By Rev. Heather J. Blais, Rector What are your childhood memories of Palm Sunday? I spent my middle and high school years worshiping at the former St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Augusta, Maine.* On Palm Sunday, we would gather at the Parish House with our palms, and process across the sidewalk into the church. Much like we did today, due to the ice, the crucifer would lead us in one of those curious figure eight processions, round and round the sanctuary, until finally we would make our way to our pews. I remember sitting in my pew, turning my palm into a cross, and curious neighbors would hand me theirs, so I might do the same with their palms. Looking back, I now recognize those neighbors were really compassionate grandparent figures, who could easily spot a kid in great need of something to do at a particularly lengthy Sunday service. Anyone who has ever sat next to me knows, I’m not very good at sitting still. The words of the liturgy and the readings would soak into me, even as I was busy fidgeting with palms. But when it was time for the gospel, things were startlingly different. Our parish celebrated Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, where the congregation would turn the Passion gospel into a dramatic reading. There was a bone chilling moment where the entire congregation would shout together, ‘Crucify him, crucify him’. Many of us grew up with similar experiences on Palm Sunday. In recent years, here at James and Andrew, we have joined other churches in a conscious shift away from celebrating Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday. The primary hope is that instead of trying to fit all of Holy Week into a single service, instead we will gather daily as a community to give our full attention to each momentous element of Holy Week. To be certain, this is less convenient. Possibly a disastrous choice at a time when our culture increasingly values convenience. That said, when has following the Way of Love ever been convenient? In fact, it is largely rather inconvenient. Choosing to follow Jesus on the Way of Love forces us to regularly examine our motivations and actions, to strive for justice and peace, and to genuinely care for the wellbeing of all people and God’s creation. Yet there are still other reasons to hold off on a dramatic reading of the Passion. At our winter clergy day, Bishop Fisher and his staff brought in Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, who serves as Kraft Family Professor and Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. He is also an Episcopal priest, serving the Diocese of Massachusetts as Ecumenical & Interreligious Officer.** He is deeply engaged in helping the Church examine and rethink how we talk about Jews, particularly within our lectionary, liturgy, and preaching. During his time with us, he addressed how we, as the Church, have historically engaged in antisemitism by the way we use certain texts in Holy Week. He strongly argues that how the Church speaks about Jews in worship shapes how the Church stands with Jews in public. Professor Joslyn-Siemiatkoski reminded us that the Church has long promoted supersessionism, which is the belief that the Church has replaced Israel as God’s chosen people.*** According to Professor Joslyn-Siemiatkoski supersessionism is woven into our beliefs in three core ways:
He goes on to say that when these beliefs go uncorrected, it misshapes and misunderstands Judaism as a religion that:
These anti-Judaism beliefs lead to instances of anti-semitism. In particular, Holy Week has historically been a time of rhetorical and physical violence for Jews. While Jews and Christians have begun the long work of reconciliation, the Church still has extensive work to do. Part of this work is taking a closer look at our liturgical practices during Holy Week. Earlier I mentioned there might be another reason to hold off on the dramatic reading of the Passion. In the Passion narratives, the crowd is understood to be Jewish. This means the narratives portray Jews as the ones crying out, ‘Crucify him!’, and in Matthew’s version, the crowd cries out: ‘His blood be on us and our children!’ (27:24-26). These readings portray Jewish leaders as though they carry a greater responsibility for Jesus' death than Pontious Pilate, when in reality, the Jewish people are subjects of an oppressive Roman Empire. Even the Jewish authorities who act as intermediaries are subject to Rome’s power and might. This means throughout history we have placed responsibility for the death of Jesus on an oppressed people, instead of their oppressor, the Roman Empire and the only person in the room holding all the actual power, Pontius Pilate. Above and beyond this fact, are the complexities we add in when we, as Christians, play act at being Jewish for a dramatic reading of the Passion. We get to experience that bone chilling moment when we cry out ‘Crucify him’ and feel, for a moment, what it's like to be responsible for Jesus’ suffering and death. But we are playing at being Jewish; a people that have historically been oppressed, and when the service is over, we go back out into the world as Christians. How is that appropriate, when as Christians, our religion sits so adjacent to power, that it has been swept up in its own oppressive and disturbing version of nationalism? Professor Joslyn-Siemiatkoski begs the question of us: Is the drama worth it? I would have to say no. Professor Joslyn-Siemiatkoski suggests one of the solutions to this challenge is to separate out Palm and Passion Sunday, as has been our custom in recent years. Good Friday holds its own complexities, which we will tend to later this week. Each year a gospel lesson is assigned for the ‘Liturgy of the Palms’ that we shift to our primary gospel lesson on Palm Sunday. Before we take a closer look at that text, and I promise, I don’t have a whole other sermon, I want to lift up something that theologians Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan observe about the Passion in their book The Last Week.**** They observe that the word ‘passion’ means more than simply ‘suffering’; it also means what a person is passionate about. These two interpretations play against one another in the life of Jesus. They write: “The first passion of Jesus was the kingdom of God, namely, to incarnate the justice of God by demanding for all a fair share of a world belonging to and ruled by the covenantal God of Israel. It was that first passion for God’s distributive justice that led inevitably to the second passion by Pilate’s punitive justice. Before Jesus, after Jesus, and, for Christians, archetypically in Jesus, those who live for nonviolent justice die all too often from violent injustice.” When we bear all this in mind, it helps make sense of the events in our gospel lesson.**** Jesus is not just randomly asking for the disciples to score him a colt, so he has a sweet ride into Jerusalem. He is actively planning a political demonstration. Jesus knows that on the other side of Jerusalem, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate was leading his own imperial procession into the city. Rome was always ready to showcase their might, particularly when they wanted to squelch the possibility of revolt. Only twenty-six years earlier, there had been a rebellion in Jerusalem following Herod the Great’s death. When Rome finally quelled the revolt, they punished the rebels by crucifying two thousand rebels en masse. It was customary for the Roman governor to arrive in Jerusalem in anticipation of any major Jewish festivals, particularly for Passover, which celebrated the Jewish people’s liberation from Egypt. The Kingdom of Caesar was on full display and it told the oppressed: Stay in your place. Yet the Kingdom of Caesar stood in direct opposition to everything the Kingdom of God stands for. And so, with the help of his followers, Jesus organized an entirely different procession of peasants that took place at the exact same time, on the other side of Jerusalem. Jesus entered Jerusalem on a colt, stirring to mind for the Jewish people the words of the prophet Zechariah, who foretold of God’s king who would bring peace: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem; and the battle-bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zechariah 9:10). All those years ago, two processions entered Jerusalem reminding the crowds of two very different ways of being, two very different kinds of kingdoms, and two very different dreams of what this world can be. There is the Way of Love and the Way of the Might. This Holy Week, this one precious life: Which Way will we follow? Which Way will we walk? Amen. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mark%27s_Episcopal_Church_(Augusta,_Maine) ** https://www.diomass.org/news/diocesan-news/new-ecumenical-interreligious-officer-appointed *** The points made in this paragraph and the subsequent two paragraphs are directly taken from the Rev. Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski talk and power point presentation on ‘Engaging Anti-Judaism in the Texts of Holy Week’ given at the Diocese of Western Massachusetts Winter Clergy Day on February 1, 2024. ****The points made in this paragraph are referencing Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan book, The Last Week, p. vii-viii, 2-30. Comments are closed.
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