Let us go also to die with him.

Homily: Palm Sunday – Cycle A

“Let us also go to die with him.”  These were the words of Thomas the Apostle from last Sunday’s Gospel reading.  You’ll recall that it was the recounting of the miraculous raising of Lazarus from the dead.  Lazarus, who with his sisters, Martha and Mary, was a great friend of Jesus’, fell ill and died.  Martha and Mary had sent word to Jesus that he might come and cure him (for surely, as great friends of Jesus, Jesus would come quickly to heal him).  Jesus, however, delays and Lazarus dies.  It is only then that Jesus turns to go to Bethany, announcing to his disciples that Lazarus’ death will be for God’s glory and so that he, the Son of God, would be glorified, too.  Thomas—the one whom we often deride as the “doubter”—is quick to believe what Jesus has said and courageously announces that he, too, is ready to go and to die so that God might be glorified and Jesus, too, might be glorified.

When he and his fellow disciples, along with Martha and Mary and the Jews who were accompanying them in their grief, saw Lazarus—the man who was surely dead after spending four days in the tomb—walk out alive, he, along with them, must have had a profound sense that he was part of something big: something, perhaps, that he couldn’t quite comprehend at that moment.  Then, some time later, when he and the other disciples accompanied Jesus as he made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, I imagine that he looked with wonder and delight as great crowds of people acclaimed Jesus as the Messiah.  Perhaps for him and his fellow disciples, it was the final confirmation that he was, indeed, part of something big—the biggest, in fact: the definitive restoration of the throne of David, their great king, and the ushering in of God’s eternal kingdom.

Soon after, however, their assurance would begin to wane as they came to know that not everyone in Jerusalem was convinced that Jesus was the Messiah.  The religious elite, in fact, were so unconvinced that Jesus was the Messiah that they were plotting ways to arrest Jesus and put him to death for the sin of blasphemy.  Thus, by Holy Thursday night, the joyful, triumphant spirit of Sunday had turned into a spirit of tension and uncertainty, which then would quickly transform into a spirit of shock, fear, and grief as Jesus was arrested, condemned, tortured, and crucified.

As we recount the Passion of our Lord today, we see this kind of rapid change in spirit in Jesus.  We can imagine the excitement, the joy in Christ’s heart as he entered Jerusalem to the shouts of “Hosanna” from the great crowds.  We can imagine him feeling very energized by this display.  Then, as the events of Holy Thursday night unfold, we find Jesus’ spirit turn and he becomes emptier and passive.

Jesus “emptied himself”, Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, and he took “the form of a slave.”  Typically, a slave is someone who is very passive and who will often speak as if he has no voice of his own.  Multiple times in this account from the Gospel, we heard Jesus respond as he was pressed to give an answer: when Judas asked if he would be the betrayer, when Caiaphas ordered Jesus to say whether he was the Messiah, and when Pilate asked whether he was the king of the Jews.  In each, Jesus said, passively, “You have said so,” instead of directly responding to their questions.  In fact, most everything in this account of Jesus’ Passion is showing us how completely Jesus emptied himself, making himself a slave, and becoming obedient even to the point of the most shameful kind of death: death on a cross.

Friends, every year Lent is a time in which we are called to “empty ourselves”.  This year, we’ve been called to an emptying that, perhaps, we never imagined.  A spirit that I’ve had to fight in the last couple of days has been the spirit of “let’s just get this over with”.  This is a bad spirit.  Bad because it causes us to step out of the present and into a future that isn’t yet real.  But God isn’t in the future.  God is here, right now, in this mess with us; and he wants to encounter every turbulent emotion that you are experiencing so as to speak into them: “Do not be afraid, I am with you”.

Friends, if you heard my homily from the first Sunday of Lent (remember? way back when “normal” was still normal?) you'll remember that I said that the physical discomforts that we voluntarily embrace during Lent—that is, the things we enjoy that we give up or the things that we do not enjoy that we take up—are meant to create a space in us in which we can encounter our spiritual discomforts: mainly, the realization that we are not yet fully the disciples of Jesus that he has called us to be.  Our challenge this week, therefore, is to embrace the words of Thomas the Apostle: “Let us go also to die with him.”  Friends, let us let go of our anxiety to wrest control over this situation and instead empty ourselves, like slaves, and bear the cross of this pandemic in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the world; and let us go also with Jesus to die with him, so that we might glorify God—and be glorified by him—on the day of Resurrection.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – April 5^th, 2020