First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
20 March 2005
Just One of the Crowd
I begin today with a quote that is taken from the journal of a Catholic woman named Ida Gorres.
Holy week is beginning again, and here I am once more, feeling so unadjusted to it, so utterly inadequate. Not that "heart of stone" feeling, simply the sense of being completely out of proportion—something momentous, like the Niagra Falls is thundering down, right beside me, and there I stand, with a thimble in my hand, and I'm supposed to dip in and collect something, catch it up, assimilate, reacting properly, goodness knows how. But if you hold a cup under a waterfall, its not only knocked right out of your hand, but empty to boot; the rushing, tumbling water rebounds. The only hope of scooping anything at all is to hold the cup up carefully at the very edge, under a lost thin trickle.1
I love these words. It's not that "heart of stone" feeling that I bring to this week either, especially not after having shared such a rich and spiritually probing Lenten season with many of you. There is that sense of being out of proportion though, that something huge is about to happen and that I still don't feel like I've got what it takes to understand it all.
Though I'm not sure Gorres was contemplating Palm Sunday in particular when she penned these lines, in a way her image fits the events we celebrate today. Her image of the Niagra Falls offers us a powerful metaphor that can help us begin to understand the meaning of this awkward and ironic first day of Holy Week, this Sunday on which the Church celebrates and shouts praise at Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem just days before he is crucified.
Imagine, if you will, that the Holy Week waterfall of which she speaks, begins today, not in some far corner of your mind or of God's, but where it really began over 2000 years ago, atop the Mount of Olives. Imagine this waterfall consisting of crowds upon crowds of people flooding the streets, waving their palms, cascading their way down to the heart of Jerusalem towards the explosive three-day finale at the end of the week. Can you hear the low rumblings in the distant? Can you feel the power of the surge in your chest? We did our best this morning to invite you into a re-enactment of the drama of processional. Beginning at our own Mt. of Olives in Margaret Jewett Hall, we coursed our way through the halls, into the streets and back into the sanctuary where now, ready or not, its time to make the deep plunge and to join Jesus on the free fall into the waters of eternity.
In case our own procession wasn't enough to stir your imaginations, I'd now like to give you a slightly different picture of the Palm Sunday processional and tell you about a painting I once saw by a Belgain artist named James Ensor. Apparently, Ensor saw fit to paint a colorful modernist rendition of this Palm Sunday scene set in contemporary Brussels. The oil painting, which now hangs in the Getty Museum is called "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889". Great title, don't you think? Well, at first glance, it appears nothing more than a mob scene heading directly toward the viewer. No path cut; no palms laid down; no cloaks on the ground; just a river of people make their way through the street. The eccentric faces in the foreground, at the base of the painting, are distinct and colorful, if not a little haunting, and as your eyes follow the road back, upstream, into the depth of the painting, the crowd begins to blur. The faces and colors begin to fade together. Oddly enough, Christ at first appears to be nowhere in the scene. Upon a closer look though, near the middle of the pack, you can make out a rough image of a person sitting on a donkey. However, the texture and colors of this figure readily blend into the ripples of chaos on the street. In this artist's interpretation of the Palm Sunday narrative, Christ the King, even Christ the servant King, who rides not a stallion, but a lowly donkey, seems like just another face in the crowd, his color, his very self, virtually diffused into the watery throng. In almost every other visual portrayal of Palm Sunday I've seen, Christ stands out, depicted as lone figure. Here though, Christ blends in!
The painting makes me wonder whether Jesus may have felt a shudder of reluctance about setting himself apart, if only on a donkey. He was in fact playing a part, and I have a hard time convincing myself that he, like any of the other reluctant prophets that came before him, would have enjoyed being cast in this role. We know his script was taken from the prophecy of Zechariah wherein it was foretold that the Messiah, the King of Kings, would come to us triumphant and victorious though humble and riding on the foal of a donkey. True enough. At least it was not a horse or chariot or anything so pompous, but the fact is that the donkey would have set him apart and would have made him stand out all the same. If he had his druthers, can't you imagine him saying "No thanks, I'll walk, along with everyone else."? I mention this because I think there is a temptation on any given Palm Sunday. If we aren't careful, we might find ourselves too quickly swept up in the festive, albeit understated, majesty of the parade. We might find ourselves, I daresay, paying too much attention to Jesus and NOT enough attention to the crowd! What's more, we might lose sight of the fact that we ourselves, you and I, have a role to play in Palm Sunday and throughout Holy Week.
The painting I just described may well give us a better sense of the proportions of Palm Sunday at least. It portrays a Jesus whose very ministry is about the melting and mixing of his own heart and colors into the hearts and colors of the ordinary folks like you and me. My sense of Jesus reluctance about playing the Palm Sunday role is rooted in my conviction about Jesus earnest desire to have solidarity with all of humankind and so not set himself apart from the ordinary folks like you and me. The painting depicts this beautifully. Howard Thurman, a one time Chaplain at BU and a mentor to King, makes a similar point in this reflection on Palm Sunday which is worth quoting at length:
Step by resolute step, he had come to the great city. Deep within his spirit, there may have been a sense of foreboding, or the heightened quality of exhilaration that comes from knowing that there is no roadblock.
He had learned much. So sensitive had grown his spirit and the living quality of his being that he seemed more and more to stand inside of life .... He could feel the sparrowness of the sparrow, the leprosy of the leper, the blindness of the blind, the crippleness of the cripple, and the frenzy of the mad. He had become joy, sorrow, hope, anguish, to the joyful, the sorrowful, the hopeful and the anguished. Could he feel his way into the mind and the mood of those who exclaimed their wild and unrestrained Hosannas? [And] Did he mingle with the emotions that lay beneath the exultations ready to explode in the outburst of the mob screaming, "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!"2
What need could this man have had for a donkey, but to simply play the part! He was in the midst of achieving a oneness with all of creation, and therein lies the force and power of this Holy Week waterfall. God's purpose in Christ was becoming ever more streamlined, even as it was gaining in volume. As Jesus finishes the work of emptying himself in these last days of his life, the Palm Sunday scene—the entire Holy Week narrative—becomes as much about us as is it about Jesus. Like the painting would suggest, Jesus desires solidarity with humankind, he wants to be one of us, he wanted to know us and to stand inside of life, our lives. He wanted to experience our deepest and rawest nerves. If we put too much distance between ourselves and Christ, we won't stand a chance at being able to understand the mysterious events of the week that is now upon us. If we want to walk with Jesus in his last days, we don't have to look up at him or to him at all. We do have to get in touch, I mean really in touch, to the point of tears and trembling, with what is most real right now in our own lives and in our world. To seek the Passion of Christ, we need not gaze upon the mystery and pain of the cross itself so much as we need to gaze at the pain and the mystery that is present within each of our hearts and within our broken world.
An abiding theme of this week is that Jesus came to share our pain, to understand us and to stand under our pain even unto death. What flows down from the Mount of Olives on Palm Sunday, what comes rushing through the City Gates, is the fullness of Christ's understanding of who we are—he knows us better than we can know ourselves. He knows our humanness and our hunger, he knows our brokenness and our thirst. He has seen and comprehended the extent of our sin more deeply than any of us could acknowledge. Then, in the explosive moment at the base of this cosmic waterfall, at the base of the Cross itself, he knows us in our dying and he knows us in our death. This is the Passion! This is the watershed of God's deepest desire—to be in relationship with us, to understand us, to know us deeply and intimately that we may know that God is always with us.
The task of being Christians during Holy Week, whether we are feeling adequate or adjusted, is to bear witness not only to Christ's suffering, but to do as he did and to bear witness to the very suffering of humanity writ large, starting with our own. It is to be in touch with the suffering of the crowds and ordinary folks, and to realize where we fit into that picture. When you find that place of emptiiness of in your soul that cries out for help, that part of ourselves that cries: "I cannot do this thing", I cannot kick this habit", "I cannot read one more despicable heading" that is precisely when you know you've found your thimble and your entry point. That is where you can join the crowd that is close to Jesus, for where your nerves are most raw, there Jesus will be most present to you and so you will be most present to Jesus. Wherever you may tremble this week, upon hearing news that is personal or political, that is where you are ready to hold out your cup. This is the week to take hold of what is most real in our lives and our world, and to bring them a step closer to those Niagra Falls, to bring them in touch with God's loving purpose of intimate relationship that courses through our lives and through our history. Without bearing witness to pain and suffering of Christ in our lives and in our world, we'll never realize the fullness and beauty of God's grace and endless offer of life and meaning giving relationship with God. We will never feel the mist of Christ's companionship on our faces. That grace and companionship will always, always be there for us, encouraging us to face our fears and our world. And within this watershed of Christ's passion may flow the very tears of God, tear that may meet and mingle become one with our tears.
My advice to you as we enter into this Holy Week. Take hold of your cups. Hold on tight. And if all you can do is stand by the waterfall and marvel this year, that may be okay too. Ida Gorres, who gave us this waterfall image to begin with, continues in her journal in a far more humble tone:
This is how it is with me. I'm standing as near as I can get to the cataract. The thunder and roar of the water is deafening. I can catch next to nothing and I know very well that one-step nearer and I'll be caught up or swept away. But maybe this helpless state of just standing aside, this overpowering sense of not being able to do anything about it is the only sort of adoration I'm allowed just now . . . .this too, is one way of divining the immensity of this tremendous mystery, of paying reverence, at least, to something surpassing by far either comprehension or emotion.3
I pray that we all might be allowed such reverence and adoration on this holy week now upon us. Amen.
1 Ida Gorres, quoted by Martin Smith in A Season for the Spirit(Cambridge, Cowley Publications, 1991), p. 179.
2 Howard Thurman, For the Inward Journey: The Writings of Howard Thurman (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Meeting, 1984), p. 263.
3 Ida Gorres, quoted by Martin Smith
© 2005, Daniel Smith