St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wesley Chapel, FL
Preacher: The Rev. Adrienne R. Hymes
March 28, 2021● Palm Sunday (Year B)
Gospel: Mark15:1-39
The world is in need of a good love story. I was recently moved by a love story between a grandmother and her grandson. Bryan Stevenson, social justice activist, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the book, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” which became a 2019 movie, shared a powerful story about his grandmother, the daughter of slaves, and how she responded to him out of love, and possibly fear, with the advent of integration.
When Stevenson was about nine years old, every time his grandmother, the powerful matriarch of the family saw him, she would squeeze him so long and so tightly that he thought she was trying to hurt him. An hour or so later, she would say to him, “Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?” If he said, no, then she would hug him even more. By the time he was 10 he says that he knew that the first thing to tell his grandmother was, “Mama, I always feel you hugging me.” As a college student, Stevenson found himself at his grandmother’s bedside as she was dying, holding her hand, not even sure if she could hear him as he poured his heart out. When he stood up to leave, his grandmother opened her eyes, squeezed his hand and said, “Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you? I want you to know, I’m always going to be hugging you.”
The world needs a good love story. And while the Passion Gospel in Mark focuses on Jesus’ suffering on the way to the cross and on the cross, we must remember that it is one part of the unfolding story of God’s self-giving love poured out for humankind and all of creation. The passion gospel is an unlikely love story, but it is a love story nonetheless.
Having been handed over to the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, the Jewish chief priests accused Jesus of many things against which he was expected to defend himself. This encounter came after Jesus had gone before the Jewish religious council, where he had told the high priest that he was the Messiah. In his claim of divinity, Jesus was condemned to death as a blasphemer. This encounter with Pontius Pilate also came directly after Jesus’ beloved disciple, Peter, had denied even knowing Jesus three times.
This love story sounds a lot like a one-sided story of unrequited love. But in the tension of rejection and abandonment, by his own people, whom God sent him to save, Jesus the lover of souls, remained obedient to his purpose in God’s plan for universal salvation. So, how did the Jewish religious leaders get to a point in their relationship with Jesus that it cost him his life? The simple answer is that they had no love for Jesus.
Jesus was a threat to the Jewish religious leaders’ authority and influence with the Jewish people, and he was a threat to their established relationship with the Roman empire. The agenda-seeking religious leaders, certainly had encounters with Jesus, many confrontational, and knew enough about who he claimed to be, his teaching and preaching with authority, as well as his miraculous works amongst the Jewish people. Instead of being drawn to Jesus, they set their sights on erasing him.
As Jesus was handed over to be crucified, the assaults to his humanity escalated with the whole cohort of Roman soldiers mocking his supposed kingship and beating him. When Jesus was crucified, passersby and the chief priests and scribes taunted him to save himself and come down from the cross. “…Come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe,” said the religious leaders. Even the bandits on either side of him taunted him.The onlookers, the religious leaders and the cohort of Roman soldiers were all watching Jesus suffering on the cross because they were waiting for one of two things to happen. Either Jesus would inevitably die, or he would save himself and come down from the cross as the crowd taunted him to do.
They must have wondered, “What if Jesus really is who he says he is? Let’s watch and see.” The irony, which you and I know on the resurrection side of the cross, is that Jesus endured the inhumane treatment, and remained on the cross to die, so that the very people who persecuted him would have everlasting life.
Within the crowd of spectators, was a Roman centurian, a gentile, who, after Jesus’ death (in which he participated) confessed, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (15:39). What happened to evoke his exclamation? We know that the centurian was physically facing Jesus; and we know that he was close enough to him to the cross to see Jesus take his last breath. Whatever he saw and heard, in the closeness of that most holy moment, changed him from being an active enemy of Jesus, to a confessor of his true identity.
Up to this point in Mark’s gospel Jesus’ baptism was an extraordinary moment in time where the separation, between heaven and earth, was temporarily removed. In his baptism, Jesus saw the heavens torn apart (similar language used to describe the tearing of the temple curtain) and the Spirit descended from heaven on him. The voice from heaven spoke to Jesus, “You are my Son, the Beloved…” (1:10-11).
Recall, also, that Jesus’ transfiguration in chapter nine, was another extraordinary cosmic happening in time, witnessed by his disciples as he stood with Elijah and Moses. The voice spoke to the disciples from the overshadowing cloud, “This is my Son the Beloved…” (9:7).
And, here in chapter 15, I cannot help but wonder, that when Jesus breathed his last, whether or not the centurian, who so up close and personal to the crucified Jesus, heard the voice from heaven saying, “This is my Son the Beloved.” And, with his confession, the centurian, an unlikely participant in God’s love story, became the willing beloved.
The passion gospel reminds us that Jesus’ crucifixion is inextricably bound to God’s love story with humankind—a love story that is at once communal and deeply personal. As gruesome as it was, the cross event, invited, and still invites, humankind into relationship with God through Christ. The experience of the suffering servant must be experienced from a position that is up close and personal, and there’s nothing more personal than the depth of one’s soul.
Nurturing a deeply personal relationship with Jesus makes it possible for faithful people to optimally witness those holy moments when the separation, between the heavenly and the earthly, is torn in two—holy moments, which are occurring all around us—that turn human hearts toward the eternal love that created them.
There will be times in our lives when we need to feel the embrace of Jesus; and need to be affirmed that we are loved and cared for. We need that divine embrace that assures us that God is with us, even in the midst of human suffering caused by a deadly pandemic, which has separated people from one another.
We need that divine embrace to assure us that even in the midst of human suffering caused by the insidious sin of racism, and other -isms, which separates people from one another based on race, class, gender—you name it—God is with us. We need to feel Jesus’ divine embrace to remind us always that though we may be separated from each other, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
As you move through this Holy Week, gazing upon the cross on Good Friday, with the expectation of the risen Christ on Sunday, be reminded of God’s divine embrace—an embrace that hugs you so tightly that it hugs your very soul.
As a part of God’s unfolding love story, know that God is always going to be hugging you—because you are his beloved.
Amen.
