Palm Sunday: Meditations on the Cross
Introduction
The Stations of the Cross are usually, as is the case this evening, accompanied by the singing of the Stabat Mater; a hymn that follows the Way of the Cross from the position of Mary. We witness Jesus’ suffering from his mother’s perspective, a mother losing her first child. It’s an invitation, not an emotional manipulation, but an invitation to come as near as possible; to experience Christ’s love for the world from the position of the person who loved him and knew him best; to look upon suffering at its hardest in love at its strongest.
This year we come at Holy Week from a year of death; of daily death counts, a year of temporary hospitals and morgues. And a year of increased suffering, of disenfranchised grief, of deaths in isolation, funerals unattended, Of personal and national tragedies. The stations of the cross are there to connect us in solidarity with all who face these hardest aspects of life. We hear this story of injustice, suffering and loss together; That whatever our own experience, we might share it with one another and with God, knowing that love is always redeemed, always held, always cherished, never forgotton, even when cloaked in the darkness of the tomb, in the promise of resurrection.
The stations are from a Roman Catholic church known as the Hidden Gem in Manchester. They are by Norman Adams, an artist and professor of painting at the Royal Academy, who painted them in the 90s, and believed them to be his best work.
Jesus is condemned by Pilate
Injustice quickly becomes normal. So normal we don’t notice it. Some injustices in our society became quickly apparent at the beginning of Covid. The human mind, though, has a natural gravity to ease and forgetfulness. I wonder as we emerge from lockdown if any of those concerns will remain.
The last year has also highlighted injustices of race, and violence, hidden in the home, and against women. It is an effort of consciousness to remain stirred up by injustice. To continue to see it. To act upon it. To not consign it to a land far away I don’t understand; or as too big an issue for little old me to face.
The truth is always being told - on the radio - even sometimes on the internet. But we rarely hear the truth from below. The truth from the poorest and most without power. And we don’t want to hear it - because it’s exhausting. It’s easier to watch the Crown, Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Love Island. Since the birth of tragedy, literature has always focussed on kings; We remain in the thrall of wealth and beauty. The Gospel is an ugly story about poverty and impotence. The lead is unexpected. The plot is an unfamiliar twist. It reminds us to look at our world again. From below. to tell the truth slant. To look for the other story, not told. To seek out injustice, and the suffering that trails in its wake.
Jesus takes up the cross
John Donne wrote that ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less’. Whether it’s Brexit, Covid-19, which has meant for many perpetual isolation, age – with its many challenges – Or just the reality of modern life, our connectedness with one another is more diminished than ever, and even at a time dominated by disease, we still largely push death out of sight to covid wards, hospices and crematoria.
The purpose of this service is to draw us back to solidarity with those who suffer, to connect us with one another, and remind us of our common mortality; to help us consider our humanity and draw us towards the divine love revealed in Christ through this story. In the same sermon Donne writes that ‘any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’. How much more then does this death – of injustice and torture – diminish us when we reflect upon it? And do we feel involved in mankind? Do we feel diminished by the deaths of our neighbours? Of Ethiopians, of countries without vaccines? Are we connected to this present grief so widely felt?
It’s not easy to look upon suffering. To look on Jesus taking up the cross. Typically we avert our eyes or walk on more quickly. Change the subject. We don’t want to disturb our grieving neighbour.
Tonight we may reflect, within the safety of this gentle liturgy and beautiful music, upon those things that trouble us most; to look on death and to believe in life. And as we reflect on this story of death, this memento mori, we might imagine the bells also ringing out in Putney Vale, in Mortlake and Lambeth with Donne’s injunction: ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’
‘NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS. Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.’
Jesus is helped by Simon of Cyrene
Suffering is never an individual matter. We often see and think of a single cross, of Jesus alone as a sacrifice before God. That forgets the two thieves crucified alongside him; the innumerable other Jews crucified as rebels against the Roman occupation; the millions who have died for political expedience. Not to mention the women who followed steadfast to the end, the Marys and the women of Jerusalem. And we have this station with Simon of Cyrene forced to share the burden of the cross. All of these people share in Jesus’ suffering. He was not a man alone, but a person connected by bonds of love and friendship, a man who was grieved over.
How we react to suffering says a lot about our own character and strength of conviction. Artists have long enjoyed painting the three crosses. In Easter gardens our children make three little crosses on a hill. The thief who scoffs is usually portrayed as agonizingly contorted, pulling away from Christ, his face in shadow. The good thief leans towards Christ, sometimes with a trace of the peace ordained by Christ’s words: ‘today you will be with me in paradise’. We shouldn’t be too hard on the scoffing thief. Under the duress of crucifixion, who can blame him? The good thief, though, is remarkable. His suffering does not drive him within himself. His attention remains outward, thinking of Jesus before himself. In the same way, the women cry for Jesus, and their concern is reflected back by Jesus’ concern for them. Simon, a foreigner, steps in to help Jesus who has fallen under the heavy cross.
Our suffering often provides us with these alternatives: to fall in upon ourselves, and, even if it is not quite self-indulgence, to lament our own losses; or suffering may be a springboard for the alleviation of others’ pain. To find in our own experience of weakness an inspiration to protect and serve our neighbour. Christ is the pattern here, the man of sorrows by whose stripes we are healed. T. S. Eliot called Christ the ‘wounded surgeon’, writing:
his ‘dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
By death redeems the world.
It should never stop striking us as odd that the centre of the Gospel is the death of the man said to be king. It is unlike any other religion. There is no miracle, no magic. It is the most human of experiences, encountering meanness, pain and death. The most surprising thing about Christianity though is to say that it’s actually here, in this seeming total lack of God and the supernatural, the strange cruelty of humans, the experience of forsakenness, here that God is most present; that God is revealed. Even 2000 years later we’re still tempted to look for Christ where there is power and authority; to think that God is with us when we are strong and blessed and to worry that God has deserted us, or to question whether there is any God at all, when things get difficult.
For us, quite often, religion is an added extra; a pleasant thing we might do when we are feeling good about things, something to enjoy for an hour or two on Sunday. Our faith though is something rooted in the most basic experiences. It looks for God in godlessness; it takes a situation which seems unjust, irrational, inhuman and says ‘here is true divinity’. Not in miracles, magic or power, but in love, sacrifice and generosity. Things which we all have access to; and which at any moment we may be transformed by.
George Herbert famously wrote ‘seven whole days, not one in seven, I shall praise thee’, echoing St Paul that we should pray without ceasing. In the letter of James we read that true religion is this: ‘to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.’
It is a comfort to find God in beauty and friendship. The crucifixion though is a reminder of where the heart of God really lies. The disciples expected a Messiah to come in power and were surprised by a God of love. When we are looking for God, we should be careful that we do not do the same.
The Tomb
The Stations of the Cross leave us at the threshold of Holy Saturday. The Jewish day, following Genesis, begins in the evening: ‘And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.’ So as Good Friday ends at the tomb in the light of the dusk we are at the beginning of a long day. Dominating the mind is an experience characterized by betrayal, injustice, suffering and death. But the close of Saturday promises a new beginning – a new creation, a liberation and a putting to right of the world.
Here is the world we inherit and in which we mostly live. Between the memory of suffering, of a generation, a nation, a person whom we loved and lost, with the fearful knowledge that we are the inheritors of this broken Good Friday World; and the promise, we dare to hope in, that the fragile meaning and uncertain hope will emerge with the dawning of a new day.
Saturday is also the final day of creation, the Sabbath on which God rests. Holy Saturday the day when Christ rests in the tomb. At any time the agony of the cross, the grief of the pieta, may threaten to choke us with the fear of Good Friday’s return. What makes Christians different, what marks us out from secularism, which can only ever look backwards to the angel of death working its way through history, is the belief that love is somehow eternal. What is sewn in love on Good Friday, for Christ, for us, is reaped in joy on Easter Sunday. That is to say that the agony of the darkness of noon is pregnant with glimpses of light from the coming morning. And for our pilgrimage on Holy Saturday, this means that all our grief and suffering, the falls we have endured and the end we grow ever more conscious of, may be given meaning, may be borne in the hope of resurrection.