With Palm Sunday comes the Week that Christians cherish as no other. We name

it as Holy. With Palm Sunday comes the high solemn feast of God’s dark glory and

grandeur. With Palm Sunday comes the most awesome and terrifying time in the Church

year.

With Palm Sunday, we Christians take up again our peculiar waiting. We are

accustomed to waiting; indeed, Advent creates in us an expectation—pregnant with life

and possibility. During Advent, we wait in transparent joy even as we grieve over our

scarred and battered world, our sinful human condition, the bright glory of the Advent of

our God enfolds us and our world in grace so that we might live in hope.

But the waiting that begins with Palm Sunday is not the waiting of Advent. It is a

peculiar fearful kind of waiting and anxiety: In his passion, in allowing himself to be

handled and seized, beaten and mocked and spit upon, Jesus discloses for us a distinctive

quality of God which disturbs us: Jesus discloses the vulnerability of God, the willingness

of God to suffer with us and for us. And even though we know the end of his story, the

idea, the image of a suffering God disturbs and unsettles us.

We experience little or no difficulty with the child Jesus—after all, we were

children and many of us are parents or godparents or guardians to children. We learn

slowly not to be dismayed by crying, we accept the 2:00 am feeding, we have memorized

the quickest route to playing fields. Our children are miracles full of so much wonder and

possibility. But images of the passion of Jesus disturb us.

Prior to the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic artistic representation of the

passion of Jesus was often so graphic as to be gruesome and repulsive, but since the

Council, we have beautified and sanitized the cross. For some time now, I have thought

the old depictions preferable. For more than two hundred years Christians were mocked

and jeered by their colleagues, friends, and relatives because these men and women

worshipped a God who had been crucified. And in their world (what we call the ancient

world), crucifixion was the most scandalous and ignominious way to die. How, their

colleagues, friends, and relatives wondered, could such sane and reasonable people

worship a God who allowed himself to be crucified? This is the image of Jesus which

unsettles us and disturbs us: a suffering God: a God who in free initiative gives the

divine self over to suffering; Jesus who in free initiative gives himself over to be handled

and beaten, spit upon and tortured, crucified. This image unsettles us because it brings us

to anguish: If our God so suffers, is so exposed to the brutality and power of the world,

what shall become of us? It is a daring and daunting theological prospect—for God and

for us. For as we believe that our God suffers, we who confess, who worship, who love

are called to a share in the suffering of Jesus, a share in the suffering of the peoples of our

world. Moreover, we who confess, who worship, who love are charged to bring about

with him and with them that trajectory of expectation released at the Advent of our God,

signified in the Resurrection, and to be realized in the eschatological banquet.

With Palm Sunday comes the high solemn feast of God’s dark glory and

grandeur. Now begins the most awesome and terrifying time in the Church year. Now

begins our vigil; we wait, we stand beside and with our God who loves us and suffers

with us, beside us, for us. But we can stand with our God only insofar as we stand beside

and wait in active and compassionate solidarity with children, women, and men who

suffer concretely, unbeautifully, and actually in our world which is God’s world—the

poor, oppressed, and excluded; abused children, battered women, and homeless men;

those who believe, those who believe differently, and those who are afraid to believe. We

stand and wait in love for Love to cast upon us the rays of dark, divine glory.