Palm Sunday                                              17 April 2011

Isaiah 52. 7-10

John 12. 9-26

Glory to God in the highest

And on earth peace among those whom God favours.

Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, and then echoing in the writings of the Christian scriptures, there is a deep and abiding longing for peace.

And so we hear it from Isaiah today

How beautiful upon the mountains
   

are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,


who brings good news,
   

who announces salvation,
   

who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’ 


Tens of thousands are gathered in Jerusalem for Passover as Jesus trots in. Announcing peace; this preacher of non-violent action; who has become icon of so many Judeans longing for peace; their longing to simply be able to live in freedom and dignity rather than under the successive rod the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and now the Romans.

So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting,
 ‘Hosanna!
 Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—
   the King of Israel!’

Victory parades are a funny business. Parades of course are such public displays of what we value, or celebrate; those we honour – in life or in death. Sometimes, like Moomba, they’re simply for fun. Sometimes, like the pre-grand final parade they’re about macho and muscle and victory with a sense of celebration about them – until the sexual scandals deflate and sullies all of that adulation. ANZAC Day; strange all that attention on it now when a few decades ago its observance had almost run out of puff. And those bizarre military parades of repressive regimes – so often bordering on the comic; goose-stepping soldiers strutting in perfect timing like tin-men,  saluting their dictators, the whole thing held together like a tightly coiled spring ready to release in indiscriminate obliteration of the enemy – without or within – whatever is necessary to keep the peace. It might be funny if it wasn’t so frightening. Peace through oppression.

I always feel ambivalent about Palm Sunday. From within Christendom we read it as a victory parade. But this lone prophet from Galilee comes bobbing into town – knowing himself that it will  not end well. In all this adulation we call to mind Jesus words from earlier in the gospel: I do not accept glory from human beings. So Jesus acceptance of the crowds adulation is strange because he lays little store by it. Jesus is focused on another goal – the approval of the crowd is not the glory he seeks.

Then the Greeks come. A solicitor once said to me when advising me on a legal matter to do with a very solicitous Greek was luring me: beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

The gathering of disciples in John is not like in the other gospels. Unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke in John Jesus calls no one. Disciples join because they are invited by others to come and see or because they seek Jesus themselves. In this request  to see Jesus from the Greeks – the gentiles, the ones beyond the bounds of Judaism – we find that Jesus ministry draws to a sudden close. With the Greeks request to see him the hour is suddenly here and all things are ready.

And in this culmination of everything that has gone before we hear what surely must be most important thing for John to emphasize. Surely at this moment when all things are ready, this is the thing to grasp; to pay attention to; to comprehend the meaning of this mysterious death.

Amen, Amen, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

But oh, how to weave our way through this short but crucial saying? We have been invited over such a long period to misunderstand it; to hear this brief saying as though it points to another life beyond this one. To another world. those who hate their life in this world. Seems like it’s about another world, after this one. But thinking about whether this is what is meant we need to ask why, why would John introduce us to the one who is the divine Word, the one who was in the beginning with the Father; this one who has now come into this world, this world which the Father loves so much – why would Jesus desire life for us in another world when this one is loved so deeply by God?

So, if this saying is about this world and not another, what then is this eternal life for which we must give ourselves away? We have found Jesus’ concern with eternal life in John is not about quantity of life – everlasting tick-tock time -, rather it is about this life grounded in God; fullness of life; resurrection life.

So how can we grasp what Jesus means to fall into the earth and die? This image of the sown seed is the metaphor John gives us to contemplate as an image of  eternal life.

Through our Lenten study series fourteen of us started a conversation which we didn’t finish; when we wound up this Wednesday it felt like the end of our time together was very untidy, incomplete. I had a sense, an expectation, that we should have been going home with the answers; at least some conclusion, but we opened what seemed to be a Pandora’s box of questions about who are we and who is God; questions of anthropology and theology. We concluded with no definitive answer to our deliberations. Because we were dealing with questions about the nature of our human being. We have been looking at the global environmental crisis and the fact that humans have become like a swarm on the face on the earth. And so we considered the question what is it about our human way of being that is so costly for the earth. We of course were contemplating that the way we live is not necessarily the way we have to be – in fact cannot continue to afford to be.

As we explored the issues together and came to understand the gravity of the crisis we face we were tempted by the usual human desire in a crisis to set the rules – we know how to fix things and will have everyone goose stepping in the same direction in no time at all, take the reigns of power, set the standard by which everyone else lives. We realised that this won’t work; because it hasn’t in the past and won’t in future. Over the weeks we became somewhat overwhelmed by a tremendous tension: between on the one hand realising that we know all-too-well about the global dimensions of what is happening to the world’s climate and our own sense of impotence as we realise we can change very little. Many of us became quite deflated by this tension but in that place of tension as we sat with it over a few weeks we came to understand more deeply the common human response in such crises.

We have a few typical responses in major crises as people. Sometime resorting to despair – don’t tell me about; I don’t believe in it. Sometimes we resort to an eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die response; or sometimes to a religious sensibility which holds hard and fast to a hope of a new heaven and a new earth and bunkers down in isolation. Often we just take denial as our stance: I don’t believe in Climate Change – as though it’s some sort of religious doctrine. Sometimes, as we found we get dictatorial and belligerent. And sometimes we believe that all that is needed is a technical fix: science and technology will save us.

What we realised and struggled with – inconclusively – is a need to understand ourselves and our being in the world differently. David Tacey writes about it in this way: The environmental crisis is not just a moral problem or an economic issue relating to how we manage our natural resources; fundamentally, it is a spiritual problem about how we experience ourselves in the world. The environmental crisis is about our lack of a binding relationship to what we persist in calling the ‘external’ or ‘physical’ world. When we stop referring to the world as external or outside, or as merely physical, I dare say the environmental crisis will be faced and solved, because its existence points to a limitation in our human love, an inability to extend love and concern to that which lies beyond the immediate realm of our personal lives.

As we steep ourselves in the Gospel of John this year we find ourselves  invited to contemplate: if God loves the world so much, how is it, then, we are called to be in the world? If God has taken on our human being in Jesus; and in doing so has redeemed our often degraded view of our humanness, how might we be called to be? This is not a question of pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps; or of being better Christians, or having more faith – but a question of finding ourselves radically transformed by grace and so able to be differently in the world.

As we reflected in this place of tension the radical abandonment of Jesus to the path to the cross seemed to be drawing us – an opening seemed be appearing before us to a different way of being. And so in my own ears the saying from today’s reading rings bells of recognition: Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. This being in the world is not an expectation of another world; it is not a trite and contemptuous in the world but not of the world; it’s not a hating and loathing of self and one’s body or the delights of this wondrous, beauteous  creation. It’s a being in the world that seeks to comprehend and embody the knowledge that God so loved the world; yet it is also a call to live with the gut knowledge that all is not as it is destined to be. It is the tension which we seemed to find ourselves in – the tension between what is and what we long for; knowing that God also longs for a renewed creation.

And so over the series we found ourselves living with what Sallie McFague calls internalised vulnerability; living with a gut-knowledge of this tension; being with a humility which is willing to live with the tension between a desire for what can be and a realistic knowledge of what is. It is to live in a cruciform way. In this place of tension is a place is a place that prayerful longing for a better world can inhabit; in this place too dwells the longing of God; and in our willingness to inhabit this tension we find the ability to be differently. In this tension we die and are born again. And in our longing and our being God gives birth to new life, new possibilities – in us and through us. In this place is the possibility of resurrection.

So we enter Holy Week again recalling its ominous events with John’s call to us to remember that, not just for Jesus, but for us all there is the call to die and so live. So we enter the great paschal mystery trusting that we might too spring to new life.

Andrew Boyle