Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday A; 03.29.26; G. Miles Smith+
Updated: Jul 30
Philippians 2:5-11; Matthew 26:14-27:66
No doubt, part of the appeal and power of the gospel story of Holy Week is just how relatable it all can be.
We don’t necessarily have to be Christian, or even religious, to potentially be moved by this story of Jesus. All you have to be…is human. Any human being…who has lived long enough…and with enough awareness of life…and all the twists and turns of the news…and human relationships…and the human heart…any person can potentially recognize their experience of real life…somewhere in this Holy Week story.
Holy Week tells the truth…about some of our most difficult human experiences. And so, ever since, this story has had its own peculiar power…to draw all kinds of people into the orbit of the Christian story.
But once we are in this Holy Week story of Jesus,…and imagining it…the story takes a startling turn. Because fundamentally…we are not being asked to recognize ourselves in this story…we are being invited to recognize…God…in this story.
What does it mean…that the Son of God…was at first welcomed and then reviled…embraced and then betrayed…arrested and abused and paraded before the authorities of religion and power…and finally cast aside by humiliating death on a cross?
The early disciples realized that this was a human tragedy like so many countless others. But in retrospect what was revealed to them was something…the likes of which the world had never seen before or since…that the passion of this man Jesus was in fact the passion of the Son of God. It was the Son of God who entered into the suffering of Holy Week. And this upended everything they thought they knew about their lives in the world:
Any assumptions they might have had about God as a somewhat untrustworthy and punitive god…detached from the world…that assumption died on the cross with Jesus. No god has ever risked so much…to come to us…in peace.
And any assumptions that the disciples may have had about what they thought was wrong with the world…became even more grave. There is something about the world…even though the world comes from God…and is upheld by God moment by moment…there is something about the world that is nevertheless unfriendly to God… and enlists us in that alienation.
The Son of God came to us. And we did not know him.
Until…we did.
And then “we saw his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
