Whew. This gut-wrenching Palm Sunday Gospel, dramatically enacted by… reads like a catalog of provocative questions and defamatory statements about Jesus’ identity. At the outset, Pilate asks Jesus if he is king of the Jews, and then the Gospel ends with a centurion proclaiming “truly this man was God’s son.” In between, there’s all manner of mocking and accusation and derision. While I grieve the physical violence being done to Jesus, the words strike me as equally painful. It’s as if I’ve gotten lost in the first century equivalent of a contemporary internet troll-hole. “Stop the hate speech,” I want to plead of this heart-wrenching Gospel account. Something cosmically tragic is happening in your midst. Can’t you all just shut the heck up?
But here’s a challenge. Humans beings are not really inclined to shut up. I have this on the good authority of my two-year-old granddaughter Ella. She has a lot to say about just about everything—all the time—even though not that much of it is intelligible. Her language gets a bit clearer every day, however, because she mimics everything she hears. Everything. Which is a mixed blessing, as you might imagine. I really have to think twice about what I say out loud in her presence these days. For example, I probably won’t be reading today’s Gospel to her anytime soon.
But Ella doesn’t only mimic words. She’s also watching adult behavior: sometimes to imitate it, and other times to get us to do things for her. Things like give her water or a snack, take her to the park, read her a book. Since she doesn’t know many verbs yet, one of the ways she communicates her needs is to mime some aspect of it, and then insist with whatever words she has. She’ll bring me a book, open it, point to a page and say “do do.” This same repeated verb form works for many things. Like when she shows me her empty water bottle, or points to the fruit bowl, or reaches towards crayons which are kept on a high shelf. Grandma and Grandpa—we’re actually known as Popop and Booboo—do this thing for me. I’m done trying to use words that I don’t even know yet, so pay attention to my actions. And then just “do do” it.
A curious aside. In a way, Ella is demonstrating a very Hebrew sensibility in her speech. To emphasize something really important to her, she repeats a syllable. As in the names of people she loves like mama and dada and popop and booboo. But Hebrew poets have been repeating themselves for emphasis for millennia. Literally. Think of our best loved Psalms: “I will exalt you, O God my King/and bless your Name for ever and ever.” Or “Be pleased, O God, to deliver me; /O LORD, make haste to help me.” Or “Hear my plea, O LORD; give heed to my cry/listen to my prayer.” I suspect that for Ella, “do do” serves the same emphatic purpose.
In the Episcopal Church, ours is a wordy tradition. Am I right? We need an entire prayer book full of words to lead worship or visit a sick person. And they are such lovely words, poetic words, inspiring words, hopeful words. But words do have their limitations, even for people who have a bigger vocabulary than my two year old granddaughter. My husband is doing some deep soul work right now—I’m really proud of him—but his spiritual director had to tell him directly one time “get out of your head and stop talking.” And he’s an introvert, so he’s not actually that talky a guy. Our culture does reward those who use words with facility—we know that—but Holy Week is not about rewards or well-chosen words. It’s about Jesus’ obedience, which leads him to the greatest loss and betrayal, so that the whole world might experience God’s victory over the worst of human evil.
So here’s my invitation to you this week: get out of your head and stop talking. Don’t say say, don’t read read, don’t even pray pray. Do do, as our Lord has done. Follow him down the via dolorosa—with your body even—as best you can in this time and place. Our own church has some lovely stations of the cross, custom made for us last year. There’s a devotional book that will guide you through them with some very prayerful words. I commend it to you. But you could also just walk around them wordlessly and let your prayerful imagination do the work. Do do the work, you might say.
This week we’ll offer you plenty to do at Trinity. You can join us for the midweek Eucharist on Wednesday at noon, you can share in the meal and footwashing and stripping of the altar on Thursday evening—a powerful embodied witness—and you can even vigil overnight. We’ll be setting up an altar of repose in St. Mark’s Chapel where you could pray until morning, but if you don’t want to do that in person I believe that Deacon Bertram will have a remote vigil that all of us could access from our homes. And then there’s Friday, day of deepest sorrow. Give yourself permission to cry in church so that you can “rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels” with the lighting of the new fire on Saturday evening.
It’s a week of holy drama with the capacity to teach much more than all the words we could use to describe it. So I’m not going to tell you what to expect, but I will be praying that the Spirit enter your heart and shape your experience with sighs too deep for words. And I will take the liberty of suggesting some habits of mind and heart that might help you to receive the blessings of this week.
Show up, prepared or not. It’s not important to God that you have done all of the readings or said all the prayers or wear the right clothes. It’s not even all that important that you come on time, although I’ll confess that it makes me happy. Come as often as your schedule permits, and ask God for the grace of being fully present when you do.
Set aside what you think you know, which is another of saying “stay curious.” Despite the many words you hear this week—some of which will be well-known to you—don’t be tempted to overthink Holy Week. Notice what happens in your body, and where you feel your emotions locate themselves. Don’t be afraid to be afraid, or sad, or even angry. You can feel pain without returning it, as Jesus showed us.
Be open to the surprise of joy. Which tends to come into clearer vision when we are also in touch with our fears and our sorrows and our vulnerability. In the midst of many words and much busy-ness, it is entirely possible to move right through joy without really noticing it. But let’s not do that this Holy Week. Instead, I invite you to experience it in all its fullness. Or as CS Lewis wrote, more than 70 years ago, in Surprised by Joy—
“Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come at all.
And notice here how the true training for anything… that is good always prefigures and—if submitted to—will always [prepare us] for the whole Christian life.”
It’s a whole Christian life we’re being invited into this Holy Week. Come, see, hear, taste, and risk being transformed in the doing of it. Yes—I’m repeating it in the Hebrew way—risk being transformed in the doing of it.
