PALM SUNDAY 2009

The Revd Canon Daniel S. Weir preached this sermon on The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, April 5, 2009.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

In Mark’s account of Jesus’ passion and death we see the harsh reality of this death - Jesus’ utter and complete desolation as he is betrayed by one of his disciples, denied by another, and abandoned by all the rest, abandoned by God. This is no sanatized death. There is here no peaceful passing from this life to the next, no hint of the immortality of the soul. No, here we see death, the ending of this man’s life.

That is, I think, the point. Whatever else might be said about the meaning of this death, whatever Good News we might find there, there is the Good News that God in Christ shares our humanity fully and without reservation. We live, in Heidegger’s phrase, towards death. We are born not only to live, but to die. In an address to the Bishops at last summer’s Lambeth Conference, Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, spoke of the covenant of fate in which we all share, the covenant that God made with Noah and with all creation. In the Incarnation, God shares that covenant on our side, as one of us. Jesus is, to use Adam’s words about Eve, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.

Mark’s account of the Gospel begins: the Gospel of Jesus Christ the son of God. For the next 14 chapters there are only a few mentions of Jesus as the son of God, and these few by demons. Jesus speaks of himself as the son of man, as simply a human being. It is only here at the end of his life, that those words – son of God - come back as Good News. Here at the foot of the cross, the Centurion sees the truth that this man, who has just died, is the son of God. In his dying the truth becomes clear – this man is God’s son, and that is Good News indeed.