Passion/Palm Sunday
The readings and the liturgies this week speak for themselves and don’t require a lot of commentary.
The Passion according to Mark was, it seems, the first part of the gospel to be written down, at a time when the eyewitnesses were getting on in years and the story needed to be written down while they were still around. It is also the starkest. Even so, there are a lot of characters and a lot of detail: the unnamed woman who prepared the way and whose role Jesus proclaims, Judas Iscariot, the disciples, St Peter, the chief priests, elders and scribes, Pilate and the Roman administration, the soldiers, Simon of Cyrene the perfect stranger, the crowd, the women disciples witnesses to it all, possibly the only witnesses after the apostles and St Peter depart the scene, on whose witness we are presumably ourselves relying for the later part of the story, and Joseph of Arimathaea and the women again at the end, witnessing to the burial. It’s mostly a sorry story, a story of betrayal, desertion, denial, of corrupt power, of corrupt trial and judgement and torture and judicial murder. This is all in consequence of previous events, including the symbolic entrance into Jerusalem on the donkey, like King David long ago and in fulfillment of messianic prophesy – though more so what happened immediately after that, the business end so to speak of the entrance into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the Temple and the entertaining of the blind and the lame in the Temple, the clash of Gospel values with earthly realities, Jesus’ zeal for his Father and his Father’s Little Ones coming up against the corrupt and exclusionary idolatry of religious and secular authority.
We all occupy the position of St Peter with his involvement in the affair, and after his departure the position of the women disciples – we see it all through their eyes. We may also find ourselves drawn into and identifying parts of us with parts played by these and other characters, mostly a fairly sorry cross-section of humanity high and low still very much at work in our world. But the real point, given already in the second reading, is the identification which Jesus is achieving or which God is achieving in Jesus, the identification with human kind and the extremes of the human condition, the Beloved Son emptying himself, becoming as all people are, even to accepting death on the cross. But it is even worse than that, in the psalm that Jesus says on the cross which takes us into his own experience, the same as our responsorial psalm, and the only words from the cross reported in the Passion according to Mark. For our sake, Jesus the Beloved Son becomes one of the God forsaken, God – abandoned ones, not just the consequence but the extension to the limit of his ministry carrying God’s own identification and God’s presence and God’s love across boundaries and distinctions beyond all the margins – whoever and wherever we are and however we feel. In communion with us, body broken and blood poured out for us – for all of us, beyond all limits.