Sunday of the Passion/Palm Sunday
March 16, 2008
Text: The Passion According to Matthew
In Matthew’s account of the Passion of Our Lord, we have a contrast between Jesus and the disciples. Jesus is the obedient Son of God, who fulfills the Scriptures and is faithful to God’s will unto death. The disciples are of little faith and exhibit shaky obedience.
In the verses immediately preceding the Passion narrative, Jesus asserts his commitment to be put death. He says to his disciples, “You know that after two days the Passover is coming and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” When he instructs the disciples to prepare the Passover, he says, “My time is near.” His obedience will be fully tested.
At the supper, when Jesus gave the bread and cup to the disciples, he reaffirmed the purpose of his entire mission that his blood would be “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays repeatedly that God’s will be done “not what I want but what you want.”
At the moment of his arrest, Jesus refuses violence and tells his captors, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled which say it must happen in this way?”
The trial scene continues this thread of the faithful obedience of Jesus. Standing before the hostile Sanhedrin, Jesus fearlessly accepts his role as the Christ and Son of God. Two times, when Jesus is accused by his enemies, he stands silent and uncompromised as his fate is sealed. Pilate has him flogged and Jesus with a quiet obedience is handed over to be crucified.
Dying on the cross, Jesus remains faithful and obedient to God. He is tempted by a procession of taunts, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” “He trusts in God let God deliver him.” Nothing will turn Jesus aside from his fidelity to God.
Even with his final words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus is holding tenaciously on to His trust in God in spite of what his enemies have done to him.
The Jesus in Matthew’s narrative of the Passion dies in anguish but faithful to the spirit in which he lived. The final surge of life in his broken body is an act of obedience: with a loud voice Jesus breathed his last.
The disciples, however, are ones of little faith and shaky obedience. In the very beginning of the narrative, Judas steps out in front to barter for Jesus’ betrayal. During the supper, Jesus predicts the treachery of Judas and the desertion and denial of the rest of the disciples. In Gethsemane, the disciples do not “watch and pray” as instructed, but fall asleep at the moment of greatest crisis. They act cowardly as one of them retaliates with a sword. All of them betray him when he is arrested.
The way Matthew describes the disciples reminds us that we are ones of “little faith.” We would have behaved no differently in these circumstances. Faced with the brutal realties of persecution, suffering and death, our faith and obedience would not be sufficient to keep our relationship with God secure.
On this Palm Sunday, Jesus is the faithful one. We are the ones of little faith. Jesus is perfectly obedient to God. We fail miserably to obey God. Jesus gave himself unto death for us. Out of fear, we run from death. Jesus is the Son of Man who was crucified. We are the sons of Adam and Eve who should have been crucified.
We betrayed and rejected Jesus. For these very reasons, Jesus obediently dies for us that our failure to be faithful and obedient would not keep us in everlasting condemnation and death.
Matthew’s narrative of the Passion is a story of fidelity: Jesus’ fidelity to God that becomes our hope of forgiveness and new life. Truly, this crucified One is the Son of God.