Sermon: Days of Awe

‘Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany' says St John.  That was the day before Palm Sunday, so the lectionary is ahead of real time.  Those six days sound like an incidental detail.  But there is the hint of foreboding in it, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand that portends how this story will unfold.  Passover - a time of freedom and festivity but also of bloodletting, the slaying of animals in memory of terrible ordeals long ago when rescue seemed impossible.  And Bethany, symbol of homecoming and rest for the son of man with nowhere to lay his head - this place has just witnessed one man's passover, Lazarus who died and whom Jesus raised.  Bethany is the only place in St John where Jesus has wept.  However on the surface everything seems calm and peaceful once more - for now.  They are giving a dinner for Jesus and the room is filled with warmth and laughter and the love of friends.  But then Mary does this extraordinary thing with the most expensive perfume that could be got.  And as the sweet fragrance fills the room the bitter smell of death can be scented too.  Judas remonstrates: John says not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; it's another hint of what is to come when Judas will shortly go out into the night to hand Jesus over.  And Jesus interprets Mary's act for what it foreshadows: ‘she bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.'  And at once we see with shocking clarity what the end will be.  ‘Six days before the Passover', six days before this Lamb of God must be offered up, six days before the hour of suffering and death and burial has finally come. It is the beginning of St John's passion narrative. 

In six days time, we enter Holy Week.  The Jewish community calls its solemnities Days of Awe.  Holy Week and Easter are our Christian ‘days of awe'.  As these days unfold we enter into the profoundest mystery of the universe, that ours is a suffering God in whom we see love poured out, love emptying itself, love freely given that all creation may be redeemed.  These coming days draw us into this movement of passion and pain that is the cost of our salvation.  But because love conquers all things, love is risen too, like spring following winter.  Throughout the lengthening light of Lent we have been looking forward to this ‘hour' of the passover of the Lord.  Like Jesus in St Luke's Gospel, we set our faces to ‘go up' to Jerusalem at Passover time to witness this exodus he must perform there that has changed human history and saved the world.  Vexilla Regis prodeunt: ‘the royal banners forward go' sang the great 6^th century poet of the passion Venantius Fortunatus.  And we must go with them to see this thing that has come to pass, and gaze upon the ‘Tree of beauty, Tree of light' on whose arms the weight of the world's ransom hangs.  He was an exile fleeing to France from Lombard invasions.  Perhaps it is those who are pushed to the extremities of human experience who appreciate most, as he did in his hymns, the sense of rescue that the cross brings. 

Today is commonly called Passion Sunday.  This is the last sermon you will hear at the Sunday eucharist until Easter.  So let me look forward to these ‘days of awe' that we shall journey through. Next Sunday, Palm Sunday, the liturgy takes us into the city of paradoxes.  In the procession of hosanna acclamations we greet the king who comes to his city; yet at once we face the truth that he enters Jerusalem to die so it is the Sunday of passion as well as palms.  On Maundy Thursday the three holiest paschal days or triduum begins.  We recall the last supper in the upper room; and then go out to remember the Gethsemane in the Maundy vigil.  On Good Friday we tell the story of Jesus' trial and passion, his death and burial.  Holy Saturday is Sabbath, the last and empty day when creation waits for what the coming night will bring.  And then Easter, God's great reversal, his remaking of the world.  This is the journey the Holy Week liturgy takes us on in symbol, word and image: not a succession of services but one single liturgical event in which memory and story are acted out and become visible words in our midst. 

The week summons us to a special act of the imagination. These ‘days of awe' put their question to us about where we most want to travel to.  How we respond to these great, saving events of the gospel, the cross and resurrection will decide the kind of people we shall become.  That is to say:  do we want to take up our cross and follow him?  Do we want to make him our king?  Or are we content with the easy‑going, undemanding religion that asks nothing, and, in the end, gives nothing in return?  For the liturgy of Holy Week is more than a powerful spectacle. It is drama, something performed, something done, the work of God that in its very act proclaims the kingdom of God, summons us to repent and believe the gospel, so that in the workshop of the new creation God may wield well his tools on the rough-hewn raw material that is us.  That will bring its share of pain, for art never comes without a price.  Holy Week should change us in deep and lasting ways.  For we should glimpse what it could mean for us to be crucified with Christ so that we might be raised with him in newness of life.

I once went to see The Taming of the Shrew at Stratford.  The Shrew is really a ‘play within a play', put on by a troupe of visiting actors for an audience of Warwickshire locals.  Usually, producers of the Shrew forget about this stage audience, for Shakespeare's text hardly mentions them after the first scene.  But in this production, they not only kept this audience on stage throughout the entire play: they also had them walk on to mix with the actors, play certain characters, become involved with the drama.  The boundary, that is to say, between players and audience was dissolved: the two became one action, one theatre.  I saw in that a picture of liturgy: how there are not ‘performers' (clergy) and ‘spectators' (congregation), but only one single drama, one thing done, in which all of us are the participants. That is true of every act of worship, but it is particularly true of what we do this week as we process with palms, wash feet, wait in Gethsemane, venerate the cross, keep watch by the tomb, kindle fire, shout alleluya. 

It is an awesome prospect to draw near to holy ground, this blazing heart of God's passionate love for us.  There are six days to go, six days to prepare for the days of awe when we shall bring our Lenten business to a close and give ourselves to this strange work God comes to do among us in Christ.  I should like to urge you to make a pilgrimage of grace this Holy Week, come with us and celebrate the Lord's Passover, this ‘thing most wonderful', ‘love so amazing, so divine'.  Yes, it takes time and effort: a week is a long time not just in politics but in religion.  But to invest in God, to transact the issues of death and life, to deepen and enrich our own humanity could be the most important thing we do this year.  Six days to go, still enough time to take off our shoes. 

 

John 12.1-8