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Palm Sunday
April 1, 2007 Sermon by The Rev. Bill Van Oss, Rector
Readings

Back in the Spring of 2004, Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ” debuted. I had read quite a bit about the film and seen interviews with Gibson, and I was reluctant to see the movie. But knowing I’d be facing lots of questions from church members and family, I reluctantly saw it.

I should have trusted my instincts. It was very, very difficult for me to sit through the violence, especially the violence of the scourging scene. It was gruesome and gratuitous. It seemed to last forever. I ended up closing my eyes, because I knew that the point of Jesus’ act of love was not for me to sit and watch it, like some kind of voyeur.

Jesus’ suffering is not meant to be watched, or even simply listened to, as we have done today. Jesus’ suffering is meant to be entered into – we are invited to share in Christ’s human suffering, so that we might weep for the suffering and brokenness of our world – and be agents of healing it.

Jesus was able to see the world as it was meant to be – a place of peace, justice, hope and love – and His suffering was rooted in how broken and shattered the world was, and is.

Nowhere in the accounts of Jesus’ pass and death do we perceive Jesus saying, “Look at me, look at how much I suffered for you, look at how many lashes I could bear.” As a matter of fact, Jesus says quite the opposite, especially in Luke’s account:

Jesus tells the weeping daughters of Jerusalem to weep for themselves and for their children and not for Him. The tortured Lukan Jesus asks forgiveness for his executioners, “For they do not know what they are doing.” The suffering Jesus confidently promises a place in paradise to the repentant thief.

In the midst of his suffering, the Lukan Jesus continues to heal, this is the point of his torture and execution. Watching Gibson’s Jesus endlessly flogged and walking away from the film saying, “Boy that was really rough for poor Jesus” misses the point completely.

Love was tortured and crucified to show us the depth of God’s love for us sinners and for our broken world. Jesus’ crucifixion is about the extravagant cost of our forgiveness, and also our responsibility to tend to the wounds of our broken, shattered, suffering world.

Use the story of the passion you just heard today as a lens through which you see the world – use this passion story to help you feel the brokenness and suffering in your own life and in our world and become an agent of healing, as Jesus was right to the very end, an agent of healing and forgiveness.




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