The Overture

Passion Sunday - April 13, 2025

Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.

St. Columba's Episcopal Church

LISTEN HERE

Liturgy of the Palms: + Lk. 19:28-40

Is. 50:4-9a + Ps. 31:9-16 + Phil. 2:5-11 + Lk. 22:14-23:56

Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven! My sisters and brothers, I speak to you today + in the name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.

Passion Sunday inaugurates the beginning of Holy Week, with our processions and palm-waving, with our “hosannas” and accolades of fealty to “Christ the King,” all of which are juxtaposed to the scandalous proclamation of his Passion and death by crucifixion. Almost universally regarded as the most brutal and dehumanizing form of execution ever devised, its purpose was to utterly reduce the victim to zero, a nobody, a nothing, in the most debasing and humiliating way possible.

Yet, in the earliest decades of the church, Paul penned his first letter to the Corinthians in which he belligerently insisted, “We preach Christ and Christ crucified, a scandal to Jews and folly to the Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). Over two thousand year later the cross has remained both a scandal and a stumbling block even to faithful Christians precisely because the cross is by its very nature irreligious, as the renowned scholar and Episcopal priest, Fleming Rutledge, convincingly argues from the outset of her 650-page tome on the subject.

As Fernando can well attest, throughout my sabbatical, I faithfully spent my mornings over coffee on what I called, “my date with Flemming” as I combed over every word of her astounding book entitled, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Christ. If the coffee doesn’t wake you up, that will. 

The truth is, I cannot recommend her work highly enough as a sweeping, lucid, and compelling exploration of the theology of the cross. Published in 2015 it has rightly earned it place across denominations as a modern classic and will richly inform my sermon today as well as my reflections over the course of the Triduum because she has for the first time in my theological career helped me to appreciate with nuance and candor why Paul had it right: The cross was meant to be preached! 

So, I know this is a difficult subject for all of us, and if we are honest, (really honest) we know it isn’t just the Jews and gentiles of Paul’s day that are scandalized by the cross, but no less we Christians of the modern day. 

All kidding aside, I grappled mightily over whether or not to preach this sermon as my first one back after such a long hiatus. “What about the new parishioners who have never yet met me? What will they think?” What about the long and heartfelt conversations I’ve had with so many of you who have openly confessed your struggle with the theology of the cross, its purpose, and its implications?” “Is this really the message you want to deliver after 2 ½ months of absence?” I literally have an alternative half written sermon, far more flowery, about the insights I have gained over my sabbatical, that I began to write as an alternative. But in the end, I decided to wager my bet on the hope that maybe you all miss me enough to not walk out on me in the middle of it. So, I’m going for it. Would the ushers please bolt the doors.

So, I’m asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to listen with as open a heart as you can. I’m asking you to consider that much of what I say today will be filtered through preconceptions and misconceptions that you hold, and which will take me far more than one sermon to clarify. And to trust that this is the beginning of a conversation that we will have for some time to come as we integrate an understanding of the cross that is as counterintuitive, as it is counter cultural, as it is unimaginably liberating.

Let’s start by searching our hearts. Isn’t it true that as a beloved community we treasure a theology of a creation-centered, always loving, never judging, all-inclusive, forever compassionate, never wrathful God of West Marin. Isn’t it true that most of us are deeply offended, if not, just utterly confused by the very idea of the cross and all we have come to associate with it? And isn’t it true that our local West Marinian theology is just one iteration of what the American church wants today: “spiritual uplift,” “divine intimacy” “emotion devotion” – but, please God not the cross.

Don’t we, after all, secretly find all that gibberish about sin, divine wrath, judgment, suffering, sacrifice – just foolishness from a bygone age? Vestiges of an archaic (even barbaric) world-view from which all of us undoubtedly bear some collective moral responsibility to unshackle the church in favor of more enlightened values not centered on the cross, but sanitized of it?

I mean, how many of you, if upstarting a new religion would choose as your central symbol of faith a crucified corpse? Exactly. Who would do that?? Nobody would do that! The fact of the matter is, the church did not choose the cross, the church was confronted with the scandal of a crucified messiah – which, as we will see over the course of the Triduum, was an absolute, unadulterated, and outright contradiction in terms. The book of Deuteronomy 21:22-23, for example is unequivocal:

22When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed, and you hang him on a tree, 23his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; …for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.

Can you imagine the religious and moral offense taken by Jews who (well versed in Deuteronomy) witnessed their own fellow Jews, like Paul and the first churches, proclaiming a messiah who suffered this very accursed fate? Can you image the scandal of witnessing fellow Jews praying and singing hymns to that dead cursed man as if he were…God?

And yet, the cross is as much scandal today as ever it was, as Richard Niebhur astutely observed in his 1959 publication, The Kingdom of God in America, when he wrote: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” Niebhur’s critique of American Christianity is perhaps more apropos now than it was then, in a time when popular Christian literature has brazenly replaced the cross with “creation centered spirituality.” A spiritual turn in the road that the great scholar of Celtic Christianity, Esther De Wall summarily called, “an abomination.” Creation centered spirituality is an abomination.

As a Celtic Christian scholar, Esther Diehl is by no means opposed to the beauty of finding God in the elemental forces of nature, but what concerns her is the historical and theological inaccuracy of dislodging the cross as the hinge upon which the door of Christianity swings, because it leaves us with a little more than sentimentality. And sentimentality is the death knell of an authentic spiritual life no less than of the church’s power to transform our culture through the power of a God whose relentless love surpasses all understanding.

Today is called “Passion Sunday” because it inaugurates this great unmasking of our sentimentality. Despite how the commercialization of Christmas in our secular culture has led many to mistake the birth Christ as the pinnacle of all Christian holy days, the fact is, it is the unadulterated exposure and eradication of the power of Sin accomplished on the Cross to which the whole incarnate life of Christ is oriented. And the definitive overcoming of this maligning power is what we call, in a word: Salvation.

This is precisely why we proclaim the entire Passion Narrative both at the inauguration of Holy Week (today) and in the midst of Triduum (Good Friday) because the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ is the “Master Story” to which the whole of the Gospel is oriented and the very axis upon which all of Christianity – and indeed and all of creation with it – rotates. (Rutledge, 223)

Unlike the great councils of the early church that were convened to clarify, for example, our most central doctrines of the Trinity or the divine-human identity of Christ; it is telling that none of the councils ever promulgated a definitive doctrine of the cross. 

Rutledge suggests rightly that the reason for this is most likely two-fold. First, that a multifaceted approach rather than uniform teaching was favored. And secondly (but related), the fact that the Bible itself bears witness to a variety of approaches without speaking univocally on the subject. There is no ONE theology of the cross in the Bible.

All well and good. But what she doesn’t say is that a casualty of this kind of multifaceted approach has resulted in far too many of us becoming recipients of some pretty crappy theologies of the cross.

But if we are really to begin to explore the mystery of the cross we do well to go beyond intellectual constructs and instead begin with the realm of emotion, imagination, and artistic expression. And for this, Passion Sunday quite literally paves the way. 

The liturgy today is full of exultation, intrigue, and discord. Like a great orchestral overture inaugurating Holy Week, our readings introduce the major themes of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection that we will commemorate in the week to come. Of all the holy days of the Christian year, Palm Sunday is unique in its proclamation of two distinct gospel readings within the same liturgy – readings which could not be more dissimilar in mood or tone.

Beginning with the jubilation of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem proclaimed in the liturgy of the palms; the second gospel reading suddenly takes an ominous turn toward abandonment, betrayal, and crucifixion. Indeed, the whole liturgical service this morning feels like a disjointed hodge-podge of schizophrenia: jubilant and hopeful, triumphant and joyful; one can almost taste the euphoria of the crowds shouting their “hosannas” as they wave their palm branches in a crescendo of exaltation in honor of this charismatic would-be messiah. 

But make no mistake, the image of a rag-tag rabbi hobbling his way into Jerusalem on the back of a colt is not meant to illicit saccharine images of a humble Christ meekly submitting to his death like a lamb led to slaughter. Even before the Roman guards will begin their torturous mockery of him as a “pretender to the throne,” the apparent humility with which he enters the Holy City is itself a provocation, a public act of prophetic defiance, a mockery of imperial power which will, as history will show, will be reduced to little more than a play-thing by an invading power we know as the counter-kingdom of God.

Jesus knows full well that as the throngs lay their cloaks upon the ground before him no one could possibly miss the irony. No one could fail to realize that his grand entrance was to be seen as an unmistakable sign of contradiction: A siege by the kingdom of God upon the kingdom of men. (And let’s be clear: the empire of Rome was ruled by men).

Yet Jesus’ entry, hobbling into town on a small colt, was clearly staged as the fulfillment of Zechariah’s oracle in what John Dominic Crossian calls Christ’s “anti-triumphal” entry into the holy city:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

10  …and he shall command peace to the nations;

his dominion shall be from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the earth.

So let’s be clear, Jesus enters the Holy City not as a victim but as an invader. Like the youthful King David of old, his feeble posture and diminutive frame is easy to mock, easy to underestimate by “Goliath Rome.” But as we will come to see, even Rome in all its glory is but a pawn of the real Kingdom Jesus has come to conquer: the dominion of death itself, against which the cross will serve as his proverbial slingshot of divine victory.

Over against an imperial government that clung to power with an iron grip, a government that oppressed or eliminated anyone who dared oppose its national agenda to Make Rome Great Again, a government that exerted its economic power through tariffs, taxation, and military control across the known world; and which annexed (or threatened to annex) any nation-state in order to serve its national interests…(as a matter of historical record I remind you that Canda and Greenland were part of the Roman Empire…)

Over against this imperial machine, Jesus hobbles into the Holy City, not to quietly acquiesce to his martyrdom, but to raise Cain and to wage…Love. Not the gentle love of a good shepherd carrying his lost sheep back to the comfort and safety of the fold, but a fearsome love that strips us – all of us, both then and now – of the sentimental veneer of our collective innocence.

As Jesus marches to his fate, he will be stripped, humiliated, tortured, and reduced to a nobody by the Roman state, make no mistake, we too will be stripped bare by an inconceivable divine love that hangs, suspended, as it were, from heaven and earth; a sacrificial love that demands we put away the Norman Rockwell’s of a world that never was. That we put away the sentimental stories we tell about ourselves and the brutality of human history in which we are helplessly intertwined. Perhaps the reason the cross so disturbs us is not because of the window it provides into human history, but because of the mirror it holds up to the human heart. Indeed, a sentimental Christianity dislodged from the cross is far more palatable, and far less honest. Because religious sentimentality is little more than the willful blindness of our collective complicity in an unjust world hell-bent on its own destruction.

In his play, The Cocktail Party, T. S. Elliot’s main character, the psychiatrist, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, makes the following observation:

Half of the harm that is done in this world

Is due to people who want to feel important.

They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them.

Or they do not see it, or they justify it

Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle

To think well of themselves. (Rutledge, 306)

I am not a psychiatrist, much less a psychic, but I know what you’re all thinking. 

But that is precisely the problem. Egregious examples of Elliot’s description help all of us to deflect the truth of it. But at the end of the day, Elliot’s is not about anyone. It’s about everyone. And what the cross will reveal with ruthless honesty is that line between good and evil is never between us and them, but traverses straight through every human heart.

The fact is, we are terrified to talk about the cross because on some deep-down level we are all anxious to think well of ourselves, we are all fear judgment, we all desire to be thought well by others. We are anxious to feel worthy. But as we will come to see with great joy and liberation, worthiness has nothing to do with the inconceivable love of God. In fact, the cross will ultimately reduce to rubble, any of our vain efforts to be “worthy” before God.

But before any of us can arrive at a lived experience of that liberating exhilarating and overpowering love of God, we must allow the cross to do its work in us. There can be no Easter without Good Friday. But as for today, Jesus has set the wheels in motion. His fate is sealed, and our journey to Golgotha has only just begun. But as Christ marches victoriously, even now, into the Jerusalem of our own hearts, make no mistake, his betrayer is not far off. Indeed, is much closer than any of us might dare to admit.

So go ahead and look. Really look into the mirror of the cross. Because until we see, really see what’s revealed there, we will never know the meaning of what it is to be loved beyond all telling.

+ Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.