Article
- Date:
- Sunday 2nd April 2023
Year A, Palm Sunday - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- Psalm 118.1-2;
Matthew 21.1-11
Saint Matthew's account of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem is anything but triumphal, he is riding on a donkey, surrounded by his followers, with the bystanders asking who this person is. Not unnaturally, his followers are singing Psalm 118,, one of the Psalms appointed for the Passover period, and they are shouting "hosanna", calling upon Jesus to save them.
I wonder what they wanted Jesus to save them from? Some scholars think that Judas wanted him to save them from the Romans but I think this very unlikely; how would it come about that a healer would suddenly launch a bloody attack on occupying forces? Perhaps some of his followers had an inkling of Isaiah's idea of a Messiah who might save them in some way but it is not clear. Perhaps they thought that Jesus would make their earthly lives better but there is no evidence in his previous teaching and actions that that was his intention. They had, of course, been taught by Jesus since he had first called them, in a far more intensive way than the Gospels recall, so they might have been thinking of the Jesus prayer which asks that they may be saved from the time of trial, what we call The Lord's Prayer. This feared ordeal was thought to be a necessary rite of passage which would have to be got through before Israel was ultimately purified.
As it turned out, that is precisely what Jesus did: he saved Israel and, by extension, us without the necessity of going through the time of trial. Jesus bore the trial on their behalf and our behalf on the cross. And then at the Resurrection he founded a new Covenant for his Easter people, sparing us the death which had until then been the natural consequence of human disobedience. We describe this process as forgiving our sin, that is a cosmic forgiveness of all sin for all time, a much greater matter than the forgiveness of individual sins to which the death and Resurrection of Jesus are far too frequently and erroneously reduced.
To understand the nature of what is going on we need to consider the import of the Psalm that was being sung which proclaims that the mercy of God, what the NRSV translates as steadfast love, endures forever, that is, it is timeless and unvaried. Moreover, it is also indifferent as to persons and situations. It has nothing to do with the mercy for which people plead when they are in danger of being convicted for an offence. It is the kind of mercy to which Portia refers in The Merchant of Venice when she says: "the quality of mercy is not strained", that is, it is not forced through a human filter, rather: "it droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven"; and, as we all know, rain does not choose where it falls as it falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.
So if this mercy, this steadfast love, endures for ever, indifferent to action, time and place, what do we think we are praying for when we ask for forgiveness? As God's mercy is timeless and as our prayer is not going to, in a figure of speech, change God's mind, what is the point of the process?
I want to suggest that the primary purpose of prayer is not transactional. There will be occasions when our prayers are 'answered' but most of the time our prayer is not transactional, its purpose is to remind us of ourselves and to remind us of God's boundless mercy.
Too often Christians have fallen into the trap of making religion transactional, thinking that if we do this God will do that: it has made us focus far too heavily on the idea of personal salvation and what we need to do to attain it. Well, in the strict sense there's nothing we can do to attain it, for our salvation, our freedom from the mortal consequences of sin, was secured at the Resurrection, for God's mercy endures forever. We do not live a holy life in order to be saved, that is a misunderstanding of the reason for being; we live a holy life because that is the purpose for which we were created. To do otherwise is to go against the grain of our creation, it is to act unnaturally.
The reason why we get this so wrong is for the very simple reason that there is a strand of Christianity beginning with Saint Augustine which sees human beings as naturally sinful, as people in need of constant chiding and harrying which, in turn, has led to this unpleasantness being doled out by priests whose purpose should be to preach the good news and to nourish us in its proclamation through Christ's body and blood in the Eucharist. The sin industry of Western Christianity has been a terrible aberration, establishing an earthly system of judgment, punishment and mercy which bears no resemblance to the teaching and life of Jesus.
Yes, we all fall short, of course we do; we were created to love God and each other of our own free will and free will necessarily involves falling short; but we don't need to go on about it. As we were created to love, and as most of us do our best to love; and as most of us suffer when we fail, we might better characterise ourselves as a suffering rather than as a sinful community; but right through our suffering never forget that His mercy endureth forever. Amen.