upon and see lynchings and murders and atrocities. They take pictures. They create souvenirs. They send postcards. They shoot videos. They satisfy their cravings, and their hearts swell with cruelty and lust. And they care not one bit for the suffering they inflict. In the rare event they are held to account, they wail for their own misery over and above the misery they have brought upon others.
Looking and seeing isn’t enough. But it’s a start. So long as we close our eyes, so long as we avert our gaze, we can avoid confronting things as they are—in this world, at least. We retreat to our dens even as we hear Abel crying from the field. And yet, as God says to Cain in Genesis, “Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!” We don’t need the story to tell us what it is that God hears from the land. It’s the same timeless cry: “Look and see.” That’s the Lord’s own cry as he hangs on the cross, quoting from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Or as the Greek puts it, “My God, my God, look upon me”—pay attention to me, draw near to me—“why hast thou forsaken me?” Look and see. Look and see.
Why? Surely not out of some morbid curiosity or fascination with pain and death; after all, Jesus comes that we might have life and have it abundantly.
But to look upon suffering in the world is to break ourselves out of our delusions: that we might find a way to save ourselves, that we might expect justice in full in this life, that this world is our home. And to look upon suffering in the person of Jesus is to break ourselves out of a final delusion: that God doesn’t care. When we look at the cross, it’s true that we see an innocent man condemned to be executed by the state for daring to challenge a kingdom founded on oppression and violence. But for us as Christians, what we also see is God sharing in the world’s suffering that he might transform it and make us new. As the image of Christ says in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, “It was to be trampled on by [others] that I was born into this world. It was to share their pain that I carried my cross.”
As Christians, we know that the story doesn’t end there. We know that the God who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to our mortal bodies also. We know that sin and death have no dominion over us, even though we live as though they do so often. We know that Easter is coming soon—and with it, the Resurrection, and vindication for the oppressed and judgment for the oppressor, and life everlasting and the joys of heaven. And nothing should deprive us of looking forward to these things by faith with great longing.
But for now, we are in Passiontide. Jesus’s ultimate triumph over death does not make his suffering—or that of the world—any less real. So may we look and see. May we take our place alongside the women who followed Jesus to the last. May we stand with them and with those in every generation who have borne witness to human dignity and God’s presence in the midst of utter inhumanity.
Long ago, Archbishop Michael Ramsey wrote that
Like the Christ, the Church is sent to execute a twofold work in the face of [human] sufferings . . .; to seek to alleviate them, to heal them and to remove them, since they are hateful to God—yet, when they are overwhelming and there is no escape from them, to transfigure them and use them as the raw material of love . . . [that they might] become the place where the power of God is known.
May we do likewise.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.