Palm Sunday

First, I’d like to invite you to use your imagination for a few minutes: If it helps you to close your eyes, go ahead and do so. It’s Friday, the day before the Sabbath. It’s late afternoon, maybe early evening. It’s been a long and exhausting day. Jesus is dead. He’s been arrested, interrogated, tortured, and murdered by the state.

All of his usual followers? They seem to have disappeared into the woodwork. They’ve faded into obscurity, at least for the moment, like the dust that permeates the streets of Jerusalem.

And so, two others take it upon themselves to do the respectful thing, the necessary thing, of retrieving Jesus’ body, so that it can be properly cared for and laid to rest before the Sabbath. Two men are there to undertake what would ordinarily be done by a whole contingent of close friends and family. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. The first is a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one. The other, a Pharisee, visited Jesus, but only at night for obvious reasons. Together they meet to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. Joseph has secured the body of Jesus. Nicodemus has brought the necessary things to prepare the body for burial. Cloths for wrapping the body. A mixture of aloes and myrrh. Spices. They’re going about their work methodically, but hurriedly. There is no talk of resurrection. They’re simply in the dark, doing what love requires in the midst of confusion and doubt. This is what it looks like to fast from certainty.

The power of John’s symbolism in this story is deep and rich. Nicodemus, the man who once sought Jesus under cover of darkness is now acting openly. But it’s still very much an in-between, liminal moment. He’s tending to a dead body with no certainty of what comes next. He is the embodiment of someone dwelling in what the 16th century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, called “the dark night of the soul.” Joseph of Arimathea is a secret disciple. He has been hiding his faith, living in the border country between belief and fear. This is the moment he steps across the threshold, not because he has answers, but precisely because he doesn't. The two of them do what they do out of custom and necessity, not revelation, "because the tomb was nearby."

There is something profoundly human and honest about that detail. They do what is in front of them in the darkness, without a roadmap. And of course, all this is done on the eve of Holy Saturday. It is the ultimate threshold space. It’s the border land between death and resurrection, between the world as it was and the world as it will be. Nobody in that moment knows what Sunday holds.

For that matter, nobody even really knows what Palm Sunday holds. Jesus knows that, with his entry into Jerusalem, he is very consciously setting himself up for a radical conflict with the powers that be. But how will that work out? What shape will it take. Do the people who welcome him with palms have any idea what’s really going on? Are they just cheering mindlessly? Or is there cheer laden with bitterness towards their roman occupiers? Or is it a cheering that masks a deeper anxiety about what the future might hold, now that Jesus, the mighty prophet and miracle worker has made his way into the camp of the Jewish authorities?

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus certainly have no idea. They have yet to emerge from their own shadowy world.

And the disciples? Who knows what the disciples are thinking. Those who belong to the zealots are probably relishing the possibility of conflict. We know that one of them is already slowly solidifying his plans to betray Jesus, perhaps in the hopes of sparking a revolution. And I’m sure there are others who are just as caught up in the carnival atmosphere as the rest of the crowds, despite any misgivings they might have.

When Joseph and Nicodemus re-appear, it’s significant that they choose the evening to do so; a world of shadowy light that beckons us into the darkness of night. Most of us do everything we can to avoid it.

In the book titled Amiel's Journal, Henri-Frederic Amiel writes: “Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an unknown God.”

It’s a heart-felt invitation to let mystery have a place within us. When we intentionally embark upon a spiritual path, it can be tempting to just plow up everything with our self-examination and inquiry, including the fertile soil of our being. But as Amiel states so poignantly, we’re called to leave some darkness for the seed, some shadow for the bird, and an altar for the God we can only know dimly.

Amiel goes on to write: "If you are conscious of something new – [a] thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being – do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it,[or] to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow ... all conception should be enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence and night."

Darkness is the place of conception. Darkness is the place of new birth. Mystery calls us into the silence. Mystery calls us into the night. Mystery calls us to sit with what is in the midst of becoming, rather than an examination of things the way they are.

There’s a tradition in Christianity called the “via negative” or apophatic way. It means the way of unknowing. It demands that we talk about God only in terms of negatives or what God is not, with the understanding that God is so vast and infinitely complex that any attempt to describe God, only serves to limit God, in the end. It helps to cleanse us of our idols.

In his book Soul Making, Episcopal priest Alan Jones writes, "We can only say that God is both unknowable and inexhaustible." Entering the unknown to meet the inexhaustible requires humility on our part. It means letting go of our images of who God is and how God works in the world. Ultimately, what the desert journey demands is that we let go of even this false idol and open ourselves to the God who is far more expansive than we can behold or imagine.

This mystical experience which John of the Cross referred to as the "dark night of the soul," is what happens when our old convictions and conformities dissolve into nothingness and we are called to stand naked before our fear of the unknown. The challenge is to allow the process to move through us. It’s a process which is admittedly difficult to wrap your head around. Because it means that we can never force our way back to the light. It is only in this place of absolute surrender that the new possibility can emerge.

Letting go of our images of God can be terrifying. It often comes as a result of having experienced suffering in our lives, when our previous understanding is no longer adequate to give meaning to what has happened to us.

In my 30-plus years of being a pastor, I have seen the exact opposite more often. My mind still goes back to our first parish. A young couple was involved in a snowmobile accident. The young man experienced serious head trauma and cognitive impairment. The young woman died. The young woman’s mother, Blanche, could not let go of the image of a god who has everything under control. She talked about God having a reason or purpose in her daughter’s death. As a result, she ends up inadvertently attributing her daughter’s death to God’s will. How do you draw comfort from a God who desires your child’s death? She was unwilling and, at least at that point, unable to let go of that image of God and to explore the unknown. She was not willing to experience “the dark night of the soul.”

Nicodemus, on the other hand, is deeply engaged in his experience of the dark night of the soul. Because where do we find him? We find Nicodemus in the middle of this place where he recognizes that things can no longer be the way they once were, yet he has no real conception of what lies ahead. And so, he moves forward, feeling his way along in the darkness. He first came to Jesus with questions and categories. Now he comes in silence, in darkness, with spices. He has let go of demanding answers. In doing so, he has opened himself up to possibilities that he may well have never even dreamed of.

Sheri Hostetler’s poem "Instructions" begins with the words: "Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God." Her word choice is certainly provocative. And I’d be curious to know your reaction to them. Do her words provide you with a sense of relief? Do they ratchet up your anxiety? Do they cause confusion because her words would seem to smack of atheism?

And yet the call of the mystical tradition is to let go, let go, let go, and let go some more, on every level of our lives, to everything we cling to, including and especially our ideas about God. Because as soon as we begin creating categories, we risk turning them into idols. Our challenge is let go of who and what we believe God to be, so that we can learn to cultivate an openness to the One who is. The one who is far beyond our ability to imagine or truly comprehend.

Often, we meet this mystery in the place of our own unfulfilled longings. These longings that seem to go unanswered are often the thing that drives us to seek and probe and to try to find an answer. We often try to domesticate God and to make spirituality about happiness or feeling good. We try and tie things up in neat packages. The spiritual journey is about none of these. It demands something from us and calls us to stand in uncomfortable places while the deserts of our lives strip away ego and power and identity. It calls us to embrace the God of wild borderlands.

Lent is in part about dwelling in the border spaces of life and recognizing those places and experiences that do not offer us easy answers, those fierce edges of life where things are not as clear-cut as I hope for them to be. There is beauty in the border spaces, those places of ambiguity and mystery. “[The] ability to live with uncertainty requires courage and the need to ask questions over finding answers. We are called to hold the space for mystery within [us].”1

This border country is one we all carry within us. There is a fault line running down the middle of our lives that connects our ordinary reality with its deeper roots. In fact, it’s this border country that gives our lives meaning, it’s a “place of intense vitality. It does not so much draw us away from the everyday world as it plunges us deeper into a reality of which the everyday world is like the surface… to live there for a while is like having the veils pulled away.”2

Threshold space opens us up to life that is vital, intense, and filled with unknowns. Borders and edges are the places of transformation, transformation that makes demands of us. Jesus's journey in the desert was a willingness to dwell in the border space of that landscape and the walk through Holy Week often fills us with more questions than answers.

This week I invite you to fast from the places in your life where you crave certainty and sure outcomes and release them to the great Mystery. Celebrate a God who is infinitely larger than your imagination and rest in the possibilities which that opens up. But for now, let’s take some time to rest in this place.

In this garden. The tomb is sealed. It is Saturday. Let’s take some time. Let’s sit with Joseph and Nicodemus in the not-yet, in the mystery of a God whose next move no one can predict. AMEN

[1] Esther de Waal, To Pause at the Threshold, Morehouse Publishing, 2004.

2 William Countryman, Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All Believers, Morehouse Publishing, 1999.