Skip the Sermon

I don’t preach on Palm Sunday.

I would be lying if I said that I expected the average churchgoer reads their bible with any sort of regularity and I would be even more surprised if they could explain the differences between the Gospel narratives depicting the events of Holy Week.

All too often the events of Holy Week, and especially those of the crucifixion have been melded into some sort of “harmonized” soup, a soup which focuses on some misunderstanding of a historical Jesus and often seems to taste an awful lot like the Calvinist version of Penal Substitution (this being the atonement theology which essentially holds that God killed Jesus so that Jesus could take on our punishment). For this reason, instead of preaching I pick up one of the Gospel texts (this year being the one from Luke as his is the Palm Sunday text we read in Year C) and read. I start with the triumphant entry and the events of Palm Sunday and I end with Jesus’ body being entombed.

It might be asked why I read through Holy Week? Don’t we have Maundy Thursday and Good Friday on which to read those passages? Yes, again, however, the thought that the average church attendee will attend each service is at this point, not one that is altogether realistic. I read the story in its entirety because of the Gospel-specific image it paints following in the footsteps of Jesus throughout his time in Jerusalem, for some this is their only opportunity each year to attend church and hear the events of Holy Week recounted. The events of the week are vital, and without them, we slide from the celebration of Palm Sunday into the celebration of Easter all while missing the low that is the rest of the week’s events. We miss out on the political games being played, the intrigue, the betrayal, the denial, the abandonment. We miss out on so much of the meat.

And so I read these texts and in many ways, I believe doing this is more powerful than preaching, at least on this Sunday. It allows the text an opportunity to speak for itself, it doesn’t leave time for atonement theologies or pontification on the suffering of Christ, it allows the text the room to breathe, to work. It allows people to have a moment to put aside, however briefly, their harmonized and heretical* soups and take up something better; it allows them to hear the specific Gospel narrative for what it is and not what they think it is.

This also means that when the time comes for Communion, another practice we partake in weekly during Lent, we have the natural liturgy to use- the text itself. Rather than taking part in the Service of Word and Table or Great Thanksgiving found in the Hymnal, I read the text, and then I pray to bless the elements. This offers more of that cohesion, it gives us the space to hear the words, as spoken, and to respond. To pull the strands of the text together and attempt to work out the Mystery therein.

Substituting the Penal

There seems to be a default mode of preaching in America, or at least for the Evangelical-influenced overly Calvinized portions of America and that is Penal Substitutionary Atonement. You know what this is even if you don’t know the term, the concept falls back to that most famous of Evangelical questions, have you accepted that Jesus died for your sins? It carries a lot of weight and a lot of clout because it's so common in our context it’s problematic in that it envisions a Jesus killed by God not by — you know — the people who executed him, all so that Jesus could take on the price of our sins, all so that he could suffer and die because God inherently desires (or requires?) us to suffer and die for our sins.

It might be apparent that I’m not a fan of this atonement theology.

While this seems to be the default of how common Christianity is talked about and understood in America, it is an atonement (like all atonements are when you get down to it) that is read into the text. I hold that it is an atonement and a theology that needs to be questioned and pushed back against (especially given that there are far richer and more interesting atonements that speak to a less blood-thirsty and evil God) and I think in many ways the best way to do that is to try to get people to hear the text and to realize that it might not say what they think it says.

I have spoken in the past about the need for interpretation of Scripture, that without an interpreter we have a tendency to fall into interpreting it based on our own knowledge or our own half-remembered Sunday School lessons, and I acknowledge that here my view of Palm/Passion Sunday is somewhat counter to my own view, however, I hold that perhaps for one Sunday at least we need to listen, not preach. We as pastors need to hear what the text is saying as much as those sitting in the pews need to hear what the text is saying. When we do this we might find new ways the Spirit is moving. We might find what we need to question. What we need to confront. To disturb. To disrupt.

As pastors, we preach some 52 Sundays a year, for one of those at least, Jesus can probably speak for himself.

God of palms and of stones, of wood, and of tombs, give us your Word, that is, your Son, Jesus Christ. Teach us a new song, teach us new words, allow us to hear your voice in our hearts and minds, to listen, to react. May we truly be your renewed people. Your daughters and sons. May we look on the Cross and the Empty Tomb and be reminded of our dependence on you. Amen.

*The Diatessaron was a second-century blending of the Gospels created by Tatian, and later it came to be considered quasi-heretical as it reordered and rearranged certain Gospel narratives in order to provide a cohesive (and one might say blander) narrative.