PALM SUNDAY 2007

Isaiah 50:4-7

Philippians 2:6-11

Luke 22:14-23:56

Lose your life, that you may welcome Christ, give up all to Christ, that you may see the Father; then you will find your true self as a gift of God.

How many times have we sung this troparion, my brothers and sisters, and is it not ever new? Does not a slightly different meaning come forth, a nuance we have not heard before, a deeper awareness of the truth of it all?

Especially now, as we have just heard the Good News of our Redemption, THE great story of our salvation. Jesus has “offered his back to those who struck him, his cheeks to those who pulled out his beard.” And why? Because “the Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”

What a paradox our life is! What a paradox upon which our Christian faith is based!

Lose to gain.

Take a beating to be able to teach.

Life sprung from death.

It happens no other way. And so Jesus himself, Son of God though he was, “did not think equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself and learned obedience through what he suffered.”

My brothers and sisters, let this reality sink into your minds and hearts. Let it become the warp and woof of your life.

Let me conclude here with a couple phrases from a poem from the middle of the last century. They are powerful words and poignant images. I offer them as another way of saying what our troparion does so eloquently. They come at the end of a dialogue of the crucifixion – a dialogue between Jesus and the Father. These are the Father's last words, but they are really the words of each one of us as we come to understand just what is happening in these days – in this week we call Holy, and which our forebears called “The Great Week.”

“And I, always,

must absorb his agony into myself as mine,

to raise me to larger memory

and mercy and farther seeing.

I must hold his darkness in my heart,

sleepless and weeping,

until I am illumined and revealed to myself

as richer than I could have known.”

Let us enter this Great Week knowing that this is our master plan: “to hold his darkness in my heart, sleepless and weeping; to absorb his agony into myself as mine.” This is the only way to allow the events we celebrate to form us and shape us, that we, too, “may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”

Amen.