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Year B, Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
St. Ives’ Episcopal Church, Arlington, Virginia
The Reverend Mark Byers

Probably Because of Something You Did.

Many of you may remember the humorous writer, Jack Handey, who wrote the “Deep Thoughts” segments for Saturday Night Live. In college, I had his calendar, with a “Deep Thought” for every month. I remember one month in particular. There was a picture, I think of a beautiful, red sky, and then, written in the corner, “If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is, ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.’”

There’s a movement in the story of Jesus, as we hear it today, from the general and political to the deeply personal and intimate end upon the Cross. So is the lesson that everybody was wrong to believe that Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem was an event with a strong political dimension? Were the people who welcomed him just way off base, and then they turned on him when they realized that he wasn’t the Messiah they had expected? Then, of course, we can look at everyone involved and say, “See, this just points to their sin, because they didn’t acknowledge Jesus as their Lord and Savior. They just wanted a different king.”

Lesson learned. Jesus Christ isn’t about politics. Or if he is, he’s about the particular political issues that we think have to do with faith, but nothing else, because those issues have to do with personal morality. He’s about saving us from our personal sin, after all. Why was Jesus nailed to the Cross? Probably because of something those people did, but we wouldn’t. We know better. In one way or another, we are moved by the story, and we hear it, but we are comfortably safe in whatever ways we’ve chosen to be “not like those people,” who don’t understand why Jesus went to Jerusalem.

Why did he go to Jerusalem? Or, more broadly, “Why did God become a man?” It’s one of the oldest questions in Christian theology, and one of the most important. There are answers that we come up with that skirt the issue, such as the various varieties of Gnosticism that hold that Jesus was never fully human. In other words, all the things that we associate with Christ’s humanity were simply done for appearance. He was never truly tempted as we are, because he was incapable of real temptation, being a transcendent spirit who only appeared human in order to pass on special spiritual knowledge to us to help release our spirits from their bodily prisons. Most Christians today don’t say that Jesus wasn’t both fully human and fully divine, but they reduce Christ’s humanity to the point where his temptation and suffering were simply pro forma, and only occurred to fulfill theological functions.

When I was in college, there was a small group of students one night who got some cardboard boxes and spent the night out on the grass in the middle of the Quad. The idea was to sympathize with the homeless and draw attention to their plight. There is real danger as Christians that we can look at Jesus on the Cross and think that this is simply God’s way of sympathizing with our plight. Think about this, though: when Jesus Christ is screaming out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” maybe he’s not just quoting the psalmist and then dying a deeply moving, ready-for-Renaissance-Art death.

Maybe he doesn’t know where God is any longer. Maybe he has realized that God isn’t speaking from the clouds any longer, isn’t “up in heaven” watching over him.

Here’s what it means to me for God to become a man. It means that God didn’t just put on an especially good costume, or memorize his lines really well. It means that God bled all over the nails and the wood and the ground. It means that God experienced excruciating pain and organ failure, all the same things that we experience in suffering and death. It means that when Jesus screamed out to his Father in heaven that he WAS alone at that moment, because in order for the crucifixion to matter, God had to die the same ugly death as the two convicted criminals next to him. All of God that Jesus could possibly have known and communicated with wasn’t there to hear Jesus. Not because God had forsaken him, although it must have felt that way, but because all of God was on the cross with him.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and tell you something right from my heart. You don’t have to agree. The mistake we make isn’t just that we politicize faith, or that we make it too personal, or that we compartmentalize it. It’s that we don’t realize that it’s not simply spiritual, or simply something cosmetic, or simply about changing what we believe to more acceptable things. It’s the consummation of a reality that God has been trying to draw us into since the dawn of human consciousness. It changes everything, every relationship that we have, from the one we have with the President on down to the ones we have with women in Botswana with AIDS, or illegal immigrants down the street from us, or our parents, or our selves.

Were it the case that God took the form of a slave and bled all over the hard wood of the cross and all that happened was that you or I “got saved” and then began pestering our friends and neighbors to go to church, or that something called the “Social Gospel” got invented and we started to attend protests or “act prophetically,” then indeed we might scream along with Jesus that indeed, God has forsaken us. Because that would mean that God is no more powerful than what we imagine or desire. But thank God that he became a real man, a bleeding, suffering, sometimes doubting, sometimes angry, sometimes laughing, real man because in that way, his life could become fully ours. Not Jesus Christ’s example, or his teachings, or the hopeful veneer of piety that we learn to wear, but his real, scarred, loving presence within us all. Without that, nothing else matters.

When you and I bear witness to the Good News, we bring the promise of Jesus Christ that there is hope for all people, because he lives in all people. And not simply hope, but the victory of all that God is through the redemption of all that we are. Top to bottom, because it all needs redeeming: every nation, including ours; every people, including us; every belief system, including ours; everything.

Here we are, sinners every one of us, of the very same frail mortal flesh as all those who watched and jeered, who stood by powerless, or even who drove the nails in. And yet God does not ask for our shame. God does not weep for us, but rather he calls us. And so we proclaim the triumph of Christ who is not us, but who is in us. And we trumpet his victory, which is not ours, but which is for us. And this is not just a bunch of words. Because God seals promises not with other peoples’ blood, but with his own.

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