A Listener Who Heard
Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021
Mark 15-1-39
Dearly Beloved: I have missed you so! But not in my prayers! We are experiencing a relentless Lent, not of forty days but more than forty weeks and still lingering. Necessity has required us to “fast” on precious things, even hugs and the reception of the Eucharist. We dare not deny that our isolation has diminished us and wounded us. Today, when we “say” what we would really prefer to “sing” together, Hosanna, let’s slow down and remember what the word means: “Save us, make us whole, we beseech you, O God.”
The Gospel of Mark “fasts” on wordy speech. The author’s brevity invites our focused attention not on the writer, but on Jesus. One critic, with frustration, writes: “Mark’s Gospel says nothing about its own authorship yet much about the significance of Jesus.”
Tom Wright, with Anglican humor, admits that the Jesus of Mark’s account has to repeat plain talk to the disciples again and again because they just don’t “get it.” So Jesus tells stories, parables, to illustrate what is on his heart. Then some of the hearers take “literally” what Jesus intends figuratively, but miss the point. There is a difference between listening and hearing.
The reading of the Passion Gospel today, part of the several chapters of Mark’s overview of Holy Week, shows a remarkable change in Jesus. Today he speaks only two terse sentences: In answer to powerful Pilate who asks: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus responds: “You say so.” When Pilate presses - “Have you no answer?” - Jesus’ only answer is silence. For Mark, Jesus’ last sentence is spoken to God: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Then came a loud, wordless cry, and he died. As we all must do one day.
But did you notice that Jesus is not the last one to speak? A Centurion, a military agent, likely present to assure Pilate that troublesome Jesus was now safely among the dead, spoke just as tersely as Jesus. We know nothing about this witness. There is no evidence that he Centurion had ever seen Jesus before this day.
But what he saw in the events of Good Friday, through his police officer’s eyes, filled him with immediate revulsion that could not be silenced. It outraged him. There was no way he could reconcile the brutal execution of a non-violent, respectful, rabbi while Barabbas, a felon, walked free. As a matter of fact, he probably knew more about the pardoned criminal than he did about Jesus.
I reflected on the Centurion this week as I read The New York Times article about 900 aspiring college applicants who were willing to share the personal essays they wrote to get into the colleges of their dreams. In our pandemic world, few wrote about themselves. They wrote about the importance of their families in shaping their lives. No one could have blamed them if they had written about the stress of being isolated in their homes, cut off from friends, deprived of sports, and a much longer list of “losses.” No one wrote of an “overdose” of family relationships.
One of them, a young African American woman wrote about her Father, a policeman. Her love for him and her concern for his safety were palpable. She also spoke of the contradiction in her soul as she honored him and his work, but deplored police brutality and the death of George Floyd and others. A woman reader responded to the essays: “I don’t shed tears very often. Today was such a day... (these youth represent) the eternal hope for a better world.”
The Centurion, says Mark, did not have the benefit of all the teaching and friendship Jesus offered the disciples, but he “got it.” Instead of waiting to whisper his protest to his wife after dinner, but while still in his uniform, he spoke. In six words at the foot of the cross he blurted out a soliloquy, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” So, pandemic or no pandemic: What are we waiting for?”
Jesus, Lamb of God, have mercy on us. Amen