The Sunday of the Passion
March 28, 2021
Sermon by the Rev. Bernadette Hartsough
Good morning. It is good to be here in person-to wave our palm branches. It is good to be in this place. I think the crowd that welcomed Jesus thought the same thing. It was good to be in Jerusalem for the Passover festival. The atmosphere was festive. It was good to prepare, be with family, and to remember God’s promises given so long ago. There was hope in the air. This Jesus-he would bring salvation to the Jewish people. He would bring freedom. He would restore the Jewish nation. People would no longer be subject to Roman taxes and Roman rule. There was hope. So much hope and praise for Jesus that everyone surrounded him when he came into the city.
As the week progresses, Jesus goes from being surrounded by crowds to being surrounded by close friends. Then he is alone except for a few women. A few women who stand and watch him carry the cross, watch him be crucified. They watch him endure the pain, the humiliation, and the loneliness. The atmosphere in Jerusalem for Jesus’s disciples changes quickly.
It is hard to listen to the passion of Jesus. It is difficult to retell and to hear and to imagine. It is hard to see how easily the crowds go from praising him to condemning him. We must retell the story and be consciously reminded of the passion. It is easy to want to jump to Easter and slide through this week. Sometimes we can become so familiar with the passion that it doesn’t affect us anymore. We are so used to seeing crosses that we forget the instrument of torture that it was. A generation or two after Jesus, early Christians did not venerate the cross. The cross and the death of Jesus was still too raw-too gruesome and too frightening. In the early catacombs, Jesus is represented with Greek letters or with the sign of fish not with the cross. For us, 2,000 years removed from the Passion, we need the retelling and the symbols.
We must stay conscious of the passion of our Lord. We must see the man-Jesus. As we see Jesus the man- we continue to stay conscious of the dignity in other human beings.We must see the man or the woman. When I use the phrase, “See the Man,” I am speaking about men and women. I am speaking about seeing the image of God in others. “Seeing the Man” is respecting the life of the other. It is seeing where dignity is stripped from others. Dignity is allowing others to make a living wage. A living wage that gives enough money to pay rent, utilities, buy food, and to have money left over to rest. It is allowing others to live in safe cities and towns without fear. It is being sure that all men, women, and children can see a doctor when they are sick, can get vaccinated, and can afford cancer treatments. Inequalities in income are a problem but the rich have their problems too. Their money does not define their humanity. We need to see beyond their money and accept them for who they are. Seeing the man or the woman is seeing the other as a person and caring for their well-being. It is walking with them and listening to their story. Seeing the man opens our eyes so that we can look past age, gender, race, sex, income. When we see the man-we see ourselves united with other humans and with God through Jesus.
When we see the man, we can see the best and worst of the human condition. We see the reality of what is happening today. In the last two weeks, we have had two mass shootings. Eight people were gunned down in three spas in the Atlanta area and ten in a grocery store in Boulder. We can close our eyes to these tragedies. We can tell ourselves that these shooting happened in Atlanta and Boulder not in Plymouth Indiana. We can pray for the victims. We can pray for the shooters. And we can make it about political divisions. We can argue over gun control and our Second Amendment rights. But do we “SEE” the men and women who have been shot? Do we see their families? Sometimes I feel as though I am so accustomed to gun violence that I have blinders on, and it doesn’t affect me anymore. Whatever we believe about guns, we all know that gun violence and mass shootings are wrong. I don’t have the answer to stop gun violence. That is something that we as a society must work on together. I do try to keep my eyes open by reading about the victims to remember their lives.
I think this violence is affecting all of us. It is affecting how we relate to others. It breeds mistrust and fear. It wants to pull us away from each other and blind us to the pain and suffering of others. We need to see the man. It starts with seeing Jesus betrayed, condemned, tortured, and murdered. Jesus was stripped of all material possessions and of who he was as an earthly man. In Jesus, we see that he doesn’t serve God and humanity based on artificial constructions of identity. He doesn’t put others down. He doesn’t condemn others. He doesn’t act because of what he will get out of the relationship. He doesn’t need to make others look bad to make himself feel good. In Jesus we see the fully human image of God.
This Holy Week we take off our superficial human created identities. We stand equal before the cross. Our vocation, our money, our race, doesn’t matter. As we live into this week, we must see and experience the man. As we see Jesus, we see the most fully human part of ourselves.
But if we fail to see Jesus as the man -fully human hanging on the cross then we fail to see ourselves in the crowd praising him and then condemning him. My prayer for all of us this week is that we see the man. We hear his cry. We feel his pain. As we see the man Jesus, may we also see our brothers and sisters throughout the world who are suffering, crying, pleading, and begging for our eyes to be open.