“I tell you, if they keep silent,
the stones will cry out!” (Lk 19:40)
Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt that has never been ridden. He is a humble man, riding toward his own humiliation and torture and death. He embraces this shameful end as a raising up that will draw all people to himself. He is a king, riding into his own city.
Mother Marija of Holy Annunciation Monastery recently wrote to me about the icon for Palm Sunday, a copy of which we sent them along with our notes of commiseration and prayer over the events in Ukraine. She describes the icon as “beautiful, precious and so tender – a child feeding the donkey, others spreading garments and cutting boughs,” saying that it reminds her of the Cherubic Hymn:
“We who mystically represent the Cherubim,
and who sing to the Life-Giving Trinity the thrice-holy hymn,
let us now lay aside all earthly cares
that we may receive the King of all,
escorted invisibly by the angelic orders.
Alleluia”
“The Cherubic Hymn means Palm Sunday! In every Byzantine Liturgy, it marks the end of the Liturgy of the Word and is the transition to Anaphora [the Eucharistic Prayer]. This Hymn also signals the Great Entrance of the Gifts (a liturgical re-enactment of Our Lord’s Palm Sunday entrance into the City to begin our redemption). The music is very majestic – a call to welcome and accompany our Lord on his way to Good Friday.”
In many places, the celebration of Palm Sunday includes a procession through the streets with a figure of Jesus on the donkey. Jesus rides into every place, every situation, every heart, pushing on into unknown territory, to the limits of human experience. He comes riding into every city, whether burned out by bombs, or silenced by strict lockdown, constrained by oppression, consumed by hunger or set alight by revolt, whether in Ukraine, China, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Central African Republic, Palestine, Libya, Hong Kong, Tigray, Syria, Kazakhstan, Democratic Republic of the Congo or the USA. He is a king, riding into his own city. Let us not keep silent, but like the disciples, like living stones, cry out that the Jesus who rides into the depths of our hearts rides into every other place also, reconciling the world to himself.
“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me;
weep instead for yourselves and for your children.” (Lk 23:28)
In Luke’s Passion account, Jesus says this to the women who are watching him carry his cross. It is worth pondering in light of the liturgy’s focus on grief for the suffering and death of Christ. We sing verses from the Book of Lamentations during Vigils of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. This series of five lament songs was composed for Jerusalem besieged and conquered, its temple destroyed, its population exiled or living amid the wreckage. It is fittingly applied to the destruction of the man Jesus, God’s Son, who is everything that we hoped for from the Lord. We mourn for him as for an only Son. But the poems’ imagery is transparent to the events of our own day. Doing lectio with this book during Lent, the association with the devastation in Ukraine was inescapable. And this too is fitting. We do not weep for Christ only, but for all who, in him, suffer the unimaginable pain of seeing their homeland laid waste, their loved ones slaughtered or displaced, and their hopes for the future like the shells of ruined tanks lining the streets.
“Cry aloud to the Lord!
O daughter of Zion!
Let tears stream down like a torrent
day and night!
Give yourself no rest,
your eyes no respite!
Arise, cry out in the night,
at the beginning of the watches!
Pour out your heart like water
before the presence of the Lord!
Lift your hands to him
for the lives of your children,
who faint for hunger
at the head of every street.” (Lam 2:18-19)
One challenging aspect of these poems is how they unflinchingly point to God as the agent of destruction in punishment for sin. God is an enemy who turns his hand against them, a bear lying in wait, a lion in hiding, an archer who pierces their vitals with his arrows. We find such language shocking, particularly in reference to what we consider innocent suffering, perhaps all the more in reference to Christ, who cried: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” But the poet takes it in stride, finding in catastrophic suffering purposeful divine activity. I was grateful to read in the notes to the bibles I consulted this explanation: that Judaism’s absolute monotheism allows for no evil deity to take the blame for what goes wrong. If something happens, whether good or evil, only God has power to allow or to prevent it. And we do not need to defend God, to acquit him of wrongdoing. As Fr Gabriel once said to me, God is big enough to take criticism, even blasphemy, with a tap of his cigar. What he has permitted, he will bring good from, though we know not how. In the context of such brutal honesty, we need not fear our feelings of anger and frustration, outrage and disgust. Our Scriptures give us permission to challenge God, to cry out to him about the suffering of his people, calling upon him to set things right, to bring an end to his wrath, to remember his mercy which never comes to an end.
“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34)
A professor of moral theology who taught me in graduate school once surprised the class by asking out of the blue what the crucifixion of Jesus means. Shock! Horror! What a question! He was greeted by a mumbling of half-baked ideas from those who thought they knew the answer but had never been tested. The main theme of the responses was “love” – Jesus on the cross shows us how much God loves us. The professor chose to respond to this well-meaning and inoffensive reply with an objection: is that all? What about sin and its consequences? What about the appalling suffering of the world from Cain and Abel until our own day? What about my own complicity in the sin and suffering of the world? Does the cross have anything to say about that?
He went on to speak of the public reading of the Passion during Holy Week. When questioned by Pilate about what to do with Jesus, the crowd (and that’s us) responds “Crucify him! Crucify him!” It’s interesting that we delegate that unpleasant task our guests. He then came to the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, suggesting that at the moment we kiss the feet of the dead Christ, we might bring to mind a sin, a personal sin. Someone objected that this would make people feel guilty, when they should be feeling…love, gratitude? Yes, but is that all? His response: the feeling of guilt for sin is appropriate. If we have not sinned, what on earth do we have to do with a crucified Lord? If we identify ourselves only with the innocent sufferers of the world, if we think Jesus came to relieve us of our suffering and our guilt, but not our sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and we have no part with him. Christian de Cherge, when contemplating his own martyrdom, was clear-eyed about this:
“I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems to prevail so terribly in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.”
This week we go toward the Passion and death of Christ, finding in it the passion and death of all people, contained; finding in it the sin of the world and our sin, brought to nothing. Let us witness to Jesus riding into every corner of our lives and world: into every besieged city, every miserable slum, every neglected nursing home, there to be proclaimed king and to suffer and die with and for his people. Our Holy Week liturgy leads us deep into this suffering and invites us to cry out in grief for all that is not as it should be, to the God whose mercies never come to an end. Our participation should be personal, which means acknowledging our complicity, our part in the evil which strikes us down. What we have to offer the crucified Lord is not our innocence, but our heartfelt sorrow, for our sins and those of the whole world, that we may be washed in his blood, and so made clean.