Palm/Passion Sunday C: Say Just One Thing
Dear Partner in Preaching,
The biblical passage assigned for this week can be overwhelming, I know, as it covers so much narrative and emotional terrain. Indeed, this whole week of services and readings and prayers and more can be overwhelming. Known as “Holy Week,” the days leading to Easter might also be called, particularly by preachers, “hectic week”! In the midst of the both the holy atmosphere and hectic pace, I have one piece of advice: say just one thing.
Part of that counsel relates directly to the reading before us. Rather than try to preach the broad sweep of Luke’s passion narrative, choose one element or detail on which to focus. Your sermon on a day like this doesn’t need to be long – in some ways, the passion narrative itself is sermon enough. But you can focus your hearers’ attention by drawing their gaze to one significant element of this portrait. Perhaps it will be Jesus’ commitment to peace and healing. So prominent in Luke’s Gospel, this element of Jesus’ character and ministry is only magnified in the scenes leading to the cross. And so when one of the disciples cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, Jesus rebukes the appeal to violence and heals him. While on the cross Jesus comforts one of the criminals and prays for forgiveness for those who kill him. Even Pilate and Herod, political enemies to this point, are reconciled in the presence of Jesus. Wherever Jesus goes, forgiveness, comfort, and healing seem to follow.
Or maybe it will not be a single theme that grabs your attention, but a single detail. Perhaps it will be Peter’s failure to confess. So bold and confident the night before, professing his willingness to follow Jesus to prison and even to death, when the moment comes to demonstrate his faith, Peter fails. Not once or twice but three times Peter denies his Lord. And then Jesus looks at him. What did that look express? Disappointment, dejection, understanding, comfort? Perhaps it was the penetrating look of a friend who sees Peter to the core and reflects what he sees in his knowing glance. You could invite your hearers to imagine what that look is and what it would feel like to be Peter in that moment. And then perhaps anticipate what it was like for Peter to be not only forgiven but also restored, granted a position of leadership among the company of disciples, and charged to help birth this new church through the power of the Holy Spirit. Peter, the tradition says, will eventually follow his Lord to prison and death, and perhaps it was this moment of realizing who he really is and being forgiven, restored, and trusted that enables him to do so.
But while my advice to say just one thing applies to your sermon on this passage, it also applies to this whole week. Is there a theme that you can name today and carry through all the services of Holy Week?
What stands out to me this week is that all that is said and done in this dark and difficult story is done for us. Notice that the last words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel express a willing embrace of his destiny. Jesus’ life is not torn from him. From the beginning of this narrative to the end, Jesus participates willingly in what is to happen, refusing rescue, escape, or the resort to violence. So also in these closing verses of today’s reading Notice that Jesus does not simply stop breathing, surrendering to a tragic fate. Rather, he commends, or gives over, his spirit into the hands of his heavenly Father. His last words are, in short, a prayer of confidence, trust, and obedience. Why? Because while his death is in many ways tragic, it is no accident. Rather, he follows this road to express God’s complete solidarity with us in all things, including even the fear and experience of death, and to demonstrate that God’s love is stronger than hate and that God’s life is stronger than death. Jesus does not die, in other words, to make it possible for God to forgive us, but rather to show us that God already has forgiven us because God loves us.
This theme – that Jesus embraces his fate to demonstrate God’s profound and life-giving love – is something that can carry you and your people through the week. On Maundy Thursday we remember that Jesus’ command to love others is rooted in and made possible by his profound love for us. And on Good Friday we see how many times Jesus could have avoided or changed his fate but chose not to, embracing the cross and shouting his victory cry to the heavens that all that is necessary has been accomplished, as God has once again rescued God’s people, this time not merely from the oppression of Egypt but from death itself.
Say just one thing this Sunday and in the week to come, Dear Partner. That will help you navigate the demands of so many services and it will help you people hear again and believe that God loves them, that God believes them worthy of respect and dignity, and that God has promised to be with them and for them forever. You don’t have to say everything: one word – this word – will be enough.
Blessings on your proclamation, Dear Partner. Trust me when I say that God will use your words to touch someone in ways you can’t imagine this week. So preach the gospel as you hear it and trust the rest to God. Thank you for words, your witness, and your faithfulness.
Yours in Christ,
David
Thank you; this is just what I needed. The typo in the second paragraph jumped out as the one thing to use as a Holy Week controlling metaphor: the “broad weep.” I have been pondering how deep sorrow can only be present where there is deep love; real loss only happens where there is real treasure to begin with, and with Jesus as our treasure, the great turnaround is that the loss becomes even greater treasure.
The one thing on my mind is in the meaning of the word “hosanna.” The translation of the Hebrew is “save us, we beseech you.” We enter into the depth of the meaning of salvation this week, and look to a cross. But isn’t that cross our own? And the way of our own salvation through the way of the cross and not just seeing ourselves with Jesus, but Jesus showing us he is with us all the way through when the cross tries to hold us captive? Scripture’s most-repeated phrase, do not fear, takes root at Golgotha, and blossoms where tombs release new life. That’s a lot of one thing that takes me through the whole week, and ever onward.