“Why?”

A Palm Sunday Reflection by Rev. Patrice Ficken

Luke 19:28-40

Sanbornton Congregational Church, UCC

April 1, 2007

(Please do not re-print or re-use without permission of the author) 

When the phone rings and the news comes of a death, a diagnosis, an accident, a tragedy... 

When bombs kill innocent people and children die in city streets…

When we see the faces of poverty and hunger and homelessness; and hear the witness accounts of torture or senseless violence….

When we watch a loved one lose memory, lose hope, the will to live…we ask, why?

If there is a question that has confounded humanity  - it is the question of suffering.  Why?  Why does suffering exist?  If God is truly a loving and compassionate God, then why would God allow the holocaust, genocide, natural disaster, war, disease?

As we enter Holy Week, greeting Jesus on the lowly colt, on his way to Jerusalem, on his way to the cross – this is the question:  why?  Why did Jesus suffer and die?

Some Christians believe that God demanded Jesus’ death as atonement for the sins of the world, as a sacrifice, so that humanity could be forgiven and saved.  This theology portrays God as a God of retribution, of violence, of judgment.   It poses a stumbling block for many, including myself. 

And as Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan assert in a recent article in The Christian Century, this doctrine avoids the question of why Jesus went to Jerusalem and why he was killed.  They write, Jesus went to Jerusalem with one clear intention:  “to confront Roman imperial power and religious collaboration with it.”

As we bear witness to Jesus during Holy Week we see that every act – from riding the colt, to driving out the money changers in the Temple was a counter-cultural act, a radical confrontation with power.  In his fearless, nonviolent confrontation with the “powers-that-be” Jesus provides the answer to the seemingly unanswerable question of “why.”

In his actions Jesus points to earthly power, imperial power as a root cause of suffering.  He highlights how this power co-opts and destroys people’s lives.  He says, this is not God’s way.  Suffering is not the punitive hand of God.

When we look into the face of Jesus, riding into Jerusalem, standing before Pilate, dying on a cross – we see the love of God in Jesus’ willingness to take on these powers and to see through the consequences.  He does this to show us all that we are not alone in our suffering; that God’s love has the last word.   This is the answer to “why,”  it is also the answer to silence, to fear, to doing nothing in the face of greed, injustice, violence and pain.

The Pharisees tried to silence Jesus’ disciples as they shouted their “Hosannas!” – as if to say – “don’t do this, don’t come here, don’t shine the light of God’s truth this way.” And Jesus answers that even the stones cry out with the wonder and light and truth of God.  That no one and nothing, not even death can extinguish the light and love of God. 

The stones cry out, even sing out that the One who opened his heart and embraced death did so with the knowledge of Divine Love able to transform weakness to strength, brokenness to wholeness, a meaningless “why” to a joyous affirmation of the eternal “yes.”

As Gabriel Faure wrote of his Requiem,  "My Requiem has been said to express no fear of death; it has been called a lullaby of death.  But that is how I feel about death, a happy deliverance, a reaching for eternal happiness, rather than a mournful passing.”

Amen.