Palm Sunday 2022
Most people will tell you that they are not violent, that they don’t believe in violence, that violence is never the answer. Yet the reality of violence and depictions of it are everywhere, both in popular culture and in the news—and it isn’t always something that occurs “out there,” but can hit very close to home.
Religion itself has been intertwined with violence throughout human history. While I think it’s a vast overstatement to say that religion has caused more wars and bloodshed than any other force in history, we’re nonetheless far from being off the hook—whether by “we” you mean people of faith in general or Christians in particular. You can think of obvious examples of Christian violence against other human beings, like the Crusades or the brutal conquering of native people that was said to be justified by the Doctrine of Discovery, or you can even think of the ways that certain interpretations of scripture have led to the exploitation of the earth and the violence of mass extinction and habitat destruction.
The point is that violence seems to be everywhere, and Christianity is often complicit in it.
Some believe that the Crucifixion itself might be the culprit, arguing that it creates among Christians a fascination with violence that we cannot escape; they contend that our church and the world would be better off if we skipped over this part of the story, or perhaps somehow rewrote it. Every year I hear from people who hate it that the congregation’s role in our Passion Play includes shouting out the line, “Crucify him.” Nobody likes being part of the crowd that calls for the blood of Jesus. I get it, and truly sympathize.
Of course, those of us in church shouting those lines are doing so from a position of relative safety; we can console ourselves that we’re just playing a part. For centuries, Christians scapegoated “the Jews” as the perpetrators of the death of Christ, with horrific consequences. I’m not at all sure that the church has really come to terms with our legacy of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic violence; the way we talk about the events portrayed in the Passion Gospel can be a matter of life and death. This is a dangerous text, in many ways. Omitting or avoiding it, though, may be dangerous as well, since it allows us to ignore the very real problems it has created over the years.
A different angle on the Passion story is one offered by Bishop Steven Charleston in his book, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus.[i] Essentially, he contends that the key events in the life of Christ can, and perhaps should, be understood through the lens of the Native American vision quest. He explains that, even accounting for differences across different Native American cultures, the classic vision quest has four basic components: preparation, community, challenge, and lament.
If you have an image of “the quest” that you learned from Western myths or literature, one contrast you’ll notice in this structure is the importance of community. In European and settler cultures, as a rule, the hero rides off alone to seek glory; in indigenous cultures, the person undertaking the quest always has company, chosen companions for the journey. Furthermore, the purpose is not personal glory or even enlightenment but rather transformation—specifically, a transformation of the individual that will be for the benefit of the entire community.
Looking at today’s Gospel narrative, we can see the structure and the purpose of a vision quest being worked out. The story begins with Jesus and his disciples going to a place on the Mount of Olives, probably a garden or grove of some kind, an appropriate setting for a vision quest. Jesus undergoes a time of preparation, he has companions with him, and he endures a terrible inner struggle and challenge, such that he literally sweats blood.
The final element of the vision quest, what Charleston refers to as lament, comes into play both at the beginning of today’s Passion Gospel and again on the cross. While he is praying in the garden, Jesus asks to be released from the fate that he knows awaits him; on the cross, he cries out to God in anguish and also in a spirit of forgiveness. Notice that the cries of Jesus during these times of testing are never for himself alone; he is always reaching out beyond himself, keeping other people at the center of his concern. He is there in that place to draw closer to the mystery of God, and he is willing to be transformed in whatever way will be best for his community—which in the case of Jesus means the whole world and in fact all of creation!
I find that using this lens of the vision quest to view the Passion is especially helpful when it comes to understanding the death of Jesus in a way that does not glorify violence or suffering. The key to its transformative power is the vision that Jesus receives while in the garden praying. Although the Gospel writers do not put into words what happens between Jesus and God in times of prayer, I nonetheless find Charleston’s interpretation compelling, precisely because it makes sense of how Jesus proceeds from that moment on. Charleston writes,
“Called to the tree of life…Jesus realizes that he is being asked to end life so that life can continue. […] He has to be willing to go all the way in making his gift of life that others might live in health and harmony. He is not dying for their sins. He is dying for their blessing. In the reciprocity of life, things die that things may live. In this cosmic reciprocity of all life, the holy bargain is that God will die so that all creation may live.”
What a great inversion this is of the violence that seems so inescapable in our world: “He is not dying for our sins. He is dying for our blessing. God will die so that all creation may live.” In more traditional church language, we say that the death of Jesus opened to us the way of everlasting life. Seen as a gateway to life, a crucible of transformation, the Passion can never be claimed as an endorsement of violence and suffering.
Palm Sunday always begins on a joyful note, indeed almost a silly one. We wave our greenery and shout hosanna—and if we are very lucky we are even visited by donkeys! But that shout of hosanna—did you know that it means more than a simple “hooray” or “huzzah”? Although the etymology is sometimes disputed, “hosanna” is a cry for help—it means, essentially, “please save us.” Jesus heard that cry on his way into Jerusalem, and he did not forget it in anything that came after.
God heard the cry of Jesus, not taking away the cup he feared, but offering a vision that helped him move forward and embrace the next part of his quest for the life of the world. God also hears our cries—our cries of anguish, of loneliness, of fear and distress. God hears the cries of victims of violence throughout creation; after all, if the people were silent then the very stones would shout. God’s answer to these cries is solidarity—God emptied Godself and took on our humanity, placing divinity itself in the very cycle of life and death that binds us all. Jesus’s answer to our cries was also solidarity—taking into himself our suffering, drawing “all of life within himself.” All of life. Jesus did that, the culmination of his vision quest, for our blessing, for our salvation, and for the good of all creation. Hosanna, indeed. Amen.
[i] The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (New York: Church Publishing, Inc, 2015). Steven Charleston, the author, is both the retired Episcopal Bishop of Alaska and also a citizen of the Choctaw nation. The argument of this sermon is based on my understanding of this book; any mistakes or misrepresentations of his thesis are my responsibility alone.
