DON'T CLIMB ON THE WRONG BAND WAGON! A sermon for PALM SUNDAY

Welcome back, my friends in Christ, to our dear St.Luke’s-of the spirit- the soul-and the mind’s- eye.

How I wish I could have sprinkled your Palms with Holy Water and blessed them in person. I have done so in my prayers.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

If you have just read through the whole of St.Matthew’s account of the Passion of Our Lord, and I hope you have, then this is a very difficult moment for me to say anything helpful. Because the gospel story speaks so powerfully for itself.

But I want to try to say something. The beginning of Holy Week in an unreal year when we are apart, when the sheep are physically scattered, is a time to make the best sense in our own homes of the historical drama about to unfold in ancient Jerusalem. In particular not to climb on the wrong bandwagon.

There’s a bittersweet feeling about Palm Sunday, isn’t there?

The false dawn of the triumphant entry into Jerusalem; the enthusiasm of the supporters who lined the way and spread their cloaks and palm branches to form a carpet along the route as if it were leading to an earthly happy ending.

They were dreaming of a Messiah who would spearhead a revolution, kick out the occupying Romans and establish a new, free state of Israel by force.

Blessings on the king who comes in the name of the Lord they chanted exuberantly but, as Jesus Himself knew only too well, they had climbed on the wrong bandwagon.

He knew only too well that, to do His Father’s will, He must subject Himself to sentence of torture and death.

I pictured in my imagination our own little procession this morning. But our palms, the palms you have been sent through the post, are already bent into the shape of crosses.

Because, unlike the cheerleaders that first Palm Sunday, we know where it all ended five days later......

But there is more than one wrong bandwagon.

Yes, we know with the benefit of hindsight that Christ was not a new King David ready to lead an armed insurrection. So we do not cheer Him on for that reason. But then why exactly do we cry Hosanna?

This is where we have to be careful. We have a choice of our own bandwagons to jump on.

Each bandwagon has a different slogan advertised on it:

One gives a double message, one painted on each side of the wagon:

God so loved the world that He gave His only Son and God was in Christ reconciling Himself to the world

A second bandwagon has a hymn quotation on it: There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin

And, apart from these age-old messages, there’s a notorious cinematic bandwagon with garish writing all over it. It says roughly The Jews were cowards, the Roman soldiers were demented sadists and Jesus had to suffer so much whipping and flaying that he would have been long dead before He got near the cross, except that He’s the hero of a gory horror film and they always have to keep getting up again don’t they?

Let’s take this one first. I’m talking, rather unsubtly, about Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster film The passion of the Christ.

You could certainly call it a sort of bandwagon because it broke box-office records.

Well,  no doubt Gibson ( a devout if very extremist  Catholic) meant well by his powerful spectacle. If you like buckets of tomato ketchup and close-ups of skin being prised away from a body in gloating detail, then it’s your sort of movie.

But if you step back and ask about the theological message behind the Mel Gibson’s film, then the trouble starts.

It is a historically proven fact that Our Lord suffered humiliation, torture and an agonising death, although this is all grossly exaggerated in the film.

But Our Lord is by no means the only religious or political hero or martyr to have suffered such a fate at the hands of the authorities and Gibson makes the mistake of trying to identify Christ’s uniqueness in terms of the sheer amount and degree of torture that He underwent. That misses the point. It is the wrong bandwagon.

The uniqueness of Christ in the history of the world is twofold:

firstly He was and is God from all eternity (In the beginning was the Word) and secondly, unlike other victims of torture and execution, He submitted to His ordeal out of a divine love and compassion for all humanity including His persecutors.

So which other bandwagon should we join this Holy Week?

There is some mysterious truth behind the words there was no other good enough to pay the price of sin but the problem is they seem to suggest some kind of purchase and sale transaction whereby God will only let us off the consequences of our sin if the price is right and the only price high enough for Him is the death of His own Son.

That paints a rather disturbing picture of God the Father - not at all the picture painted by God the Son in His recorded parables and teachings - but even worse is the wedge it drives between Father and Son, the one using the other as a bargaining counter.

So this bandwagon is a dangerous one to ride on if you want the truth behind the Passion.       

That truth is actually very simple - so simple that people often say it must be more complicated. But it isn’t. God loves us so much that He came among us in human form, in the form of a son, to show us the divine life. And we struggled against it and it was not until we killed it that it finally got through to us.

In other words we should clamber onboard the first bandwagon, the one with the double slogan God so loved the world coupled with God was in Christ reconciling Himself to the world.

That is the real meaning of this week’s story. But it’s no good just jotting it down and filing it away.

We must let it set us on fire with love of God and love of neighbour.

And the best way of giving that a chance to work is to re-live as fully as possible the events of the climax to the week, even though we can’t do it in the normal way.

We will be robbed this year of the opportunity to process together on Thursday night to the Garden of Repose. We will be robbed of the opportunity to venerate the cross on Friday.

But we have a book about the Stations of the Cross to use and inspire us at home and I hope to have some more words for you on Thursday and Friday.

And always bear in mind that, on Saturday, we will alight from the bandwagon we climbed on this morning ready to each feel the full wonder and joy of Easter.

Let’s make this journey together in our hearts.