This is the most schizophrenic Sunday of the entire Christian year.  We begin in a great and joyous celebration of Jesus’ reign, and then we experience the pain and pathos of his passion and death. We might appropriately call this “whiplash Sunday.”  Life seems full of the promise of earthly and divine fullness, and then despair and death quickly follow.  The psalm is most appropriate:  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The early Church celebrated every Sunday in a way that revisited both the passion and the resurrection.  Before long that full story was remembered only once a year.  The passion began to be celebrated on one Sunday, and the fullness of the Easter story of resurrection on another.  The palm procession and the remembering of the passion were re-enacted on the same Sunday by about the 4th century in Jerusalem.  The Good Friday celebration came along a bit later, and Maundy Thursday as we know it was later yet.  All of which is to say that underlying this schizophrenic celebration is an ancient tradition of wisdom.  It says something central about our lives as human beings and as Christians.

The pattern of contrast runs through all we hear and do this day.  It is a Sunday of two processions – one in joy and glory into Jerusalem, the other in pain and suffering to Calvary.  It is a Sunday of two trees – the royal palm, sign of victory and new life, and the other a tree of execution and death.  What we have experienced in the last half hour is much of the unfinished Christian story – the promise of life abundant, followed by death.  We wait one more week to remember and receive what follows in its fullness.  We wait to remember that tree of execution becoming a tree of life for the whole world.  Yet even today we are offered at this very table the fullness of this coming week’s work – restoration to life abundant, meant for each and every one.

The story of Christ’s passion is both about human frailty and about the glory of humanity reflecting the image of God.  Jesus asks Peter and the disciples three times to stay awake and watch with him.  Three times they fall asleep – or, as the Greek can be translated, they die.  They are dead to the pain and the glory going on in another corner of the garden.  You and I know something of that pattern as well, for it is only in glimpses and moments that most of us can bear either the full glory of God at work in the world around us or the utter pain of the world’s suffering.  We have to keep on waking up – to reach out to our neighbor in love, to rejoice in the wonder of creation, to turn around again toward God.  It is our human nature to keep falling asleep.  It is our baptized nature to hear the voice of God calling us to wake once more.

Three times as well Peter says he doesn’t know this poor soul who has been dragged off to his death.  Not until the rooster crows does he remember.  Who is the rooster, the calling bird, for us?  Or perhaps more accurately, what does it take for us to hear the voice of God calling?

Perhaps there are some clues in Jesus’ exchanges with his interrogators.  He is silent more often than he speaks, either to the high priest or to Pilate.  He responds only twice – to acknowledge that he is Messiah, and to one of Pilate’s questions – are you king of the Jews?  He turns that question back to the governor – you say so.  If we are going to follow Jesus on this thorny road, perhaps we have to be a bit less willing to respond defensively, a bit more willing to listen to or receive the barbs, yet not respond with violence.  Jesus is amazingly patient with his tormentors.  That word patience has the same root as passion and compassion – it means to suffer.  Our journey of faith will include suffering, and it may be what helps us to hear the voice of God in our neighbors.  Having known the cry ourselves, we may more easily recognize it in others.  Yet suffering is never the final word. 

Jesus responds positively to only one question – are you the anointed one?  If we are going to follow him, we, too, have to be willing to acknowledge our own anointing as God’s sons and daughters.  “You are anointed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” 

We have been anointed for service – to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves, to bring peace and godly justice in our families, workplaces, communities, and around the world.  Our service is needed in Darfur and Iraq, it’s needed in Jamaica and Queens, in school and city council, grocery store and church.  Do you hear him calling?  Can we not watch one hour, can we not hear the pain of another crying out in one place or one community or one relationship?

The road to that city of peace, that heavenly Jerusalem, leads past the cross.  Wake up, listen for the voice of God, and walk the way of Jesus.