We’ve heard from the prophecy of Zechariah[1], 500 years earlier, that the triumphant and victorious King would one day enter the royal city humbly, not bringing war but coming as Prince of Peace. And Jesus comes fulfilling this prophecy and is acclaimed by the crowd. People wave palm branches and strew clothes beneath his feet in joyful exuberance.
This entry into Jerusalem is the culmination of a journey, mostly by foot, that takes up the second half of Luke’s gospel[1]. In the ninth Chapter of the gospel we’re told that Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem. If he’d been wanting to save his life he would have gone in the opposite direction. Instead he presses on even though he’s travelling towards danger. And our second reading today is a parable Jesus gives just after his entry into the city when he’s arrived into the Temple and has overturned the tables of the traders. So, from the Temple, the centre of religious life, Jesus tells this parable against the religious leaders. In ancient scripture[2] the people of Israel are described as God’s vineyard. So the religious leaders would have understood that Jesus was comparing them to tenant farmers left in charge of the vineyard who then refuse to pay the owner, that is, pay to God, his due share of the harvest. It is, after all, not their farm. The owner sends servants as emissaries and the tenant farmers reject them They continue to respond each time with increasing violence until the owner sends his Son, (surely they will listen to the Son). But they throw the Son out of the vineyard and kill him. It’s a chilling tale. Jesus knows how this journey is likely to end. When people deny God their creator, then other sorts of connections, with other people and with the land and its harvest are also denied and the tenants grasp the harvest as their own. What should be joy in a shared harvest becomes instead selfishness, violence and death.
Jesus knows what he faces, but presses on, through the events of Holy Week, not to save himself, but to save us, to bring forgiveness and new life for us all.
So from today, in this Holy Week you are invited to stay close with Jesus, to learn from him and draw closer to God and to other people and to yourself. In the coming Holy Week, events will unfold through triumph and disaster, loyalty and betrayal, truth and falsehood, to condemnation and to death, through silence and waiting to the dawn of a new day, new life and hope.
We are invited into this journey each year within the journey of our whole lives, the Holy Week journey is the same each year but we experience it differently, because each year we are different in some way. And this is always a journey that can change your life.
My first holy week, when I was a student, living in Leeds, had such a profound impact. I’d started attending a local church and on Palm Sunday became caught up in it all. And that week, perplexed my housemates by getting on my bike to go to church every day. I became captivated by the depth of what was being shared. On that Palm Sunday morning for the first time I’d been part of the crowd singing ‘Hosanna’, following the donkey, carrying palm leaves…..and then later, inside the church, with the same group of people, we all cried ‘Crucify him!’ and I began to comprehend that here was faith that recognised the human condition with seering honestly, that we can be both wise and yet also utterly wrong, both brave and also fearful. Here was faith brave enough to be honest about our human condition, and within this faith I could be both embraced as I am, and also changed. That first holy week made a profound change in my life and Holy Week has remained each year, through the changing seasons of life, a week to walk with Christ to the cross and wait to be taken beyond it, to new life. And it’s always profoundly challenging and ultimately joyful. Former Archbishop Rowan Williams has said ‘you have to stand there under the cross, and realise the weight of all your own denials and refusals and betrayals. And the very doing of that changes everything. It lets love through.’
‘It lets love through’. That’s what really matters, letting love through. Keeping on walking in the way of love.
And now as I retire from ministry here, I realise with thankfulness the privilege of Holy Weeks at Winchester Cathedral, where the walls are steeped in prayer, where the well of memory from which we draw is so deep. This place and its people have continued to shape and change me and I’m profoundly grateful to God to whom everything is owed. To quote a much loved prayer, ‘For all that has been, Thanks, for all that shall be, Yes’.
I want to close with an image for our life’s journey which may be helpful for you, as it is for me. With Van Gogh’s tender painting of a child’s first steps, appropriately enough, life’s journey beginning in a garden.
The journey beginning from the shelter of the mothers love and care, with the encouragement of the father, is, I find, a metaphor for our life’s journey from God’s love and towards God’s love. Towards the one whose love gave us life and who longs for us to respond and flourish in the ways of love, and whose open and loving arms wait to hold us at the end of our journey. I hope that this image can be my leaving gift for you, because it shows the source of our true identity, both the loving tender care, and the expansive joy, of God for you and in you. Walking in the way of Christ is true joy. The path will not always be easy, this gentle painting shows the way full of bumps, but don’t stray from it, for this is the way of life and love and peace.
May God bless your journey, now and always.
Amen.
