Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Isaiah 45:11-25; Psalm 22:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:39-23:56

We’re finally here – Holy Week has begun.  And it starts off a bit schizophrenically, with joy and sorrow intermixed. A parishioner came up to me last week and complained about that. “Couldn’t we just enjoy Palm Sunday? Couldn’t we just focus on the Triumphal Entry for a little while?  Why do we have to jump right into the betrayal and crucifixion? We’ll get there soon enough!”

I couldn’t agree more. I wish it were like that.  I wish that after the deprivation and penitence of Lent we could just have one good day before the hardest work of all begins. But there’s a very practical reason why we read the Passion on Palm Sunday: for a lot of people, it’s the only time they’re going to hear it. Some people are never going to hear it – those are the folks who rarely go to church, or might be “two-fers” who come on Christmas and Easter.  Happy occasions without the sorrow of the Passion.

Even folks who come every Sunday would never hear the Passion if we didn’t read it today.  They’d go from the Triumphal Entry to the Resurrection, and would probably be glad they had.

 What about the folks, though, who come to church a lot?  What about people who make Holy Week a priority in their lives, and so would definitely hear the Passion on Good Friday? And what about the people who come to every service during Holy Week, and so this week will hear the Passion from all four Gospels?  First of all, if anybody makes all 19 services between now and Easter, you deserve some sort of prize.  (Give me some time to figure out what it is.) But even if you do, there’s still good reason to hear the Passion today, on Palm Sunday.

The reason is that Christianity is a “both/and” kind of religion, not an “either/or” kind. Jesus was both human and divine.  Humans are both sinful and redeemed. The Passion is cause for both weeping and rejoicing, because of the pain of the Christ and the salvation that came through His life and death and resurrection.

This kind of “both/and” thinking is reflected in our worship.  We confess a lot during Lent, but we still hear the proclamation of forgiveness each and every Sunday. We go without the confession in the weeks following Easter, but our prayers still reflect our need for God, and the fact that we fall short of who God wants us to be all the time.  And of all the Sundays of the year, Palm Sunday is the one where the contrasts are the greatest. The Triumphal Entry, with all its hope and exuberance; and the Passion, with all its darkness and sorrow.  Right there together, intertwined.

The bottom line is that God wants all of us, and we can never go anywhere where God isn’t. The most wonderful joy?  God is there. The deepest regret?  God is there, too.  Most of all, Palm Sunday is about Jesus experiencing the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, so that we can be sure that no matter where we are, God is with us, and He’s already been there Himself.
 

So in keeping with the schizophrenic nature of Palm Sunday, let’s shift gears here and look at the Passion story that we just heard.  This week we’re going to be looking at all four versions of the Passion. First, though, we need a little bit of background.

First, let’s start with the ABC’s. There are four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three are called the Synoptic Gospels, because they provide a synopsis of the life of Jesus, and we read through one of them each year in our lectionary cycle. As this is Year C, we’ve been reading the Gospel of Luke, as we did today.  The gospel of John is a bit different, and so we bring that out on certain occasions, like every Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

Second, we need to talk about history. All of the Gospels were written in the second half of the 1^st century, several decades after the death of Jesus.  That means that the stories had survived in oral form for a long time before they were written down, which explains why each of the four gospels has its own character and emphasis.  These weren’t testimonies recorded the day after Jesus died – time had passed, and certain parts of the story had taken on greater meaning.

Finally, we need to talk about which one came first. There’s general agreement among scholars that Mark, which was written in the late 60’s – and that’s literally the 60’s, not the 1960’s – was the earliest of the gospels. Matthew and Luke both used Mark in writing their gospels, as well as some other source which goes by the mysterious name of Q, which is the first letter of the German word for “source.”  So we can learn a lot about where Matthew and Luke are coming from by seeing where they follow Mark, and where they go off on their own.  Finally, John is the latest of the gospels and drew on sources other than Mark and Q, which makes things a bit more complicated.

Today, though, we’re looking at Luke.  First and foremost, Luke is a storyteller.  He dots his i’s and crosses his t’s. He starts off before Jesus was born, leads us through the life of Jesus pointing out how Jesus fulfilled all kinds of Old Testament prophecies, describes the death and resurrection, and goes on document the early church in the book of Acts, which he also wrote.  All told, Luke wrote 30% of the New Testament, when you take Luke and Acts together, which originally were one book.  So after Easter when we start reading the book of Acts, we need to remember that it takes up right where the book of Luke ended, and that that’s an artificial division.

And it’s just as well that we start Holy Week this year with the book of Luke, because even if it isn’t the earliest Gospel, it might be the kindest.  Some of the Bible’s most famous stories of forgiveness – like the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Parable of the Good Samaritan – are found only in Luke.  And in Luke the disciples don’t get the bad rap they do in other gospels. Whereas Mark focuses on the weaknesses of the disciples, Luke is more merciful: in his account the disciples never abandon Jesus; in the garden they only fall asleep once – not three times as in Matthew and Mark – and then it’s because of sorrow, not laziness; when Peter denies Jesus the third time, only Luke says “the Lord turned and looked at Peter,” which follows on the tender words of support that Jesus said to Peter at the Last supper: “I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail.”

Jesus is also very forgiving of His enemies. When one of the disciples cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, Jesus not only tells him to put the sword away, Jesus also heals the slave’s ear. That’s only mentioned in Luke. And as Jesus is nailed to Cross, He says, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Again, only Luke has Jesus saying that.  And while Matthew and Mark also mention two thieves who were crucified with Jesus, only Luke has one of the thieves ask Jesus to “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And here “the good thief” addresses Him intimately as “Jesus,” which is only done one other time in all the gospels, by the blind beggar at Jericho. Only in Luke does Jesus tell the thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Now there’s been a lot of talk recently about who’s responsible for the death of Jesus. Mel Gibson’s new movie, The Passion of the Christ, has reignited the debate and some people have accused it, and him, of being anti-Semitic. One of the reasons for this is that in the movie when Pontius Pilate literally washes his hands of the matter, the Jewish crowd yells, “His blood be on us and on our children!” That verse in particular has been responsible for the persecution of millions of Jews, and not only be obviously evil people in horrific and famous events like the Holocaust. In the Middle Ages, for example, in some French cathedrals as part of the Palm Sunday celebration, a Jew was brought forward to receive a ceremonial blow from the count, avenging the blows “the Jews” supposedly inflicted on Jesus. [1]  This has been such a problem that the Roman Catholic Church made a formal announcement in the 1960’s stating that “neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during [Christ’s] Passion. . . [T]he Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy Scripture.” [2]

It’s also important to note that that verse comes from Matthew (which we’ll get to on Tuesday), and there’s nothing like it in Luke.  Luke is the only gospel that describes a segment of Jews who are not disciples but are still touched by Jesus’ suffering and death: the weeping daughters of Jerusalem.  We’ve already seen how Jesus prays for His persecutors, “who don’t know what they are doing.”  And Luke is also compassionate toward the Romans, because both before and after the death of Jesus he has a Roman proclaiming Jesus’ innocence: first Pontius Pilate, and later the centurion.

Finally, we should look at the last words of Jesus.  In both Matthew and Mark the last thing Jesus says is, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”, which is Hebrew for “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His last words suggest abandonment and isolation.  In John, His last words are, “It is finished,” which suggest completion, if not resignation. But in Luke, His last words are, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” which speak once again of Jesus’ trust in and intimacy with the Father. Just like in the Garden, where only Luke has an angel appear to Jesus to give Him strength at the moment of his betrayal.  According to Luke, at no point is Jesus separated from the Father, just as at no point will we ever be separated from God’s love.

This week we’re going to look at all four accounts of Christ’s passion: tomorrow we’ll examine Mark, with Matthew on Tuesday and John on Good Friday. And the reason we’re doing this doesn’t have anything to do with accuracy.  It’s not like one account is right and another is wrong. Since they were written so long after Jesus’ death, they just emphasize different things, based on who they’re writing for.  Luke, for instance, wrote to a Gentile audience, and so he didn’t use Hebrew terms like Gethsemane or Golgotha. Matthew wrote to a Jewish audience, and so it makes sense that he records Jesus’ last words in Hebrew.

Precisely because each gospel writer had a different emphasis and a different audience, it’s important for us not to summarize the Passion narratives. We shouldn’t try to smoothe out the differences in order to come up with “the true story,” because if we do that, we lose the precious uniqueness of each gospel.  We lose the overwhelming grace and forgiveness of Luke, the sense of abandonment of Mark, the Davidic parallels of Matthew, and the cosmic drama of John.  All of these are “true,” and the reason they sometimes sound different each gospel writer has a message to get across as much as a story to tell.  Just like that old saying about preachers: Each one has only one sermon that he gives in somewhat modified form every single week.  The same was true back then, which means that if we really want to understand the death of Jesus, we have to listen to all four of the gospel writers, understand where they’re coming from and who they’re writing to, and then put together our own picture of the Christ, in all of His uniqueness and complexity.

[1] Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave – A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels (New York: Doubleday, 1994): 575 (note 7).

[2] Second Vatican Council.

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