Liturgy of the Palms/Passion (Year B) + Alone, in love + 3.25.18

(http://frcharliehughes.blogspot.com/2011/08/)

M. Campbell-Langdell+

Imagine the scene.  The songs have died down in the air.  The palms are strewn around the streets that have cooled from the heat of the day.  You can still feel the electricity of the crowd and the procession in the air. Or was it from the protests?  But anyway, Jesus is once more alone.  Jesus is alone—the coats laid down in the street for him to pass have been picked up and dusted off, coats that will turn against him so soon, so very soon. Soon the happy songs will turn to the shouts of a violent crowd. 
So, alone on that quiet street, imagine him.  See our humble king as the man he is in that moment.  Before the disciples fold him back into the fellowship and the stories. There is a part he must walk alone.

Sometimes we see individuals walking a hard road alone in examples during our daily lives. During Lent I have been reading Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved in which a young woman diagnosed with terminal cancer faces her mortality and along with it all the pat answers for bad things that some Christian folks say. And she says about grief that it isn’t always as much about what you failed to do as much as about what you might miss in the future. She says: “I used to think that grief was about looking backward, old men saddled with regrets or young ones pondering should-haves. I see now that it is about eyes squinting through tears into an unbearable future. The world cannot be remade by the sheer force of love. A brutal world demands capitulation to what seems impossible-separation. Brokeness. An end without ending.”[1]

Is this a bit of what Jesus experienced in these last days and hours of his life? And end without ending, facing a future without him in it in the same way? Of course, if we skip to the end of the story, we know that there is more to it. A lot more. But if we stay with him, for a moment, can we hold his pain with him for a just a beat?

Can we listen to this passion gospel unfold, with its horrors and its bravery and the insights it holds, and say, Jesus, I will watch and pray with you this week?

This is not cancer we are talking about, but Jesus’ entry in Jerusalem is just as dangerous. Soon all the wonderful praises lifted up to him today will be hurled back at him as insults and charges of blasphemy. How can he call himself the Son of God?  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

Jesus was so focused on relationships—on being with his disciples and teaching them, some of the most powerful moments of which we will relive on Thursday with our Foot washing and remembering of the Last Supper in the Eucharist.  Jesus also focused on his Word--on the words shared with his disciples, words that continue to nurture and instruct us. 
So draw your hearts close to the tale that continues.  We know the end of the story, but don’t jump there yet. 

Be there as we learn from the bravery of this dying man, facing the end with love.  Meditate on his word as we strive to be in relationship with him.    

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[1] Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved (NY: Random House, 2018), p.69.