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Palm/Passion Sunday : April 13, 2003
H O M I L
Y G R I T S
Sunday of
the Passion: Palm Sunday
Year B - April 13, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we
may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby
you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
During the Procession: "All glory, laud, and honor"and Psalm 118:19-29.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
The Liturgy of the Palms: Mark 11:1-11a. "What are you doing, untying the
colt?"
At the Eucharist:
Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you
sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to
suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great
humility: mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his
suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for
ever and ever. Amen.
Isaiah 45: 21-25, There is no other god besides me, a just God and a
liberator.
or Isaiah 52:13-53:12 By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Psalm 22:1-21, Deus, Deus menus. or 22:1-11
Philippians 2:5-11 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus
The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to Mark (14:32-15:39
(40-47) or 15:1-39 (40-47)
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Liturgy of the Palms
Mark 11:1-11 as above,
or John 12:12-16 The crowd took branches and went out to meet him.
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29 Confitemini Domino - Give thanks to the Lord for he
is good
Liturgy of the Passion:
Isaiah 50:4-9a I gave my back to those who struck me
Psalm 31:9-16 Be gracious to me Lord, for I am in distress
Philippians 2:5-11 as above
Mark 14:1-15:47 as above
Mark 15:1-39, (40-47) as above
Palm Sunday is the alias of this Feast. We have always preferred the
alias, for it reminds us of the coming of Springtime--in Spanish it is
Domingo de los Ramos--Sunday of the Branches. It's easy in Managua, for
we just step out the door and take a branch from the tree in front of the
little grocery on the corner. The Prayer Book rubric provides that any
branches may be used, but we pretend we are subtropical, and import palms
in sterilized packages from Florida, if we live in the North, and fold
them into fetishes. Dogwood may be better, for there's an old tradition
that since its wood was used for the cross of Jesus it has refused to
grow big enough to be so perverted to capitalist punishment again. But
now for one day in the year, we are all subtropical, and the little bits
of palm are exotic. It is a virtual liturgical excursion to Jerusalem.
In a 1988 trip to El Salvador from Chicago, I remember that palms were as
common as broken bottles on the streets of the west side. In our travels
we went to Agua Cayo, in El Salvador, the country named for The Saviour.
Agua Cayo means "water fall", and there we visited a community where
stood an empty church in the midst of a deserted empty village. A few
years before that the Salvadoran army, funded by U.S. taxpayers,
obliterated the village. They wanted to insure that there would be no
political resistance there. It was the way the U.S. began to replace
electoral democracy all over its hegemony. So by now most of Central
America is a tame Chihuahua. President Bolaños of Nicaragua supports
George Bush's grab for oil in Baghdad.
Mao Tse Tung had written that the guerilla swims among the people like a
fish swims in the ocean, so the Pentagon decided the thing to do was to
drain the ocean. That is, kill all the communities in which guerrillas
might grow, reproduce, find support, get food or shelter. Thousands of
Guatemaltecos and Salvadoreños were made homeless by the U.S. and its
military advisers to our puppet governments in the Empire. So Agua Cayo
was deserted. In its midst there is a church, its roof gone, its
interior in ruins. Inside, the baptismal font stands under the sky, dry
and sun-baked. At the other end of the space is the altar, and on it a
simple wooden cross made of branches wound round with palm leaf. The
church dates back to the middle of the last century, and some of its
great roof beams, hand hewn, have now fallen to the dust in the nave.
In them, we found some big five or six inch nails, old fashioned hand
forged ones, from a blacksmith's shop. They come from a time when such
nails were common for they have been made that way for a thousand years.
The nails of Good Friday may have been much like these, until our
industrial age invented machine made nails, armored cars, tanks and gun
ship helicopters. Some of the nails we found we made into a cross to be
taken to the bishop of Chicago for the Chrism mass at St. James's
cathedral on Maundy Thursday 1988.
Nails and the fetishes of palm made into crosses more truly remind us of
the true name of this day as Suffering Sunday.
Passion Sunday, for Passion (as anyone who has been in pain or in love
knows) means "suffering." It's the same word from which we get our word
"patient", for a suffering person, but we prefer not to think of lovers
as being patient with each other, 'though in Springtime, too, our fancies
turn to the hurts of heartbreak. The truth about Palm Sunday is that it
is about Death, and Betrayal, about Evil being the Hegemon in charge. It
is the occasion to see the failure of the United Nations Security
Council's attempt to avoid the U.S. war on Iraq as betrayal, failure,
death and destruction. We don't want to face the defeat of the good,
the defeat of the human future. So we carry palms in victory, trophies
from a mini-Easter, and surround it with bake sales and fashion shows.
We forget the violence in Basrah, the murder of the innocent children
of the El Amariya Bomb Shelter in Baghdad, bombed out by U.SA. in the
Gulf War -- 427 children, women, and men killed there, their fists and
feet and eyeballs now only ashy stains on the reinforced concrete walls .
A banner out front proclaims, The Crime of Al Aamiriyya Shelter is Not
savageness only but also evidence of cowardice." The U.S., says Donald
Rumsfeld, will have its soldiers met there by cheering crowds of
welcoming Iraqis. Turncoat Colin Powell will find no murder in the
collateral damage. (I hereby excommunicate him from the Episcopal Church,
and according to the rubric will notify my bishop that I have done so
within "fourteen days at the farthest." )
Once Bill Moyers got a group of people together for a public television
special called "Understanding Evil" Participants
included Maya Angelou, Barbara Jordan, Philip Paul Hallie, Samuel
Proctor, and Raul Hillberg, the Holocaust survivor. They kept getting
off the subject of evil and gravitating to hope and forgiveness, for they
wanted to avoid the Heart of Darkness.
Barbara Jordan, blessed be she, said, "All these bright minds came
together to talk about evil, and we ended up with hope. That's too
wonderful." But Professor Hillberg, who wrote the monumental "The
Destruction of the European Jews," was one who talked about evil. His
book is all about evil, and he wrote the facts. Copies of the bills of
lading for containers of hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B) that were ordered
for the death camps. The technology used to make the gas odorless, the
anxiety of the manufactures that they would lose their distinctive
patents and monopoly on the gas if it were odorless. All of it is there
in his 800 pages on the holocaust. Hillberg said, "A person who has
suffered may, I suppose, forgive his tormentor, and that is, in some
existential way, easy But how does he forgive the killing of millions
of people? On whose authority do I forgive?" And now comes General Tommy
Franks, in the employ of U.S. taxpayers, to proclaim that he has a war
machine that can inflict damage on the people of Iraq, "On A Scale Never
Seen Before." And George Bush, the Texas hangman, now an unindicted
War Criminal, will pursue it with his half wit glee. One day soon the
world will find him in the dock of history with Herman Göring.
Holy Week is a time for us to enter the sacrament of suffering, to
catechize ourselves into its historic meaning, and to read from the
present world around us the meaninglessness of our violence. We must
not turn this day into Easter, nor leap like the Easter bunny into a
petunia patch of feel-good religion. In the U.S. Easter has been made
into jelly beans and pastel eggs, a fertility rite with hyacinths and
chocolate rabbits, but no blood and sweat, no tears, no terror, no tomb.
Therefore no Golgotha, no Agua Cayos, no Iraq. Beyond the tombs of the
West Bank, the Gaza, and Baghdad, we want a Pastel Jesus and tulips.
It is human to avert the glance from the "remains" and we prefer to read
the tributes on the funeral wreaths. We have long ago forgotten what we
did as a nation to Viet Nam, what we did before that in the Holocaust and
the Slave Trade, what we did as a victorious nation to a defeated one at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what we did to devastate Central America, what
the whole human community is doing to itself in Ireland, Lebanon,
Palestine, and sub-Saharan African. And what is still persistently being
done to wreak havoc in the lives of Lesbian, Gay, and Transgendered
people, to all women who are kept powerless. We want instead to smile,
turn away, and say "Have A Nice Day!". To which my friend Anne Garrison,
ordained a priest in her 70th year, used to respond, "Thank you but I
have other plans."
William James was quoted at the end of Moyers symposium: "In every
culture the normal process of life contains moments when radical evil
gets its inning and takes its solid turn. Yet we almost never identify
those moments until after the fact, too late to arrest the instinct for
aggression and self-destruction."
This year radical evil got its inning and took its solid turn. That is
what Holy Week is about. That is what U.S.and British foreign policy are
about, and have been about for a long time. That is what the Bush family
is about, and before them the Reagan popular dictatorship. "Republican
Guard" will live longer as an epithet for the GOP than it will for Iraqi
youth. It is what the crucifixion of the world upon the cross of the New
World Order is about.
In the Passion narrative today, Jesus takes Peter and James and John
apart and Mark reports "He began to be greatly distressed and troubled,
and said to them, ' My psyche, my mind, is very sorrowful, even to
death. Stay here and watch.' And going a little farther, he fell on the
ground and prayed, that if it were possible, the hour might pass from
him." The phrase is usually translated as "My soul is very sorrowful."
The Greek word is psyche. My mind is overwhelmed by death. And his
immediate response is to ask his friends to watch--that is, to stand
guard--while he prays. This is Jesus' call to every believer today. To
be on guard against the violence endemic to our age and in all our
hearts. To guard against it, to turn away from it to pray. To pray
liberation and deliverance from this cup of suffering we would inflict on
our sisters and brothers, and yet to pray that whatever comes, God's
will may win, God's will be done through or in spite of it or of us.
Suffering Sunday is the time to face the great mystery of evil, of
ungodliness, and to stand against it, and pray with Jesus that God will
end it.Don't run away to Easter just yet. Stay here and watch. And hold
your breath.
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line:
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