Passion or Palm Sunday features both the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and the reading of the Passion. This year the passion narrative of St. Matthew is featured. However, because of the Covid19 Virus, we will not be gathering as a community to celebrate this important Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. Each of us will have to remember the events of this particular Palm Sunday as individuals or as families sheltered in our homes. Those who have access to streamed videos can watch as the ceremonies and rituals of Holy Week are transmitted through social media and closed circuit television.
The struggle to understand the origin and meaning of human suffering is as long as human history. Each of the Gospels revolves around the suffering and death of Jesus. Each evangelist recorded the events that surrounded the execution of Jesus of Nazareth for a specific audience. Consequently the details will appear different to the careful reader. However, the central question that underlie these narratives is the same. How could this happen? How could the one man who stands as innocent of sin be condemned to the ignominious death by crucifixion? The death of Jesus at the hands of Roman executioners shatters the “theology of reciprocity” that is the underlying premise of the Sinai Covenant of Moses and that fills the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. God promises that if the Israelites obey the statutes and commands handed on to Moses, they will be God’s chosen people and will live life in a land of milk and honey.
However, suffering and death enter the life of Jesus just as surely as suffering and death enter the life of every human being. Just this morning, a good man who worshiped with me every Sunday passed away of the coronavirus. His wife and family now grieve his loss just as thousands of others grieve the loss of a loved one. Thus it has been and thus it will be. Suffering and death are a part of every human life. They know no boundaries. Is God a capricious God, one who promises one thing and does another? The experience of Jesus’ death on a cross tells us that such is not the case. Good people suffer. Bad people suffer. The difference has to be found in the experience itself.
One of the predominant themes of St. Matthew’s passion is the sense of abandonment the Jesus expresses throughout the story. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” The words on Jesus’ lips come directly from Psalm 22. The words, however, are only one expression of Jesus’ abandonment. At the Passover supper, Jesus tells Judas that he is aware of the plot into which he has entered with the chief priests and elders. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the apostles fall asleep when he asks them to stay awake and pray with him. When the cohort come to arrest him, the apostles flee. Peter denies knowing Jesus, again, just as Jesus foretold. In Matthew's version of the GOspel, no one stands beneath the cross but those who jeer him. Even those who are crucified with him join in the mockery. Jesus is left alone. Is it any wonder that he cries out in the words of the psalmist? When he expires, it is with a loud cry.
At his death, nature rebels. Rocks are split as an earthquake shakes the foundations of Jerusalem. The curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the Courtyard of the Jews is ripped apart. The bodies of people long dead are raised up. The final irony is that a Roman centurion is the only one to realize that Jesus was the Son of God. Jesus, rejected by his own, is accorded the title that has been his throughout the Gospel by an unbeliever
Though St. Matthew records the death of Jesus as the ultimate abandonment, we know that this is not the end of the story. For three days later, Jesus will rise. God has not abandoned Jesus. Herein lies one of the lessons of the Passion narrative for all of us. Though we will suffer and die, though our loved one will grieve our loss, God does not abandon us in the midst of suffering. God is with us, and that which Jesus experienced three days after his death is our destiny as well. God has promised it. God will do it.
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator