No More Secrets

Palm Sunday Yr. B; Mark, Collect of the Day, St. Paul’s, Smithfield, 3/29/2015

Jim Melnyk: “No More Secrets”

            In a few short moments we will participate in the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ – and this is just an opening to the whole journey of Holy Week.  I say “participate” for more than one reason.  First and most obvious to us is the way the story is told this morning and every Palm Sunday – a way that will be amplified as we participate in Holy Week as it stretches before us.  Many of us in the congregation will read specific parts of the story.  All of us, during the trial scene, will respond as the crowd crying out, “Crucify him!”  We are participants in the story. But we participate in another very real way whether we realize it or not. 

This is a moment of anamnesis for the Church – for the Body of Christ gathered.  Anamnesis, if you recall our instructed Eucharist last fall, is a sacramental word translated as “remembrance,” but it means so much more than simply recalling a past event.

When Jesus says “Eat this bread and drink this wine in anamnesis of me,” he is actually saying to us, “I am present with you in this holy meal just as I was present with my followers on that night of betrayal.”  It is as if we are present with Christ then, and he is present with us in the breaking of bread now.  Past and present become one as we participate in this Holy Meal – what we as Episcopalians call “Real Presence.”

We also participate in the Passion as an act of anamnesis.  We become present with Jesus in the midst of his final days.  As we read the many stories of this most holy of weeks, beginning with today’s passion narrative, we have already lined the streets of Jerusalem shouting our hosannas.  We then find ourselves present with Jesus as he breaks bread as a guest in an unexpected and troublesome place.  We are present with Jesus as the woman anoints him in preparation for his death and burial.  We receive his body and blood in the upper room, and feel cool water trace its way across our feet as Jesus kneels before us.  We flee with the male disciples and stand with Peter as the cock crows.  We stand at the cross under the darkened sky with the women who love and follow Jesus.  We observe his body placed in the tomb and we wait through a quiet, mournful, and yet expectant Sabbath.

But what exactly do we participate in, besides the obvious storytelling event this morning?  Mark’s Gospel stands out from the others in many ways – one being what has long been called the “Messianic Secret.”  Constantly throughout the Gospel Jesus has commanded silence from those who either understand him to be the Messiah or who are wrestling with that unfolding knowledge.  “Tell no one,” he commands his followers, “Tell no one until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.”  This all comes to a screeching halt with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem – seemingly staged to remind everyone present of what the prophet Zechariah  had proclaimed, “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey” (Matt. 21:9). 

No more secrets.  No more secrets. We participate in a moment of cosmic truth-telling – behold the coming of the king! Yet this is a kingship that stands in stark contrast to what the people of Israel have historically yearned for – it is nothing like a traditional kingship.  And so it is no accident on Mark’s part that the events leading up to the betrayal and arrest of Jesus includes dinner at a particular house in Bethany. 

We should not – we cannot – skip over that opening scene in today’s Passion reading in a rush to get to the more memorable parts.  For those hearing this story in its earliest settings, this would have been just another juicy bit of gossip: Jesus at table in the home of Simon – of Simon the leper – and Jesus rather extravagantly anointed with oil by an unnamed woman.  Neither action was designed to sit well with his enemies.

Jesus was the fulfillment of all that the Torah teaches – complete, unwavering love of God, and an inclusive, forgiving, enfolding love for neighbor – including the very neighbors we would rush to exclude these days – even over religious differences.  

Jesus comes into the Holy City with a rag-tag gathering of disciples surrounding him, proclaiming a kingdom where all are welcome – a kingdom where there is “no room for dichotomies that divide and exclude” – a kingdom that proclaims the worthiness of every human being, simply because every human being is created in the image and likeness of God – a kingdom that affords even the least among us dignity – and calls us to embrace such a kingdom as something ultimately from God.

“Jesus will defeat evil, injustice, and other forms of death, not with the military might of kings [like that displayed by Pilate’s parade into Jerusalem at the Passover], but with the new life of the resurrection.  But that will come later” (Michaela Bruzzese, Sojourners on line: Preaching the Word, 3/29/2015).

In the meanwhile, we are left to participate in what author Lauren Winner calls “the saddest piece of the passion…the endless betrayal” by Jesus’ own friends and followers – people who “had eaten meals with him, learned with him…[friends who] had prayed together…had seen his miracles and his healings” (ibid).  It is indeed a horrific sidebar to the expected machinations of the powerful, those who will do anything they can imagine to retain their power and quench the Dream of God – quench the fires of the coming kingdom of God.

The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Mark: