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Scripture: Matthew

Prayer: We give thanks, O God, for sacred stories. Through the holy scriptures you nurture our imaginations, increase our awareness, and challenge our assumptions. May the words of my mouth and meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

There is a legend about Marco Polo. On his famous trip to the Far East, he was seized by the dreadful conqueror Genghis Khan. While in captivity Marco Polo became desperate for conversation, so he began telling Genghis Khan the story of Jesus, straight out of the Gospel of Matthew. The conqueror liked the story and listened closely. When Marco Polo came to the events of Holy Week and told of Jesus’ betrayal, trial, scourging, and crucifixion, the fearsome Genghis Khan became more and more agitated. Marco Polo continued with the story saying, “And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.” The Turk couldn’t contain himself and exclaimed, “What did the Christian God do then? Did their God send thousands of legions from heaven to smite and destroy those who had treated Jesus so brutally?” Marco Polo’s answer clearly disappointed Genghis Khan, who did NOT convert to Christianity.

I tell you this legend to remind us how we often take the story of the death of Jesus for granted. The story is so familiar to us that we have forgotten its shock. Of course God did not send any legions-- that is not how the story goes. Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and three days later was raised from the dead to show us that all who believe in him would not perish but have eternal life. End of the story. Silly ole Genghis Khan. Silly anyone who does not know the story. But, how well do we really know the story, we who have always known it? We have heard it more than a hundred times, but always with the last page and the last two thousand years of interpretation in mind. Who can remember the first time you heard the story? Can you recall the suspense, the outrage, the grief, the wonder?

The reason we have Holy Week, beginning today, is to remember, to endure the story of the death of Jesus in gory detail. We are invited to walk with Jesus and the disciples every step of the way—with no knowledge of next Sunday, no knowledge of empty tombs or resurrections, but only of gathering doom, and threatening weather, and the smell of death all around. We are asked to forget what we know and to follow our Lord to his wretched death without a clue what will happen next, because it is only then, when we have shared even a splinter of his cross, that he has anything more to offer us. It is our final Lenten discipline and it is hard, extremely hard. Not only because we know what will happen next—but also because it is so very painful to make ourselves stop and notice it like someone who is seeing it all happen for the first time.

What a catalogue of grief it is. What an account of complete failure of the friends and family and all those following from a distance, beginning with Gethsemane. Gethsemane means “olive press,” a device in which the fruit of the gnarled olive tree is crushed to produce fragrant oil. Jesus had just come from supper with his friends, where he had passed a cup of wine around and called it his blood. It might as well be a winepress in that garden, for the fruit of his short life was about to be crushed in fulfillment of the scriptures. And Jesus was praying with all his strength, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” His disciples had seen Jesus’ grief and sadness before but never his fear. He had always been their leader: the teacher, the rabbi, the miracle worker. What had come over him? Something dreadful, that he should turn to them and ask for help. It was late and the meal was sumptuous. So they slept, certain that their master was still in control, sure that no one could pull a fast one on the son of God. He woke them before the torches did, torches and a tangle of angry voices. The failures followed from that point in quick succession: Judas’ betrayal, the disciples’ desertion, Peter’s denial, the court’s conviction, the crowd’s choice of Barabbas.

And so it came to pass that Jesus was scourged and hung on the cross. He refused the blindfold; he refused the cheap wine laced with myrrh that might have numbed him and let him die in a haze. He chose instead to feel everything he could feel, including the worst possible human pain, until he could feel no longer. If he asks us to do the same, it is because he knows there is no way around the pain, only through it. That knowledge cost him a great deal, cost him so much that his last words in this life were, “My God, my God, why?” And that is as far as we get, for this week.

If you are anything like me, the almost unbearable pain is the suspicion of my own participation in this drama. In some churches it is the custom to read the whole passion narrative out loud on Palm Sunday. Someone is Pilate and someone is Peter and the crowd is the congregation. The crowd’s lines are labeled “All,” and what all are given to say is, “He deserves death,” “Let him be crucified, “ and, with cruel sarcasm, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And what are the odds, if I had actually been there, with the crowd facing Pilate, that I would have said those things. Or that I would have been just like the disciples and turned tail and ran for my life. Yet maybe we have done just that in our lives? Do I love God with my whole heart? Do you love your neighbor as yourself? Do I recognize Christ in everyone I meet? Of course not. We go about our business, which is mostly the business of self-preservation, just as Peter did when he insisted, “I swear it, I do not know the man.”

However, my purpose today is not to rub salt in our wounds. Of course we betray him, of course we are sinners, of course we fall short of the glory of God. The most dreadful line in the passion story is “His blood be on us and our children,” and, of course it is. But the very great, the very mysterious, the most holy surprise is that Jesus took that murderous fact and turned it into the occasion of our kinship with him. Let me explain. Everything we have said up to this point is celebrated in the sacrament of holy communion, in which we are invited to eat and drink the body, the blood of Christ. Have we also taken this for granted? The children don’t. When my daughter, Abbe was in Godspell her sophomore year, I went to almost every performance. One night I heard a child gasped with disgust when Jesus said to his disciples at the Last Supper, “This is my blood.” Who could blame the child? Who, without the benefit of theological metaphor, would willingly drink? I’m sure that the parents were able to explain to the child that it was really wine or grape juice in the cup. And maybe the parents were wise enough to tell the child that the words meant Jesus was sharing his life with them in a special way so they would always remember that moment.

Yet, for the disciples, most of them Jewish, the image that Jesus gave them that night had to have been awful. God had said to the prophets, “I take no pleasure in your blood sacrifices.” The image of eating flesh and drinking blood were reserved for one’s worst enemies, for those whom you wished dead, or who wished you were dead. How Judas must have squirmed in his seat, sure that the whole scene was being acted out to point the finger at him. But from anyone’s perspective, the whole idea was a scandal—that Jesus should bless those symbols of death and persecution and then ask his friends to accept them as symbols of life and fellowship. It was crazy. Or a bad joke. Or to look at it another way, it was as if Jesus already knew what was about to happen to him. As if he already knew that in the end he would walk alone to his death. It was his way of showing them ahead of time that he bore them no malice, that his love for them was stronger than death, and that he required no more of them except for them to be who they were, and to be loved by him.

You see, he knew the truth about them and he knows the truth about us—that we aren’t very good at loving, that we fall asleep when we are most needed, that we fail to respond to calls for help, and we abandon him when the going gets tough. That is half the story. The other half is that knowing the whole truth about us does nothing to diminish his love for us. That is the whole story of Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, the betrayal, the trial, the passion. Whether or not we recognize our participation in Christ’s death, the sacrament of holy communion lets us know—gently, insistently, radically—that we are forgiven before we ever turn away from him. Which means that nothing can separate us from Christ, not guilt, not failure, not sorrow, nor remorse. All of those have been blessed ahead of time and turned into the food and drink of forgiveness. What might have been just a bloody tragedy has become for us the heart of our faith, the story and symbols of our membership in the body of Christ. Because Jesus forgives us before we ever turn away, the road back to him is always open. There is nothing finally in our way.

Let us, then, keep Jesus company this week and stay awake with him, and forsaking our own comfort, walk with him as far as we can. Today’s gospel story ends bitterly. It leaves Christ dead upon the cross, and while everything in us wants to rush ahead to the Easter affirmation that he is risen and he will come again, for this week at least we are asked to stay with him where he is. We are asked to share his story and his pain like someone who is experiencing it all for the first time—like Ghengis Khan, like a child—and to be hurt by it, healed by it, and absolutely amazed by it.

Amen.