Living the Story
A sermon preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce
on Palm Sunday, 28th March 2010
As a child, I was an incredible bookworm. I just loved reading. My idea of total bliss was being unleashed to roam free in the children’s section of the local public library, and returning home with a pile of books, every single one of which contained a whole new world of characters and places and adventures that I could enter and explore.
Indeed, I can remember my poor mother going to increasingly desperate lengths to try and stop me from reading far into the night after I was supposed to have gone to bed. First she tried confiscating the book that I happened to be reading, but I simply found something else to read instead. She then tried confiscating my glasses, but I quickly discovered that I could just about manage to read without them. On one famous occasion she was actually reduced to removing the light bulb from the ceiling, so that I was completely deprived of light. And I have also heard her describe an incident, when I was aged about six and had been instructed to go and wash, when she observed me walking into the bathroom totally engrossed in a book, pushing my glasses up onto my forehead, running a flannel over my face, putting my glasses back down, and leaving the bathroom again, whilst at no stage actually relinquishing hold of the book. (You will doubtless be relieved to hear that my standards of personal hygiene have risen considerably since those days.)
But it was not simply the excitement of new books that I found so enthralling. The joy of reading and re-reading old favourites was an equal pleasure. Because with a really fine book, somehow, it doesn’t actually matter that you already knew the plot; in fact, that is almost part of the delight: you can experience again and again the same wonder and delight, the same excitement, the same enjoyment of the familiar characters, without the story ever losing any of its freshness. There is something about the experience of ‘inhabiting’ a really good book, which is quite unlike anything else.
Which is why I can remember feeling absolutely shocked and appalled and outraged when, at secondary school, I overheard a girl in my class boasting that she never bothered reading entire books. Her advice was that all you needed to do was to read the opening chapter (to discover who the characters were), and then the final chapter to find out what happened at the end. That would give you the gist of the story, and save you an awful lot of unnecessary time and bother. You could forget about the bit in the middle altogether.
In the face of such utter blasphemy my indignant teenage self had to be restrained from setting about her with a blunt instrument. Because what I had already discovered for myself by that stage, but she had singularly failed to realise, is that a really good book is not simply a story. A really good book is an emotional and spiritual journey. Which means that, in the best kind of book, you cannot even begin to understand the true significance and meaning and power of the story’s ending, unless you have yourself travelled every step of the path that leads you there. There are no short cuts, however tempting it might be to feel that there are.
Let me give you a very vivid illustration of this. It is not very often that a work of fiction actually moves me to tears – real tears – but the last book that managed to do this, because its ending is so astonishingly beautiful, is this one: Khaled Hosseini’s book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, set in Afghanistan. For those of you who have not yet read it, its final chapter draws to a close with the image of a young family joyfully awaiting the birth of a new baby, and having fun choosing possible names for the unborn child, which they have turned into a kind of game with the mother of the awaited baby, a woman called Laila. And it was the closing words of this book that affected me so deeply – so much so that I seem to recall a friend offering to take me out to lunch afterwards to help me recover. So what are those extraordinarily powerful closing words? They are the following, and I quote:
‘But the game involves only male names. Because if it is a girl, Laila has already named her.’
That’s all. So what is so remarkable about two such apparently unremarkable sentences? If you don’t know the book, you are probably wondering why on earth those words should have had such an extraordinary effect upon me. Indeed, I suspect that, even if I were to summarise the plot for you, you would still feel somewhat perplexed as to why I was so moved by those two last lines.
The point being that it is impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t actually read the book, why those apparently unremarkable words have such remarkable power. You can only understand their true meaning, their true significance, and their true beauty when you have travelled the whole of the journey that lies between the covers of this book. Because sometimes there are no short cuts. Knowing the outline of a story is all very well – it can give you a rough idea of what happens in the plot – but what it will not do is enable you to inhabit the emotional life of the work; to live it; to breathe it; to immerse yourself in it; and ultimately to understand what is really going on within it, at the deepest of levels.
Next Sunday, I fully expect that, as usual on Easter Day, this church will be full of people, some of whom I have never seen before; and many of whom do not normally attend church services, except possibly the two big ones each year – at Christmas and Easter. And it will, of course, be our delight to see them here. Because this is a place where all are welcome, whoever they are, and whatever the reasons that bring them.
And yet, when I think about them turning up on Easter Day, having missed everything that has gone before it, I can’t help but feel a little sad. Here we are on Palm Sunday, at the start of Holy Week, poised to embark upon the most extraordinary, powerful, and life-changing journey of the Christian year during the coming seven days; and they … well, they will just turn up for the final chapter and the chocolate eggs, having completely bypassed everything that has led up to it.
The story of the passion, death and resurrection of Christ is a story that is familiar to most people within our culture. And yet, Holy Week is about so very much more than simply a knowledge of the plot. Because it is a story that needs to be inhabited; it unfolds a reality that demands to be lived. The final chapter of a novel may tell you what happens at the end of the plot – but not necessarily why that story matters. And the same is true of Holy Week. If Easter is to be properly understood there is a journey leading up to it that needs to be travelled; and each stage within it is a space to be inhabited, prayerfully, and reflectively, as we are led through one of the most extraordinary sequences of human experience imaginable.
From the partying crowds of Palm Sunday, to the quiet companionship of Maundy Thursday, to the betrayal and arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane; the darkness and desolation and despair of Good Friday; to the strange and powerful anticipation of Easter Eve, when we know with increasing certainty that God is about to do something utterly and unimaginably extraordinary. And only then does the explosion happen – an explosion so mighty and so extraordinary that it has blown a hole through history; an explosion that still has the power to transform lives; to bring into being a whole new way of living. Christ dies – but death cannot hold him.
But all of that is still to come; all that is yet to unfold. We begin here and now with Palm Sunday – one of the most curious and complex occasions in the Christian year. At first sight, it is an event of great rejoicing and celebration, as we join with those crowds in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and acclaim Jesus as our king as he enters his city, singing songs of joy and shouting ‘Hosanna’. But the palms that we bear today, a reminder of the palm branches that they waved all those centuries ago, are in the shape of a cross: an instrument of torture and death; shame and humiliation. The joy and excitement of Palm Sunday, which at this moment seems so very real, is in fact, it turns out, all just so much froth; it is merely the reaction of an excitable crowd who think that there must be something in it for them; because before this week is over, the very crowd that today is praising Jesus as Messiah will be baying for his blood.
And we are a part of that very crowd. The shadow of the passion lies deep over Palm Sunday, which is why it is such a strange and perplexing day. In the words of the hymn we shall be singing in a few moments’ time:
Sometimes they strew his way
And his sweet praises sing
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King.
Then ‘Crucify!’ is all their breath,
And for his death they thirst and cry.
And that is why we move from the joyful celebration of his entry into Jerusalem this morning, to a performance of Stainer’s Crucifixion here this evening. I myself shall be singing ‘Hosanna’ with you in our hymns this morning, just as I shall be crying ‘Crucify Him!’ with the choir tonight. Because one of the most uncomfortable truths that Palm Sunday requires all of us to face, as we prepare for our descent into Holy Week, is that Jesus was nailed to the cross, to die a slow and agonising death, and that it was good, upright, law-abiding, and religiously inclined people like you and I, who put him there.
The harsh reality is that we are, all of us, however wise and good and eminent and trustworthy and true we might like to think of ourselves as being, we are all of us frail, and weak, and much more easily seduced into wrong doing than we might readily be prepared to admit. And just occasionally it is no bad thing for us to be reminded of that.
So, I wonder what kind of an experience Holy Week will be for you this year? I wonder how far each one of us is prepared to go in accompanying Jesus on the journey that is about to unfold before us? Because one cannot fully understand or experience the joy and hope and new life of Easter without also tasting the darkness that precedes it. You cannot have a resurrection without first having a death; just as you can only truly appreciate the value of light when you have also experienced real darkness. Only one who has glimpsed despair can understand the true meaning of hope
The journey begins here. Now, of course, it is perfectly possible for you all to decide to skip from the celebration of Palm Sunday this morning to the celebration of Easter Day next Sunday and to miss out all the bits in between, like that teenage girl in my secondary school. After all, we all know what happens in the plot.
Or we can recognise that Holy Week is not merely another story; rather, it is a reality to be inhabited; it is extraordinary; it is powerful; it is life-changing. And it can be yours.
Whether it is or not, of course, remains entirely up to you.
Amen.