Passion Sunday (March 21, 2021)

In our Gospel lesson this morning, we are privy to a conversation between Jesus and some of his Jewish detractors. The fundamental thesis advocated by our Lord is that those who are of God hear God.

This means that God speaks. Speaking requires love which is a recognition of equality. When I love Jude and Rowan, it’s because I recognize in them humans who deserve dignity and respect (even when Rowan cries all the time).

This, by the way, was why slavery is so bad: it denies equality to the other. We could say slave-masters are nice to their slaves but we could never say they are loving.

But this raises a problem: if love and communication require equality, how can God, our creator who is greater than that which we can conceive, speak to us? It’s not as though God is another being in the universe.

So, how do we as creatures hear him?

The answer is Jesus. God speaks through the Word, who St. John identifies as the Son of the Father in the opening of his book: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

And we know, based on Jesus’ words in St. John that the Father and Son are equals because they love each other. We can ascertain that from our reading this morning when Jesus tells his interlocutors: “I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory.” But on the flip side, the Father honors the Son: “it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say that he is your God. But you have not known him; I know him.”

What this means is that in the Incarnate Christ, we see the love that exists between the Father and the Son made manifest. But it goes further because in the Incarnation, we are allowed to participate and share in that love because, according to the Athanasian Creed, Christ “takes Manhood into God.”

But in our reading, we run into a problem: sin.

Here’s the beloved Son of God, the Incarnate Word who has existed for eternity (as he tells his audience: “Before Abraham was, I am”) and who beckons his audience into the divine embrace.

And how do they respond?

They accuse him of having a demon and being a Samaritan, which would have been quite an insult.

And finally, by the end of the reading, they took up stones to kill him.

The crowds here represent the larger human problem from which we all suffer: original sin, that self-destructive impulse which causes us to forcefully reject real love when it is offered to us which darkens minds and inculcates cycles of violence.

That violence traps us but is ultimately directed against God.

God exists outside of creation so our sin doesn’t “diminish” him in any way. However, the problem is that because he is our Creator, we were already entirely dependent on him. He is the reason we are alive and we spit in his face.

So in the Incarnation, our Lord not only makes love available not only by taking us up into the divine love of the Trinity but also by paying the reparation for our sin.

This is why Christ is referred to as our High Priest in our Epistle reading from Hebrews 9.

The Old Testament priesthood was about God’s temporary provisions to cover the sins of his people through the offering of animal sacrifices.

But to the author of Hebrews, Christ is a superior priest in that his priesthood is what the Jewish priesthood always pointed to.

It’s superior because it’s not the blood of bulls and goats that our High Priest offers — he offers himself.

It’s in this self-offering, a willingness to be destroyed by the other instead of desiring to destroy that he teaches us what it means to be human and break those cycles of violence that we participate in because of original sin. Jesus succinctly summarizes this in the Fourth Gospel: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

And so on this Passion Sunday, with the end of Lent coming more into view every day, we begin to turn our gaze towards the events of Good Friday as we are reminded of the most fundamental truth of Christianity.

This fundamental truth was expressed by the theologian Karl Barth who, after having written massive tomes of theology, was asked by a student to summarize his theology in one sentence. What did he choose? “Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.”

As we near our Lenten destination, we place the crucified Christ in view because outside of the crucifix, there is no other way to say “God loves you,” which is why the crucifix is the central image for Christianity and why it hangs over so many altars: how much does he love us? That much.

And that is who we are to become.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.