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Passion

March 28, 2010, Palm Sunday, MLC Ocean View, NJ, H. Fege, D.Min.

Is. 50.4ff. Phil. 2. 5-11, Lk. 23. 1-49.

We used to call it Palm Sunday but it has always been Sunday of the Passion. Living in a post-Christian, secular culture, where what we do,

and who we are, may be misunderstood or worse not understood at all;

a word of explanation is in order. 

            I Googled the word putting it in quotes:

1. Sign up for premiere adult personals

2. New kind of dating site were women take the lead

3. Easter Concert in S. NJ    See what I mean…?

The word actually comes from the Latin Pati meaning to suffer.

From it we get compassion, pathology, pathogen, empathy, sympathy, sociopath, psychopath, homeopathy, osteopathy, pathology on and on…

In the Gospel today you heard a portion of Luke’s account of what the Church calls the Passion…

We have a passionate God.  To fully appreciate God’s Passion, God's pain on our behalf, we need to connect the dots.

We need to use all of our senses…

We need to hear the story.

What you heard was only a small piece of a much longer narrative. You only heard the last 49 vss.

In the language of theologians which of course is German, it is called Heilsgeschicte – Salvation History or literally “the Story of Healing…” 

To tell the whole story takes a library of 66 books.

You need to smell the story…

Last Sunday you smelled the incense as a reminder of the expensive perfume that Mary used to prepare Jesus for burial. Death does not smell sweet, ergo Nard.

I was once asked to identify a parishioner. It was late summer in the Deep South and the body had been entombed in a mobile home without air conditioning for almost a week.

The smell of decaying human flesh is not kind to the senses. All the incense and perfume could not have masked the stench.

We need to touch the story.

It is called passing the peace.

It is more than a time to catch one another up on the week's happening. It is a time to press flesh into flesh. It is a time to hold close those who are dear to us and some not so dear…

When Lutherans where first introduced to that liturgical moment in worship, there was an outcry against touching and in some places the pastor who introduced the passing of the peace was run off…

The story of Christ’s passion is a story of a flesh and blood God.

We need to taste the story of God's love; God’s passion – God’s pain.

There is a reason we use fermented grape juice in our communion service… Just ask any first communicant.

“The body of Christ given for you – the blood of Christ shed for you.”

We need to see the story – to see the word made flesh.

I can tell you, it is not Mel Gibson’s version of the Passion that the Gospels have in mind…

It is much deeper – more mysterious, more painful than any Hollywood movie…

It is infinitely more passionate.

While on Mt. Nebo, Moses once asked to see God.

So God hid him in the cleft of a rock; and we are told that Moses saw the “passing glory” of God…

The Heb. actually says Moses saw the back side of God and lucky for him lived to tell about it.

But it was on a crossbeam and an upright stake driven deep into the earth that the Glory of God became most visible. When Jesus cried out “it is finished!”

Heilsgeschicte – the Passion.

St. Paul can’t explain it any better than quoting an early Christian hymn.

            Philippians 2.5-11;

            Let this same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

            Who though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something… (here the translators have a hard time with the Gk. word h-arpagmon), to be exploited...

In other passages in the NT where this word pops up, it is used in the sense of wresting, taking by force.

In other words, Paul, using a hymn, is telling the world that the depth of God’s pain at Calvary is beyond translation, beyond comprehension, beyond our knowing… so let's leave it at that. Paul continues the hymn:  “God emptied himself taking on the form of a slave being born in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross.”  Amen