We Have Been Crucified with Christ

Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday        March 24, 2013

Is. 50: 4-9a        Ps. 31: 9-16         

Phil. 2:5-11       Luke 23:1-49  

Lectionary Link

   

  Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday are based upon two different events in the Gospel.  In one scene the crowds in the ticker tape parade of branches, cry, “Hosanna, blessed is the King.”  In the other scene Jesus is put on trial and another crowd yells, “Crucify him, we have no king but the Emperor.”

  How do we do two liturgies for this day?  Some parishes do not try to combine them; it is too much to juxtapose.

  At St. John’s in our quest for topic overload, our Bishop is here for Visitation and so we have confirmation and people being received.  Since we are having confirmation and our bishop is here we added a Lenten discipline of reviewing our faith and then all of us together renewing our vows with those being confirmed and received.  Yes, it is a jumping of the gun on the Vigil and Easter, but we have the Vigil every year, we don’t always have our bishop with us for confirmations.

  So we have one grand multi-tasking liturgy and if that is too much, too bad.  The Plentitude of life experience does not divide itself up neatly into categories for our pieties.  And even if I seem to be doing something akin to a British no-no of mixing sweets and savories, I would like to make the case that life always everywhere juxtaposes multi-experiences of people.

  Agonies, ecstasies and everything in between are happening everywhere at all times.  Just because  I may be shielded in my joy does not mean that someone else is too.  Life is full to the hilt of differentiated experiences of people and differentiation in valuing things in the world.

  Take for example the Cross; what a terrible use of a beautiful tree!  Just because a cross was made out of one tree this does not nullify all of the trees that continued to grow in the landscape or the ones which were used for beautiful furniture.  The use-value of wood has a differentiation in human experience and we experience multi-use values all of the time.

  In the Palm Sunday parade, the children cried out their praise for Jesus the King.  This Jesus said that one had to become like a child to understand and perceive God’s Kingdom.  Pilate and others did not get this message; they got the message but used it as cruel joke.  Instead of riding a donkey, Pilate made Jesus ride the cruel cross of crucifixion.

  One has to say that strangely, Christians came to value the death of Jesus.  What could be the value of such a death?  How can a person like Paul who once tried to make people die like Jesus become one who gloried in the cross of Christ?

  How indeed could the very worst thing that could happen to a person in the first century become the very best for the early Christian communities?

  Each of the four Gospels has an account of the Passion.  One can assume that the Passion Gospel became the liturgical performance of a spiritual method.  This spiritual method is best known in the Pauline admission: “I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live, not I who lives but Christ lives within me.”

  If we understand this confession we can understand the purpose of the Passion liturgy.  Unfortunately, the practitioners of Christianity, including the hierarchy lost sight of the spiritual methodology and were left with just presenting the story of the Passion Gospel.  The literal recounting of the Passion includes some incorrect features.  The Gospels make it seem as though the Jews killed Jesus when the Jews really did not have such power or authority.  The Passion Narratives refer to the Jews which is strange because Jesus too is a Jew.   The Passion Gospels show the results of having been edited and redacted in times when more Roman Gentiles were followers of Christ and when the followers of Christ were separated from the synagogue and had become a separate religion.   The Roman dominate role in the crucifixion has been "softened."   By just looking at the literal Gospel, there were times in the history of the church that the reading of the Passion incited so called Christians to go out and persecute the Jews for their responsibility for the death of Jesus.

  This literal externalizing of the Gospel Passion misses the point.  And what is the point of the Passion?

  Jesus died out of this world and out of sight in order that Christ might be known as living in and through us in our thinking, seeing and doing.   If Christ is living through us we can no longer “see him;” rather we are involved in the continual task of checking our egos so that the Christ-nature can “be through us.”  This checking of our ego is how we are crucified with Christ and we live but don’t live, because the risen Christ lives in us.

  Let us be aware of the spiritual methodology of the early church: The Passion Gospel was to give a liturgical form to express the interior quest to always let Christ live through us.

  Today, as we begin Holy Week, let us remember the internal spiritual methodology of all that we do this week:  We have been crucified with Christ, we live, but we don’t because Christ lives in and through us.  Anything other than this can border on a crass literalism and sentimentalism.  Let us remember today, “We have been crucified with Christ.”  Amen.