Palm Sunday. 06b                                                 April 9, 2006

Mark’s Passion Narrative is the darkest,
      the grimmest, the hardest to face version of Jesus’ death.
In Luke, Jesus forgives and reconciles from the cross,
      until he dies peacefully saying

      “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.”
In John, Jesus entrusts Mary and the Beloved Disciple to each other.
      He reigns in dignity from the cross,
      until he says “It is finished,” and gives up his spirit.

But in Mark, there is no beauty, no healing, no peace at the cross.
At the climax, Jesus says out “My God , my God,
      why have you forsaken me?”
      then cries out inarticulately and dies.

This is a story of God’s absence,
      a story in which the will of God is not done,
              his Kingdom does not come.
Faith is disappointed.

The story which began with, “You are my Son, the Beloved,
      with you I am well pleased.”
ends with, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

An archetypal story isn’t just something that happened once.
It’s a story that tells us something important
       about the way things are.
The crucifixion is something that happens over and over.

The crucifixion happened in the 1955 Mississippi murder of Emmett Till
       and in the 1998 Wyoming murder of Matthew Shepherd.
It happened on 9-11 and in the Tsunami of 2004.
It happened last Friday in mosques in Bagdad and Musayyib.

It happens everyday in hospital rooms and on the streets
        and when we are alone and cry silently

        “Why have you forsaken me?”

Today, when we sing “Were you there
        when they crucified my Lord?”
                all of us can answer, “yes.”
We’ve all stood at the foot of a cross
        at one time or another.

So how are we to understand Mark’s grim story?
This is a vitally important question
        for the meaning we make of the crucifixion of Jesus
        is the meaning we make of the murder of Emmtt Till,
        Friday’s suicide bombings, cancer, disabilities, and grief.

The 20th Century theologian Simone Weil
        taught us more about suffering,
        both by her writing and her example,
                than anyone else in our time.

She began by explaining creation. She wrote:

        “The act of creation is not an act of power.
        It is an act of abdication.
        Through this act a kingdom was established
               other than the kingdom of God.
        The reality of this world is constituted
               by the mechanism of matter
               and the autonomy of rational creatures.
        It is a kingdom from which God has withdrawn.”

Those hard words challenge our faith

        – saying God is not really here taking care of us –
               so we want to turn away from such words.
But sometimes when we call on God to ease our pain
        or the pain of someone we love, there is only silence.
Then we have to deal with Simone Weil’s description of

        “a kingdom from which God has withdrawn,”
with C. S. Lewis’s words, “This world is in enemy hands,”
and with Jesus’ words, “Why have you forsaken me?”

According to Weil, God forsakes the world
         in the sense of withdrawing his power,
                 relinquishing his control.
God abandons the world in order to create it,
         to invest it with freedom and dignity,
         so that history may be a truly unfolding story
                 in which decisions matter

                 – not just acting out the script of fate.

But, if God isn’t here with us, then what good is he?
        what difference does God make?
Of all the Gospels, Mark devotes the largest proportion
        to the Passion Narrative, and his Passion Narrative
                 is the darkest by far.
Yet it is Mark who invented our use of the word Gospel,
        Mark who first called the Jesus story “good news.”
Where is the good news in this?

There is good news in Mark’s Gospel,
        good news about God and good news for us.
The good news is that God may not be here
        in the way we thought,
                 but God is here in quite another way.

Philosopher D. Z. Phillips says we purify our belief in God
        by recognizing God is not here as we ordinarily think,
        not pulling the strings and making things happen.
If we set that notion of God’s presence aside,
        we can see how God is actually present with us.

God is not here as dominating power.
Like in the old Westerns, when God steps into this bar,
        he checks his guns at the door.
God is not calling the shots.
God comes instead in humility, like a beggar, Simone Weil says,
        like a slave Paul says,
        to share our experience – especially our pain.

God becomes so fully human, so utterly vulnerable,
        as to feel himself forsaken by the God of power,
        so that he himself cries in despair, “Why have you forsaken me?”

God is here alright but not in the way we expect,
       because God the Creator stands outside the creation.
God is here as our redeemer and that looks entirely different.
Yale theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff says,

       “When we think of God the Creator, then we naturally see
       the rich and powerful of the earth as his closest image.
       But when we hold steady before us the sight of God the   

       Redeemer redeeming . . . by suffering, then perhaps we must look

       . . . at the face of that woman with the soup tin in hand
                 and bloated child at side.”

University of Tubingen theologian, Jurgen Moltmann,
       says that our belief that God is controlling everything
                 in a beneficent way “ends on the rock of suffering”

       “But” he asks, “what begins on that rock . . . in the pain
                 which cannot find a divine answer
                 and atheism cannot abolish?”
What begins on that rock is a new relationship with God.
It is there we meet a God not of power but of love and beauty

       – a God not to feared, cajoled, or manipulated
                 for our own benefit,
       but a God to be loved for his own sake.
And in that love is our hope, our joy, and our liberation.

In a place too dark for us to see,
       at a pitch too high for us to hear,
                 redemption is happening.
It doesn’t happen in the way we want.
We want to have our egos patched up,
       our worldly lives fixed,
                our agendas set back on track.
But that isn’t what God is up to.

God is holding us with a redemption
       so gentle we are not even aware of it.
Philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams says
       that our ultimate consolation happens through
       our relationship with God whose Goodness and Beauty
       overwhelm our suffering with joy and delight.
But how do we form this relationship?
Do we meditate and live righteously until we become divine?

We don’t have it in us. We can’t join God were God is,
       so God joins us where we are, in our pain.
God is so present with the hungry that his stomach cramps,
       so present with the lonely that his throat constricts
               and cannot call out for comfort,
       so present with the grief-stricken that he cannot move.

God does not create suffering,
       but God makes good use of it.
He makes of suffering a common ground with us,
       an occasion for us to make friends with the fellow sufferer
               who will overcome suffering in eternal joy.

                                                           Amen.