Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday 1997

Power to let be

It’s a little awkward trying to think of this as Palm Sunday. You can see it is by the calendar, but you don’t have the blessing of palms, or the procession with the palms, this was all done in the morning, and the reading of the passage about Palm Sunday from Mark’s Gospel was also this morning. I mean, we’re here with just the Passion Narrative, but I think it is really important, for a whole bunch of reasons, to keep the story in order. To think about Palm Sunday, I would like to suggest again this perspective of looking at Lent as a time of deepening our understanding of a number of things. And Palm Sunday offers another interesting object for thought

You get this strange sort of thing, this grandeur, you get Jesus stomping in triumphantly, people, as the text has it, yelling like mad and throwing their garments in front of him and waving branches... I’d like to propose that what is being honoured here is power. I think that is what people are responding to. There is some kind of power in this man, but it is power of a different kind than the way we normally tend to view power, which is, I think, that someone who has power can get done what they want done. But with Jesus, and this is a deeper view of power that comes out of the Bible, power, as one great Protestant theologian put it, is the power of God, which is the power to let be. That is the way that power is understood here. It is not power to coerce, or power to manage things, but power to allow things to be, and allow people to be. That’s precisely what power is. I mean, the creative power of God is precisely that, the letting be of reality.

Now, I think we have to be kind of careful here because when we hear the phrase: "I want to be empowered," I think that normally means "well, I just want somebody to let me do what I want to do." That’s not what is at stake here. First of all, it is important to remember that power is always a matter of relationships, power is a form of connection. Therefore, to let be, is not just allowing this other entity to go off on his or her own to do their business. Rather, it is the capacity to stand before another as one is, to stand with the other, to stand in connection... And furthermore, Jesus spends all his time with all these low-lifes: whores, tax-collectors, beggars, out-casts... What was the point of that sort of power? Did it just say: "Well, I’m a good old boy, or a slob, and I can just stand there and wallow in my mediocrity?" No, I don’t think that that’s it at all. One has the sense of being let be one’s self, precisely when one is passionately intending to transcend one’s self, and to come into connection with the One who lets one be. So, it’s not a question of managing things at all; it is a question of freeing one in order to let them respond.

This is Palm Sunday, so that is presumably what’s going on. But then we know what happens. If we think of power at that depth, then what happens? All these guys, Jesus’ own friends, deserted him. It is very difficult to live at that depth. It is very difficult to live at that level of consciousness, and meanwhile, of course, if it begins to cost us something, then, cork-like, we immediately bounce up to the surface of things. And in order save our own skins, like Peter and all those other guys did, we run away. That’s why it is very important to think of power at this depth: it lets us see, I think, Palm Sunday as the entree into the whole drama of the working out of that kind of power. And, as we see in the figure of Jesus, it is very dangerous.

Thinking about this over the past little while, an interesting thing has happened: all kinds of names came into my head. Talking about power in this way sounds very far-fetched until you start thinking about people like Gandhi, or Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, or Cori Aquino, or Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King... And even we in the Roman Church have that rare, rare, rare figure, the most truly powerful figure that I know in the church this century, John XXIII, who let people be, who gave people room to grow, who, by letting them be, precisely brought them further into their own growth. But, as with all those people I mentioned, it is a dangerous thing. Gandhi was not killed by accident, Martin Luther King was not killed by accident, whether Havel is a hero in the Czech Republic, I do not know... Mandela’s life has not been simple... What I’m getting at is that Palm Sunday inevitably, it seems to me, because it is very difficult for us to live at that depth, leads to Holy Thursday and Good Friday. But thinking about Palm Sunday in this way, I would suggest, is a fair start in trying to see how this way of understanding power plays out in real human life. The hope is, of course, for me and for you, that we are drawn by the beauty, the strength, the integrity, and the nobility of that understanding of power to truly follow Jesus’ own career through these next few days, and, as much as we can, try to realize that kind of power in ourselves as we make ourselves available to God, to let God let us be.

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