Palm Sunday

When we are going through difficult times we want to talk to someone who has been through what we are going through. We want someone who understands.

Christ, through his passion, knows; he truly understands – and offers hope.

Palm Sunday Sermon

2012

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Philippians 2:5-11

Mark 15:1-39

I have found that when we are going through difficult times in our lives we want to talk to someone whose been through that themselves. When my husband was in a bad motorcycle accident he wanted to talk someone else who had been in a body cast and broken a leg. Someone who had gone through that. When I found out I was going to have brain surgery I wanted to find someone who had experienced that. I didn’t want to listen to anyone else.

When we are going through difficult times, like when we are grieving the death of someone we love, we get comfort from those who have experienced it already. Or when we are trying to lose weight we want to have the person who is helping us show us a picture of when they were grossly overweight. We don’t want some slim thing that has never known what it means to count calories. We want someone who understands. That is part of the beauty and power of the alcoholic anonymous program, and other 12 step programs. They realize that when you are struggling with something the best person to help is someone who has been through that themselves. That’s who we want to talk to. That is who we want to get support from.

Today we are reminded that Jesus has been through all of it. He knows all of human experience. At the beginning of the service we celebrate him coming into Jerusalem like a super star. People were cheering and throwing things on the path in front of him. What a glorious thing. How many of us fantasize sometime in our lives being in a position like that?

We also know that when Lazarus died Jesus wept. He knew what it meant to grieve.

And in his passion we see all of human experience in one day. He knows what it is like to be betrayed by a friend, to have those you rely upon disappear and not be there to help you, to find that the religion and the community that you supported and cared about and cared for you your whole life turns on you, condemns you, to have false accusations made about you, to have people spit on you, to be tortured, abused, mocked, nailed naked to a cross to die. And at the end Jesus says, “My God, my God why have abandoned me?” Jesus even knew what it was like to feel abandoned by God.

He knew fear; he knew hurt; he knew pain. He knows it all. That’s what Paul is alluding to as he tries to describe the nature of this Christ, this Jesus, when he writes, “Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born into human likeness.” Here he is alluding to and trying to describe the great mystery of the Christian faith, that somehow God Almighty, God the creator of the universe, the source and ground of all being, that in which everything else exists, that somehow, some way that God came into human form to experience all of what it meant to be a human being - birth, childhood, adolescence, teaching, struggle, friendship, pain, abandonment. All of it.

In John’s gospel it says, “He was with God, and he was God.” In the creeds we say that he was of one being with the father. Those are all trying to use human language to describe something that is beyond what we can quite comprehend. This great mystery that somehow God came into human form to experience all that human beings experience.

Because of that we can go to Christ, we can speak to God of our pain, and our fears, and our abandonment. Christ understands, he experienced it, he knows what it was like. We are not communicating with a being that has no idea of what we have been through, but to one who has walked there, who has suffered, and even knows what it feels like to be abandoned. To be totally alone.

We have that kind of a friend who has walked there before us and therefore can help us through whatever it is, whether it be grief, or physical pain, or emotional lose or questioning even the presence of God, because he knows, he knows.

In addition to that, the reason we want to talk to someone who has walked through the journey we are on is because we want to see that there is something ahead, that there is something beyond the struggle right now, that there is hope, that what we are going through at this moment is not the final word. And that is what we are offered through Christ, because even though his last words on the cross were “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” his last word was his resurrection. And the final word is always, always God’s abounding love.