Rev R D Drysdale
30th March 1980
Belmont Presbyterian Church, Belfast.
Palm Sunday
Hymn “All Glory, Laud and Honour”
Prayer / The Lord’s Prayer
New Testament Reading: Matthew c21 v1-9 Luke c19 v41&42
Hymn (Psalm 118) “Oh Set Ye Open Unto Me The Gates of Righteousness”
New Testament Reading: Mark c15v 21-39
Anthem “Oh Living Will” (Stanford)
Prayer
Hymn “We Sing The Praise of Him Who Died”
Sermon “Palm Sunday”
Just above this church lie the Holywood Hills. There's a road that snakes its way up through them towards Bangor. At the top you get an arresting view of Belfast, lying sprawled out in the Lagan basin.
If you come on it at night driving towards the city, as I've often done, it's hard to resist the urge to pull the car into the side of the road and sit for a few minutes contemplating the twinkling lights below. There it lies, Belfast. What hopes, dreams and new terrors are being hatched down there in the darkness? Mind you, you won't be alone for long, for it's also a favourite spot on dark nights for courting couples, though needless to say they have other reasons for parking halfway into the ditch than the twinkling lights of Belfast.
But day or night, when you've time to stop and look without feeling you're intruding, from up there the city can hold a kind of magical and almost melancholy spell over you. It must have been something like that that pulled Jesus up short on that memorable day long ago, when topping the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem suddenly came into view lying below Him; And looking down at it he wept.
“Oh Jerusalem, would that even today you knew the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes.”
And there we have it, the supreme moment of irony, the contradiction within the heart of what we now call Palm Sunday. Everywhere the crowds jubilant and Jesus weeping. Jesus riding into Jerusalem and he knew even if the crowds didn't, what was waiting for him down there.
And all the palm branch waving and popular acclaim only served to heighten the real significance of Jesus' entry into the holy city. The backdrop of this scenario is death. Casting a shadow over it all is the Cross.
That's why I can't help feeling, you know, that often we get Palm Sunday all wrong in our churches, turning it into a kind of carnival, the religious season for making whoopee. But when we try to understand this incident in the context of Christ's passion, there's really nothing festive about it. Admittedly, Jesus did nothing to try and stop the adoring multitudes. And in fact, he rebuked the Pharisees when they tried to dampen the disciples' enthusiasm. “I tell you, if these were quiet, the very stones would cry out.” But even so, the irony is there. Right at the very centre of this apparent triumph, it's there. And it comes out nowhere more poignantly perhaps than that moment when at the very height of the public reception, Jesus suddenly stops and weeps.
We who live in Northern Ireland should understand this irony of Palm Sunday better than most. For it's often been in our moments of apparent normality and even festivity that death has suddenly exploded into our midst. Who can forget La Mon? Our generation lives with the ubiquitous image of death. On our streets, we're all too familiar with the blanketed figure lying by the roadside or on the pavement viewed from a distance through the camera lens.
And not just here at home, but across our world, the grey spectre of public death has returned again and again to haunt us in our troubled times, giving us uneasy dreams. Our modern era has undoubtedly experienced a sharpened awareness of death.
When an American TV reporter was recently killed in Nicaragua by a soldier nonchalantly raising his rifle and shooting him dead, we all sat and watched the incident brought into our living rooms by courtesy of television.
And a survey published some weeks back in the United States estimated that the average teenager will have watched about 18,000 murders enacted on TV programmes and films by the time he's 18. But there's a strange irony in all of this today too. Familiar with the public spectacle of death as we are, we're also apparently less able to cope with it than former generations, or even talk about it. It's our taboo subject. So much so that universities and colleges in the States have now introduced a new subject into their courses of education. “Thanatology,” they call it. The study of death. And books and articles roll off the presses in an attempt to meet the increasing demand for help in facing death, coping with death's legacy of bereavement, and meeting the harsh realities of terminal illnesses. And I know that as a minister, I'm struck at times by some funeral arrangements that often go to enormous lengths to try and hide the reality of death behind the burial or cremation rites.
Again, in the States, they've a phrase that sums it up exactly. They call it “beautifying the remains.” It's like waving palm branches in the face of the cross.
And it's here in this irony that I believe we touch the hidden root of so much of our contemporary anxiety, fear, and obsessions that accompany every reminder of death. The fact is that many of us today encounter the presence of death in the absence of God. Deep down in the heart of our Western societies, deep down in the soul of many of us who find ourselves trapped and shorn by current values, lifestyles, and secular materialism, deep down there, we stand before death without God.
As a contemporary writer puts it, “…the philosophy of this generation is that death waits for us as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb.” And so, before this cement floor, we crumble into neuroses of all kinds and try to hide if we can from the terrifying reality of the end, putting a festive mask on it, pushing it to a distance from us where it ceases to be a visible threat, until Holy Week reminds us about what we prefer to forget, where another victim lies bleeding, mangled on the wheel of our violent times, and then we stand again in the unavoidable presence of death as the enemy, the threat.
The Cross once more is centred in our modern world, and suddenly it's Palm Sunday all over again.
It was, I think, in Auschwitz that a prisoner of the last war watched lorry loads of Jews taken every day to the gas chambers. The cries of the naked victims, often screaming for mercy, wouldn't leave him day or night. He prayed to God that if he existed, he must surely see all this suffering and put an end to it. But day after day, it went on. At last, sore and weary with prayer, he gave up. There could be no God. He was left with death in the absence of God. But when we turn to the New Testament, when we move, in fact, through Holy Week towards Easter, the whole scene changes.
We enter a different world. It's the world of faith, where death is encountered in the presence of God. And if it's true, if He's present, even when the Cross is set up in our own experience, if it's true, then all's changed, changed utterly.
There's a point in one of his letters, his first letter to the Corinthians, where the Apostle Paul, writing about death as man's last enemy, seems to stop in his tracks, gather himself together, and then goes on to say, in effect, that what death means for each of us depends upon how we meet it, in the absence or in the presence of God. And so, Paul is led directly into the meaning of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Death, every death, horrendous or natural, in war or peace, every death that confronts us outside the victory of Christ is the enemy, the destroyer, the foe that brings us to nothing.
We end it all like the light bulb smashing on the floor. But, and here's the crescendo of Paul's argument, indeed of his own experience of God, but if it be that God raised up Jesus Christ from the dead, then there's more to be said. Death is not the end, not necessarily the enemy, for the resurrection of Jesus must mean that “death has been swallowed up in victory,” to use Paul's own phrase.
Here, then, we touch on one of the subterranean truths of Christian faith, that there is nothing that can be ultimately against us, not even death, if God is in it. And what does holy week mean if it doesn't mean this? That in all our suffering and death, God is there. Even when, like Jesus himself, we cry out in the night, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The cry of Auschwitz.
For in that moment, Jesus knew the pain of those lorry loads of naked people driven to their extermination, and the anguish of that prisoner who saw it all and felt God couldn't be there. Every dark night of the soul in a nation's life, or an individual's experience, is the same cry of dereliction that Jesus articulated on the cross, and that made him stop that day above Jerusalem and weep.
But God was in it. He was there, and he was not silent. For beyond the blackness of the Cross, another cry was to be heard. He is risen.
In Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, set in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, one of the scenes portrays a confrontation between the vicious camp doctor and one of the prisoners, a priest called Ricardo. The doctor is responsible for the assignment of prisoners, either for extermination or hideous medical experiments. In Ricardo, however, he finds someone whose faith in God troubles him. The priest has a disturbing influence on him, jagging whatever remains of the doctor's conscience. So, the doctor sets out to break him and to make him betray his faith, and admit that everything has to be faced without God.
“Look,” says the doctor, “look around you. Since July 1942, for 15 months, weekdays and sabbaths, I've been sending people to God. And do you think he's made the slightest acknowledgement? He has not even directed a bolt of lightning against me.” And then sneeringly, he adds, “9,000 people in one day a while back, puffing up the chimney.”
And so the doctor goes on, promising Ricardo freedom if he'll throw in his luck with the camp authorities, and luring him with physical pleasures if only he'll acknowledge that when we die, we die without God. At last, unable to take any more, Ricardo brings to an end the doctor's unrelenting attack, and at the same time, pronounces the death sentence on himself. As in defiance, he shouts at him,
“Your, your hideous face, composed of lust and filth and gibberish, sweeps all doubts away! All. Since the Devil exists, God also exists. Otherwise, you and the Devil would have won a long time ago.”
When on this Palm Sunday and living through our own community passion in our brutalised Ulster society, we can stand with Ricardo and say that, then we've been led through the Cross to resurrection, through death to life. We've been led beyond Palm Sunday and its terrible irony to Easter, alive with hope. Only then can we really wave the palm branches.
The pilgrimage of Holy Week is the invitation to make this great discovery of faith for ourselves.
Death, Swallowed up in victory.
And may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Lord and our Redeemer.
Hymn “Ride On Ride On In Majesty”
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