Palm Sunday: Exceeding our Expectations

It was the great author JRR Tolkien who coined the word eucatastrophe; he meant by the word this - an event that occurs at the end of a story that suddenly and amazingly results in the well-being of the protagonist. Tolkien surely had many occasions to point out eucatastophes in his myth-making for which he is famous and for which so many of us are extremely grateful. However, what I want to remind you of, tell you for the first time, and bring to your attention is the way he applied this word to the Gospel story. Tolkien said that the incarnation was the eucatastrophe of human history and that the resurrection was the eucatastrophe of the incarnation. Bless him for putting it this way. I can think of no more succinct, yet, imaginative way of seeing the really big picture of what Jesus came to do than as a wonderful eucatastrophe; Jesus came to undo the work of human sin and selfishness.

Rowan Williams puts it this way in his comments on original sin:
“In humanity's history, the ingrained habit of turning inwards, turning in upon ourselves, is passed on. We learn what we want.... by watching someone else wanting it and competing for it. Before we begin to make choices, our options have been silently reduced in this way. To speak of original sin.... is to observe that our learning how to exist is mixed in with learning what does not make for our life or our joy. And every failure and wrong turn in the history of a person as in the history of our species locks us more and more firmly into ourselves. No wonder we drift further from peace, become less and less free to give. Something needs to reverse the flow, to break the cycle..... Only a human word, a human act will heal the process of human history; it isn't ideas and ideals that will do this, but some moment in history when relations are changed for good and all, when new things concretely become possible."

Jesus’ came, in the mystery of the incarnation, to reverse the trajectory of human history and to set us on the path of human flourishing which God has always intended for us. He came so we might overcome everything that diminishes the glory of our humanity so that we might be fully who we were made to be.

I got a letter recently from someone who shared with me a story that I have permission to tell you. He told me that he had been struggling with a certain pattern of acting and thinking that he knew to be sinful. His struggle was of the sort that it was known only to him, yet he could see its effects on those around him. He realized, sadly, that this pattern of living had gotten the best of him and was causing him not to have the love or patience that he wanted to have for those dear to him in his life. He said that he no longer felt the desire to confess, repent or ask forgiveness because he thought to himself, “what good would it do?”. Then he said he found himself sort of backed into a situation where he promised to do something sacrificial for a friend. He said that, at first, it felt like drudgery to help but that his heart changed when he saw how happy and grateful he had made his friend. He said that was a turning point: “I was happy too and then I thought to myself that this is what I really want to feel like more often than I do. I thought about my besetting temptation and sin and I thought I doubt I will be perfect when I bring all this back to God and ask him for his forgiveness and help but if I can just make some progress and feel a little more like I did today when I was helping this other person then I will count that as worthwhile.”

Though the person who shared this story just recounted does not use the words human flourishing he certainly describes it. This person has come to see a certain pathology at work in him that he recognizes as robbing him of human joy and he wants more human joy instead of it. That he realized all of this in relationship to loving others... well, I can’t recall a better way of recognizing human flourishing than by being able to tell what it is when seen in relationship to others - Paul’s remarkable words describing the profound interconnectedness of Christian community come to mind: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant?

When our capacity to love others as we ought to is diminished by certain patterns of thinking, doing and being, we have a pretty good clue that we might just be dealing with sin doing its destructive work.

I share this story on Palm Sunday to remind us of the deep work that Jesus is setting out to do by entering Jerusalem at the beginning of holy week, what we celebrate on Palm Sunday. As Jesus prepares for the cross, he is in the midst of working out a eucatastrophe so that we might be fully alive to the love of God in every nook and cranny of our life, especially in the places that are secret that all too easily can be places where we have given up hope. Let the sacrament of communion remind us that “The glory of God is a human being fully alive (Iranaeus).”

On Palm Sunday we re-enact the initial enthusiasm among Jesus’ contemporary followers - he is heading to Jerusalem and he is beginning to act in ways that indicate that he might just be going to take King David’s throne for himself - maybe he is the Messiah who so many wanted to come and deliver them from the oppressive Romans. Ben Witherington writes of this moment as follows: “Notice this peaceable king does not come into town driving a Humvee, or riding on a war charger as a conquering hero. He comes to declare peace for the world, not war on the Romans. And here is a profound truth--- Jesus did not come to meet either his earliest followers expectations or ours. He came to meet our needs. Oh but the expectations were exponential. They were off the chart.... The cry Hosanna (see Ps. 118.25) seems to in fact be a plea in Hebrew meaning “Save Now!”. The crowds were crying out for a particular kind of political liberation it would appear on the spot, but Jesus had another idea in mind entirely of what made for peace, what made for pacification of our warring madness, what made for liberation and redemption. The real enemy was not Romans or Greeks, or foreigners in general. The real enemy lurked within the hearts of every fallen person—it is called sin.”

In the course of our mundane lives how many times do we demand that God meet our expectations, rather than slowing down and asking him to help us understand our deepest human needs in light of the Gospel, so that we might ask him to meet them and ask him to shape our daily lives according to their priority - according to our deepest human needs instead of making our expectations what is most important to us. Let me offer an example of what I am trying to get at. Recently, we have been stressed and anxious about what we will do about our daughter for school when she is ready for kindergarten. Pretty soon you come to realize that this issue will consume about all the time you give it. And pretty soon it becomes clear that that issue can become what you proclaim to God to be the most important thing going on in your life.... but really what you have missed along the way is enough time and energy to love someone who needs love, serve the homeless, or ironically play with your child. Or, take another example: you may be in a situation with colleagues or others in your community wherein you are consumed by anxiety over some aspect of your relationship with them. Maybe you are overwhelmed by worry that you are not valued properly at work or consumed by whether or not certain people like you. Very easily we can take these concerns and worries and proclaim to God that we expect him to change these situations in our favor. We get so worked up about these worries and concerns that they become pretty much all we talk to God about (note well: God cares about all of this stuff and we should pray about it but he cares more deeply that we be conformed to the image of Christ). Meanwhile he wants us to place a bigger priority on praying for and yearning to be the very incarnation of Christ’s love in all of these contexts; we have trouble seeing that because all we can think about is how much we want him to change our circumstances to our favor. Rather than asking to be made new from the inside out we settle for yearning for and praying for a mere rearranging of our circumstances and leave it that. Craig Barnes puts it this way: “Whenever pastors gather for continuing education seminars, it isn’t long before an expert gets up to warn us that people resist change. That isn’t exactly true. What we all resist is unwanted change. But most of our wanted changes are really nothing more than efforts at rearranging our lives. We leave one job and start another with a similar company that only has a different
name. We sell one house and buy another. We stop dating one person and start
dating someone else. Things may look a little different for a while, but it’s the
same person who keeps showing up in the mirror. Sometimes people begin to look into spirituality thinking it’s another opportunity to rearrange our lives. But he wants to change us, transform us, and give us a new identity. He wants to give us his own identity as a beloved child of God. According to the Scriptures, everything is now different. The old has passed
away. Behold all things have become new. You are no longer manipulated by
guilt, compulsiveness, hurts from the past, or fantasies about the future. All of
that is in the past. Your life is free for a new future.”

May God grant us during this Holy Week the grace to long for transformation instead of mere rearranging.

Questions for discussion:

1. Do you often think of how well you are appropriating God’s love and grace according to how well you love others? Can you think of one or two friendships or family relationships which, when looked at in this light, could offer you a good read on how you are doing with God? How would you measure how well you are doing?

2. What sorts of expectations have you put on God so as to cause you to not think and pray enough about your deepest human needs in light of the Gospel?

3. If someone were to ask you what God cares about in this world, how might the conversation develop if you began by quoting Iranaeus’ maxim: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive”? Would it develop differently than if you started the conversation by saying something that is equally true, like.... “God hates sin”? (This discussion question is meant to spark conversation about how we tell others about the love of God in Christ.)