Reflections on the Passion: Part 1
Palm Sunday, 24th March, 2002
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Just as this morning's liturgy is part of a larger whole, and has a particularly obvious sequel in Good Friday, my words this morning – brief though I intend them to be – are also the first part of what is essentially a two part reflection. On Good Friday, it seems only logical to focus on the figure of Jesus, but this morning, we look in some ways at ourselves.
Over long periods of time, great works of art, and works of great art, have reminded us through music and various visual means that in this whole series of events which we recall over the coming week, we need to look at both Jesus and ourselves. Somehow, we are participants. If we listen again to Bach's Passion music, we find that he interrupts the narrative from the gospel (whether it be Matthew or John) in order to reflect on how we might be involved in what is going on. Two modern novelists, one Greek and one Australian – Nikos Kazantzakis and Patrick White in Christ Recrucified and Riders in the Chariot – remind us that people like ourselves can be caught up in a similar order of events without even being aware of it. Our response to Jesus as we hear the gospel narrative might be very different from the responses given when a figure crosses our path in whom we do not recognise any such presence. Or rather, we might find that at one moment we cheered someone on, just as the crowd does on Palm Sunday, only to change our response later on.
A careful re-reading of St Matthew's telling of the Palm Sunday event, by which I mean a re-reading that takes in the preceding chapter as well, shows that Matthew had a very particular understanding of what the crowd was doing. Jesus is pictured as coming to people who not only are 'His own' in terms of culture and ethnicity, but people who recognise Him for what He really is. Just before the entry into Jerusalem, Matthew pictures the blind man, Bartimeus, recognising Jesus as Son of David. For Matthew, when the crowd in David's city describe Jesus also as David's Son, it is a sign that they have a genuine awareness of His identity. For Matthew, their turning in the opposite direction by Good Friday is not a matter of ignorance, but of choice. It is a deliberate decision to reject someone whose unique status is understood. For Matthew, there can be no prayer by Jesus asking for forgiveness, as in St Luke, because they – all the participants, us – act while comprehending their choices.
Yet written into St Matthew's version are some hints that even though this writer pictured the Palm Sunday event as the entry into the city of an acclaimed God-sent deliverer, it was not something that really caused a great stir at all. A Jesus acclaimed by a majority of the populace in this light would have been a threat to Roman occupiers and Temple authorities alike, swiftly responded to, not left to roam the streets for several more days. To that extent, I see Luke's emphasis on a misinformed, ignorant larger community, subject to a degree of manipulation by a smaller group insistent on obtaining Jesus' death, as closer to the historical event. And I am inclined to think that many experiences and developments of the past one hundred years would invite us to look at the involvement of many participants, including our own equivalents, in this way. Twentieth century history, European, Asian, African and Latin American; all have seen crowds skilfully and deliberately manipulated in mass rallies and movements. The recent past, as well as the immediate present, is equally full of instances of cynical media manipulation of public responses to figures and situations.
What does this say for us as we look at the events of Holy Week again? When we look at the place of the crowd, the supposedly ordinary people in the street, a modern retelling might well treat all their responses – for and against Jesus – as a consequence of some degree of manipulation of which they were to some, or a large, extent unaware. Such a retelling might see the cheering of the Palm Sunday crowd, not just as a personal and direct response to Jesus, as much a response to some careful manipulation, a good publicity agent who knew how to promote a positive image that put Jesus on the right side of current issues. It becomes obvious as the week continues that there is no interest in keeping this man as the sustainer of such a positive image, so the media are allowed to reinvent His image in a way that destroys Him. What might this say about us? It is not just sobering, it is an admission of a frightening level of vulnerability for us to admit that we might be so malleable, something that might make us too angry to even bear thinking about. Yet we remain in a degree of illusion if we do not recognise that freedom is for all of us to some degree limited. We may think we make choices freely, but not only does our past condition some responses – so also does the degree to which we have limited knowledge of what we are involved in, as information is concealed, and deliberate distortions and errors are propagated.
However, the acknowledgement of great limitation is not necessarily an admission that any response is in the end meaningless. The intervention of the non-scriptural figure of Veronica is at once sobering, and one that offers some realistic hope. She has little with which to respond, but makes the most of it – she wipes the condemned man's face. This is a far more positive action than might at first appear, for all its apparent inability to prevent the course of events. As anyone with an awareness of armies of occupation in the 20th century would realise, to offer any kind of physical relief, or show compassion, to a condemned prisoner can be to risk the same fate. It is an act of both resistance and identification. That its scale is small is not the key issue. For most of us, the choices which we make, and the acts we perform, are on a small scale. The temptation is to abstain from making such choices at all, because we have been deceived into thinking that it is only the choices and acts on a large scale that are significant.
For us, and for many others this Holy Week, we do well to pray for God's mercy and forgiveness. If my analysis is realistic, we certainly stand in need of both as we make many decisions in situations in which our freedom to act is limited because we know much less than the full truth, and are the subject of deliberate misinformation. And, equally, we stand in need of God's mercy as we respond in ways that might seem limited to us, but which remain our attempts to place ourselves in the footsteps of Jesus as He walks His way through the Passion to His New Life.
|
Views is a
publication of
St Peter's Eastern Hill, Melbourne Australia.
|
