Lord and God

Palm Sunday is also known as Passion Sunday because we read Matthew’s Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ [Matt 27:11-54].

We ask “who is the man going through this horrific experience?” Who is this man of sorrows, condemned by the powers that be, and abandoned by his followers? Is he just an unlucky poor man symbolically entering on a colt, getting too close and annoying the Empire. Or is this the King in disguise who has come among his people to set them free?

If he’s just a man who gets in over his head then Good Friday becomes a sad account of a good man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time by the wrong people who can get away with killing an innocent man. A terrible tragedy that should have been avoided.

But soon after the resurrection Jesus’ disciples are prepared to die proclaiming him Lord and God as do our earliest records as evidenced by the Philippians reading    [Phil 2:6-11] where Saint Paul, writing about 20 years after the Passion events says, Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited”. Wow!

This isn’t a tragic story about a misunderstood man, but a triumphant story about God through Jesus becoming King of the world, but not using the violence and force of the world. A story about sacrificial love—how violence is overcome and God’s Kingdom established on earth through Jesus, the Crucified God.

Our role, those who are witnesses in faith of these things, is to share in the work of announcing and inaugurating God’s Kingdom, not in heaven but in the here and now, being filled with the Spirit of Jesus who lives in us.

Who Jesus is makes all the difference.

Deacon Mark Kelly [with some material from a sermon by William Bradbury, April 13, 2014]