by Fr Gabriel Everitt OSB
The Palm Sunday liturgy must be one of the most dramatic in the course of the church’s year. It begins most unusually with a ceremony and procession recalling Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and it continues with the long dramatic reading of the Passion of the Lord, this year taken from St Mark. The fact that we took part in the procession, suggests that we are not just spectators in these events, but participants and more particularly that we take the part of the crowd around Jesus in his final days. I would like to suggest that the drama in which we take part is in three acts.
Firstly, there is a joyful act. That is the moment of the triumphal entry. We the crowd are cheering, as though welcoming the coming of a king. So in the main hall we heard in the first gospel reading that all those who followed were shouting ‘Hosanna! Blessings on him who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessings on the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest heavens!’ Jesus himself seems to accept this role of king; in one of the most dramatic moments of the later Passion gospel, to the high priest’s question ‘Are you the Christ?’ – that is the anointed one, the king, Jesus answers very directly and forcefully ‘I am’.
Then secondly, there is a long sorrowful act, which is the dramatic reading of the Passion. If again, we identify especially with the crowd, then our role has most shockingly changed. Now we reject and crucify the King we had been greeting so shortly before. The drama is caught in the third verse of the Passiontide hymn ‘My Song is Love Unknown’: Sometimes they strew His way, And His sweet praises sing; Resounding all the day Hosannas to their King: Then “Crucify!” Is all their breath, And for His death They thirst and cry.
This shout, changed from hosanna to crucify, is horribly echoed by the soldiers, who in their mockey after Pilate’s sentence of death dress Jesus in a purple robe and crown of thorns shouting in derision ‘Hail King of the Jews’. It is again echoed under the cross by the mockery of the passers-by: ‘Let the Christ, the king of Israel come down from the cross now’. Jesus’ response to the horror of this abandonment by his people, who had been crying hosanna, is in his agony in the garden – ‘Take this cup away from me’ – and then most dreadfully of all as he seems abandoned by God too, in his only cry, according to Mark, from the cross ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ We spectate and take part in indeed a sorrowful act.
This all seems rather clear. But then I think there is a third act, but this one is much more difficult to discern and to take part in, it is a gift of faith. It is hard to discern, because we have not yet fully witnessed or taken part in it, it is seen only as a ‘puzzling reflection in a mirror’. In the gospels we have heard, it is only hinted at in strange and enigmatic phrases. It is the third cry, following ‘Hosanna’ and ‘Crucify’ and it is the cry which has not yet been fully uttered.
There are three enigmatic hints, I think, which point us to this third act, we have not yet seen. The first is at the beginning of Mark’s Passion story when he says of the woman who anoints Jesus ‘wherever throughout all the world, the gospel is proclaimed, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her’. The second hint is in Jesus’ equally strange words over the cup at the Last Supper ‘I shall not drink any more wine until the day I drink the new wine in the kingdom of God’. The third hint is in the words of the centurion after the death of Jesus ‘Truly this man was the Son of God’.
Why on earth do I think that this three strange and hard to understand phrases are pointers to a third act and what is the real nature of the cry of this third act? Firstly it is that this strange and apparently terrible story – the cry of joy turning to that of sorrow and horror will nonetheless become a ‘gospel’ that is a good news, which will be proclaimed in all the world. Secondly it is that even in the horror of abandonment of ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ it will be seen that this drama has in fact been the drama of the divine Son of God, our God and our Saviour. Thirdly it is that, notwithstanding all its apparent horror, it will lead to a new celebration, the drinking of a new wine, in the kingdom of God, a new heaven and a new earth.
We do not yet live in this new heaven and new earth, how well do we know this, it is the third act, still to come. But it will come, and we, who have taken part in the first two, can indeed hope to take part in this third. It has a third cry; the first two were ‘Hosanna’ and ‘Crucify’; the third cry is the cry of glory. Of course it was not fully in our gospel today, how could it be? But it was hinted at, and perhaps it is hinted out most strongly in the second reading of today’s Mass from the letter to the Philippians.
His state was divine, yet Jesus did not cling to his equality with God. He emptied himself … and he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But then comes the key part I am heading for, the third act: ‘But God raised him high’. This is the third act we have yet to take part in, that does not fully belong to this life or the frame or our current age; it is the third cry. Then all beings in the heavens and on earth and in the underworld, will bend the knee at the name of Jesus and every tongue will cry: Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.