“Don’t spoil the ending!” That should be the mantra of any storyteller. We all know that the art of great storytelling is in the pacing, laying out just enough details to tantalize the listener, create suspense, but not reveal the decisive turning point too soon.
Don’t we all know this story, I mean the story we have just heard? Here we are, beginning Holy Week with a story that we know all too well. You know the ending. I know the ending. Even people with little to no faith or people of other faiths know the ending of this story. There’s no spoiler alert on this one. Here it is: At the height of his ministry, Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph, with crowds cheering him on and strewing palm branches before him. Many have seen his works, and others have probably heard of them. Maybe he is indeed the long-expected king. The people’s cheers seem all the more sardonic on that day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem because we know how it all ends. The people, of course, quickly turn on Jesus, who turns out to be a different kind of king than they had imagined. Jesus is then betrayed by Judas. He is condemned unjustly. He is brutally executed as a criminal, although innocent, outside the walls of Jerusalem, denied even by his closest followers. He is stripped even of his clothes, and he gives up everything, his very life and self for the sake of those who are torturing him and for the sake of the whole world. He is buried in a tomb. And, at least for today, there the story stops.
If we didn’t know the true ending, Jesus’ gruesome death on the cross between two criminals would be seen as the climax, awful as it is, to this story. And the burial in the tomb becomes the mournful coda. But you and I know the real climax of this story, and so Jesus’ burial, as we perceive it, is something like a cliffhanger. We know the real ending, because it’s at the heart of our faith. We know that the power of the real climax changes everything in the story. But in terms of what we hear today, the climax is still in the future. And if we were hearing this story for the first time, we wouldn’t know that the crucifixion wasn’t the climax.
So why, year after year, do we return to this story of betrayal and death when we know how it ends? And even more perplexing, why do we begin this holiest of weeks in the church year with a story that we will hear again on Friday? Today, we hear of Jesus’ crucifixion, but on Thursday, we will wind back the clock and hear the story of the eve of Jesus’ death. The order is all wrong. But then, it never really is a linear story to begin with, is it?
There is a huge risk in telling the story when we already know the ending. We risk becoming numb to the power of the story. But the real temptation is in wanting to jump right to the end, so that everything can be tied up with a bow and so we can experience the happy ending and be done with it all.
Because, truth be told, we can’t help but read the happy ending into this story as we hear it today. We are not hearing this story for the first time. The glorious real ending of this story colors and shades everything about the cross and passion. But that’s a story for later in the week and not for today. Today, we need to stay with the first part of this story.
Because here we sit in the midst of another story. It’s one of epic proportions, and it’s a story of suffering, tragedy, loss, and woe. According to all accounts, we’re only at the beginning of this story. But unlike the Gospel story, we don’t know how this story will end. And that’s why it’s so horrifying.
Truth be told, we don’t know how much longer we’ll be in self-isolation. Every day the story’s drama increases. Every day, the numbers of the sick and the dying and the dead rise. Every day, we find ourselves stepping up our measures to try to flatten the curve or stem the tsunami-like force of the tide of sickness and death that threatens to overwhelm us. We don’t know what kind of hard decisions we’ll have to make. We don’t know if there are enough ventilators and medical equipment to support the numbers of the sick. We don’t know whether, with our next breath, we might be breathing in that insidious, vicious virus. We don’t know how we will endure more months of self-isolation.
And even on the other side of sickness and death—because this story will end at some point—we don’t know what it will be like. We don’t know how many of our friends and loved ones will have been affected. We don’t know what it will be like to interact normally again and not as if we’re scared of one another. We don’t know what church will feel like afterwards. We won’t know if we’ll be able to shake any one’s hand again. We don’t know how many jobs will be left. We don’t know which of our favorite restaurants and businesses will survive. And if we become too obsessed with these open-ended questions, it all becomes too much.
So, don’t you find yourselves longing for a happy ending? Don’t you want to jump right now from Palm Sunday directly to Easter? We know that the Good News triumphs in the end, so why can’t we just have it now?
Or is the Gospel story we tell today exactly what we need to hear in this moment? Perhaps this story, and the peculiar way in which we hear it, knowing the ending and all, can shine some light on our current crisis.
I suspect that the full force of the story we tell, the story at the heart of our faith, lies in the fact that year after year, we continue to tell it in all its gory detail even though we know that the ending is good news. We know that the ending is the definition of Life itself. We know that Love wins out in the end. We know that the Light overcomes the darkness.
But we also know that the happy ending does not wipe out all the tragedy. It doesn’t eradicate it. It doesn’t pretend it never happened. It doesn’t try to move as quickly as possible through it to some brighter future. No, it draws all of that mess into a different light and carries it forward and redeems it. And the particular beauty of this happy ending, of this good news, is that it subverts suffering and death by entering into it, surprises it, if you will. If this were the typical post-Enlightenment story that we want to hear, we would have moved inexorably towards glory and then erased all memory of the nasty parts. We would have evolved into greater selves, where the good always wipes out the bad. But our story doesn’t do that. And that’s why it’s so good.
And so this day, we preach Christ both crucified and risen, because we know how the story ends. But we sit with the overwhelming tragedy that is present in the lead-up to that happy ending. Today, with our worries about a rapidly spreading pandemic invisibly haunting the world around us, we tell our story. Today, with family members and friends shielded in our hearts by prayer, we tell our story. Today, in this empty church connected digitally to your home, without physically interacting with one another and through the impersonal means of technology, we still tell our story. And although in some sense, we don’t know what’s next, we do know something about its real ending, which is in its beginning, and its middle, and everywhere. We know, right now, that Life is the victor and Death is the loser. Even when the ending of our particular story is not fully known, the real ending of another greater story takes up our own and shines upon it.
As we tell our story of pain and suffering in the presence of that other story from over two thousand years ago, we see the veil between this world and the next, like that veil in the temple, torn in two. And we get a glimpse into God’s kingdom breaking into this world. The happy conclusion doesn’t happen at the end of the story; it meets us time and again in the midst of it.
If the coronavirus has taught us anything, it’s that we can only live day by day. And each day, as we wake up to tell our story, we have the gift of finding God anew. God is here with us in our story of suffering and death, and like palm branches strewn on the path before Jesus, God is strewing love and peace and healing and comfort and strength all around us.
Because when we talk about God’s story in Christ, there is no way to spoil the ending. And when we tell that story, we are also telling our story. We know the ending, and the ending is at the beginning. And the ending is in the middle, even as today we linger for a while with suffering and death. That pain cannot be erased, but something much greater ultimately wins, indeed, is winning. And you know the end of that story, even now at the beginning.
Reflections for a sermon preached by Father Kyle Babin
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Palm Sunday 2020