A Sermon By: The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick for Palm Sunday
Posted on
April 9, Palm Sunday, 2017
Trinity Church, Hartford
Zechariah 9:9-12; Philippians 2:5-11; Matthew 21:1-11; 26:14-27:66
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
This Palm Sunday is the start of Holy Week, also known as the passion of the Christ. The word passion is a complicated one and when we unpack it, we find a number of different but related meanings which can shed light on its significance for our lives today. Its significance, however, leads to some surprising and even radical subversions of many of the things, persons, and practices we currently seem to value in contemporary society. Exploring the depths and nuances of the notion of passion can both unsettle as well as ultimately reassure us.
Of course the first thing one thinks of upon hearing the word ‘passion’ is an extreme, often romantic, feeling for something. One feels passionately about someone or something. One is in the throes of passion. One dedicates oneself to something with an abiding passion. The emotional force of a passion exceeds and sometimes upsets our attempt to rationally master the world around us. This sense of passion has both positive and negative connotations. It’s a good thing when we feel passionately about something that is good and worthy. But we can also be consumed by passion and lose all sense of perspective and reason.
A second thing the word passion implies is undergoing something in which one is submerged by forces beyond one’s control. It is related to the word ‘passive’ which means to be acted upon by others or things outside of oneself. It is also the root of the word for suffering; which again is an undergoing of something in which one is being acted upon by something other than oneself. One is overcome with passion but one does not rationally choose to feel passion or to master it: passions act upon us, we are the recipients of feelings we don’t originate or determine. I don’t wake up in the morning and rationally decide what passions I will feel today, what mood I will choose to be in. Passions are not matters of human choice. They come upon us: we do not create them at will.
The corollary words related to this sense of passion as an undergoing are passivity, pathos, patience, and pathetic, all of which tend to carry negative connotations. And they do so because they represent us as ‘victims’ of forces outside of our control, and no one wants to be a victim. In our present value system it is far more important to be seen as an autonomous controller or determiner than as a subject being controlled or determined by others.
Passion indicates vulnerability to forces we don’t determine, being humiliated into subjection by superior forces.
The opposite of passion, of course, is self-originated force, action, initiative and the ability to determine by one’s own power what happens to oneself. Self-determining agency is considered of much higher value than being determined by the power of others. It is true, of course, that we do have a responsibility within the limits of our power to act against the instrumentalities of injustice. There are times when we must exercise coercive force judiciously and thoughtfully. But there are also times we must accept the reality of powerlessness. Jesus in his passion takes us into the reality of worldly powerlessness and forces us to see it in its awful fullness. But he does so only in order to bring us out the other side renewed and redeemed by a very different kind of power.
As the son of God, of course, Jesus represents the supreme power of the universe: God. And yet in this week of his passion he becomes the victim of powers he does not control and suffers the humiliation of absolute worldly powerlessness, crucifixion on a cross, a means of death inflicted on the weakest members of society. So we are right to ask, how can an all-powerful God allow his son to be a subject or a victim of forces that drive him into submission to merely human authority?
The words subject, submission, subservience are all related to the words that connote the undergoing of that which is bearing down on us – an undergoing in which we are the ones being acted upon by forces greater than we are. They are all preceded by the word ‘sub’, which means under the power or authority of someone greater than us.
In our desire to wield power over others we have learned to fear submission; to fear being subjected to passions and agencies that we do not create or control.
Some have noted that this is particularly true of men: men often define themselves by how much worldly power they deploy, whether financial, military, sexual, or simply physical. It is said that men would rather die of a heart attack than from cancer. Heart attacks at least suggest that those who have them are power exercising doers; cancer suggests they are passive victims over something they haven’t actively mastered or controlled.
This aspect of passion also relates directly to the experience of suffering, which is also derived from the notion of undergoing experiences as a patient which one does not choose but to which one is subject. These experiences are especially those of loss, pain, grief, and defeat.
The negativity of passion and suffering is put in stark relief by its alleged opposite: force, control, and domineering power. These are the ingredients that go to make up what are often referred to in contemporary political discourse, as winners. Those who do not win by controlling their own and the destiny of others, are losers and no one wants to be a loser: we all want to be winners whose victories and gains testify to our successful use of coercive force. Winning means dominating the losers and rejecting them as unworthy of our concern. That’s why we so often marginalize the poor: they represent the extreme negative value of powerlessness. They haven’t successfully manned up and taken control of their own lives as winners, not losers they are and who do not deserve our respect or concern.
Often associated with the approval of winners is the endorsement of what is called ‘hard’ power, meaning coercive power exercised over others, getting them to submit to the demands of the wielder of power. The opposite of hard power is soft power and softness indicates weakness, subservience, and passivity, often, in a still sexist society, associated primarily with women.
In the context of this value scheme associated with passion we find Jesus and the passion he is undergoing: a loser in many respects whose exercise of worldly power seems rather soft, even non-existent. He does not attack his persecutors: he does not fight back against the authorities who condemn him to death. Jesus is a man whose career path and route to temporal power is cut short before his mid-thirties; he is financially poor and politically powerless; rejected by the religious leadership of his time, convicted and executed by the political authorities; crucified ignominiously alongside thieves; forsaken by some of his closest followers. A man who left no estate, property, or financial assets, no army, no political party, no philanthropic institution, no government policies. A man who suffered both physically and humiliatingly at the hands of others. A man whose passion was inflicted upon him and over which he exercised no countervailing resistance.
What, then, we ask, is going on here? The only answer that makes any sense is that the passion of the Christ is initiating a radical subversion of what we normally think of and value as power. The passion of the Christ is power but in a form where one would least expect it. It is the soft power of worldly weakness; but it is the hard power of compassion and sacrifice in the face of the domineering power of hardness and the imposition of force through domination, coercion, physical, economic, and even military might. If we have eyes to see there is real power in the events of Jesus’ passion. But it is not visible to the value system which currently dominates our contemporary society. It is not power as we normally understand it: it is power based on the profound but subversive truth that true victory over what we fear comes through service in submission to others; that fulfillment consists in conforming or subordinating ourselves to God’s underlying intention as it is woven throughout reality, if we only have eyes to see it. That underlying intention is not domination but reconciliation; not the exercise of hard power but the exercise of compassion, pity, empathy, and love. The divine intention, which is hard-wired into reality despite the attempt to disguise it under the ideology of force and domination, is an intention found most commonly in communities of tolerance, diversity, and the acceptance of others for the quality of their being, not of their wealth or gender or race or ethnicity or sexual identity or orientation.
This then is the subversive meaning of the passion of the Christ: only by undergoing to its fullest extent the cruelty of the hard power of the world does one overcome that destructive and life-diminishing power. It does, of course, take faith or trust to believe that when we are at our weakest, when in the world’s eyes we are losers, when we are at our most vulnerable to the forces of evil, when we lie in submission under the forces that currently dominate us, faith reminds us that we are in the hands of a loving God whose love will ultimately overcome all that is currently arrayed against us. Passion is worldly weakness and vulnerability. Jesus took worldly powerlessness to its utter depths in his weakness and vulnerability and subverted it to reveal the true power of the ultimate victory of God over everything that threatens to undo us. The passion of the Christ vividly reminds us that out of weakness comes strength, out of adversity and suffering, come hope and resurrection. Let us then, through prayer, meditation, and biblical reflection, use this holy week to find our own way into weakness and offer it up to God for healing and renewal as we work our way to the day of the Easter resurrection and victory over death and the grave.