Through the Darkness
Mark 11:1-11 Psalm 31:9-16
Palm/Passion Sunday April 5, 2009
Holy Week is not a very popular time in our culture because it is all about going down into the depths of what it means to be human and fallible. Most of us would just as soon jump from Palm Sunday with its parades of children waving palm branches, right into Easter and its awe-filled celebration of the resurrection. But that wouldn’t be very authentic, would it? If we jumped from one highlight to the next, without acknowledging the dark valley in between, we would be cheating ourselves out of the kind of faith our hearts long for. We long for meaning in our lives, and it is impossible to find meaning in a tradition that lives on the surface alone. For meaning, you have to be willing to brave the depths.
Recently several of us have been discussing our faith, particularly where it has to do with Jesus. What is our relationship with him all about, anyway? How do we see this relationship in terms of our sin and God’s forgiveness? Is Jesus the sacrificial lamb when it comes to our sin and guilt? There is a strong tradition that would say “yes” to this, and yet for many Christians this raises a lot more questions than it offers any answers. I learned in seminary that it is really difficult to preach on doctrine and do a good job, so I know I should be careful here, but the truth is that I do think about these things. And Holy Week feels like the perfect time for us to go deeply enough into our faith to figure out what the roots of it might be. What is it that holds us in the soil of Christianity? Does it have to be the same thing for each of us, in order for our faith to be authentic?
One of the most helpful things we can do when faced with one of the so-called “imponderables” of faith, is simply to ask what kind of meaning or message the scripture or doctrine or idea we are dealing with has for us directly. Christian mystic Eckhardt was fond of turning theology inside-out by encouraging people of faith to consider what difference an event in the scripture or in the life of Jesus made in their lives. How can we bring this experience home and into our own hearts? For us this week, this terrible and yet holy week, we need to ask ourselves if there are ways in which we have betrayed Jesus. Are there times when we are in the crowd shouting, “Crucify him!”? And we also need to allow ourselves to enter into this holy space by asking, “When have I felt betrayed by my friends? or by life? or even by God?” If we allow ourselves to enter into the moment with Jesus, then I think we get a stronger grasp on what is really happening here. We take the story out of the realm of the remote but relatively comfortable past, and into the present; into our own lives and experience.
Everything that Jesus went through in the last week of his life were things that prophets had been speaking about for centuries. It was common for them to refer to God’s “suffering servant,” someone who carried out God’s work and will despite the odds. This morning’s psalm seems as if it was written to give voice to Jesus’ own fears and frustrations and yet it was actually written long before he was born, by one of his ancestors. Rather than assuming that the psalmist had Jesus in mind when he wrote this, what if we let ourselves slip into the psalm and hear its words coming from our own lips? What if we allowed ourselves to move beyond whatever barriers we may have erected between ourselves and people of biblical times by simply relating to these as the words of another human being - someone who strove to be faithful just as we do? Do any aspects of the psalm ring true for you? Can you imagine yourself uttering any of these words of desperation? Have you ever been so distressed that you weren’t able to eat, feeling your strength ebb with every passing day? Have you ever been so distraught that friends and neighbors stopped coming around, started avoiding you? I think most of us have been in pretty rough places at some point in our lives. We know what it is like to feel so stuck in grief that we can’t imagine life going on as it did before, ever again.
And yet, there is that little glimpse of hope. There is a glimmer of light that shines out of the worst of the darkness that invades our world. Even when it seems that everything is lost, the psalmist has enough faith - that tiny mustard seed of faith - to express his trust in God. What does this kind of faith feel like when it bubbles up from inside of you? How is it amazingly enough to keep you going? Can a person really live on faith or hope or whatever this is? Can faith inspire us to stay true to what we know is right, despite the dire or difficult consequences? I think this is what inspires me the most about Jesus - that he was willing to walk into the deep darkness of betrayal and even death in order to remain faithful to God and to all that he knew to be true.
When we make our way through Holy Week, when we listen to the scriptures read on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, we are aware of the light of Easter that shines out over all of that darkness. Jesus certainly saw that light, God’s light, long before any of his followers knew it existed. The psalmist sees this light as well. His situation is a bit different in that he may not have the specifics as to exactly how God might help him out of his deep and painful crisis, but he has experienced God’s salvation before or maybe he has seen God help someone else, and so he knows it is possible to hold onto his hope despite the overwhelming odds.
This is a big part of faith, to be able to see through the present difficulty to a time when the light will return and shine down on us once again. In some ways, knowing that there will be light gives us the strength to enter into the darkness of the tunnel in front of us. Knowing that there is an Easter allows us to make it through the terrible despair as we follow the events of this holy week. And maybe, knowing that there is light at the end of the tunnel, we become more willing to go into the depths rather than dance around them, avoiding them if we possibly can. A silly example of this is what I do when I read books that I think might shake me up or frighten me. I peek at the end of the book, just a little tiny bit to see if the general tone of the ending is horrible and dark or something else that I could live with. I feel better knowing that things will be okay in the end. They don’t have to be perfect with everything tied up in a neat and tidy ribbon, but I do like to know that the book has an overall redeeming quality to it. If that is true, then I am willing to slog through the frightening or challenging parts.
We all need to see some light, especially when it gets dark all around us. We all need to have something or someone to hold onto when we face challenging times. This is what faith is all about, really. Faith is that sliver of light or hope or possibility that we can hold onto when all else falls by the wayside. Faith is God’s hand for us to hold onto on a dark night. When we have to walk through something we would rather avoid, faith is the one that comes up to us and says, “I’ll go with you,” even though they don’t have to. Faith is joining the psalmist in saying:
But I trust in you, O LORD;
I say,
"You are my God."
My times are in your hands;
deliver me
from my enemies
and from those who pursue me.
Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love.
So may it be. Amen.