Sermon — April 2, 2023 — Palm Sunday
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two,
from top to bottom.” (Matthew 27:50-51)
There’s no symbolic barrier or divide in our world that’s more pointless than the curtain you find on some airplanes that exists only to separate first class from coach. It’s not a locked door that can prevent passengers from going to one side or the other. It doesn’t humidify the air on the first-class side while your skin dries out in coach. The same enticing odor of mingled airplane foods wafts throughout the whole cabin. It’s not even substantial enough to block the sound of a baby crying a few rows back in coach. There are real differences in comfort and treatment between the two sections of seating on the plane, and that’s fine—people paid for those perks—but the curtain itself doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way. It simply hangs there as a symbol of the distinction, as a border crossing between that part of the plane, where people are packed like sardines into a tin can hurtling through the sky at several hundred miles an hour, and this part of the plane, where we recline in relative luxury.
There’s something deep in the human psyche that loves a good symbolic barrier. You can see it as far back as our history goes. When God gave instructions to Moses on how to build the Tabernacle, the shrine that the Israelites carried with them through the wilderness, God carefully warned him to hang a curtain before the Holy of Holies, so that the inner sanctum, the most holy place in the world, would be separated from the rest. (Exod. 26:31, Lev. 16:2, et al.) And when the Temple was built, the same process was applied: at the center of the Temple building, in the inmost sanctuary, an elaborately-woven curtain, sixty feet high and 30 feet wide, divided the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, and only the High Priest himself ever crossed through that curtain, and only once a year, on Yom Kippur. The curtain stood there, every other day and for every other person, separating an imperfect and unholy world from the perfect holiness of God.
You see the same kind of thing when the crowds welcome Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. You’ll notice we’ve adapted this one slightly. We waved palm branches like they did, in celebration and joy, but you’ll notice nobody asked you to take your coat off and put it on the sidewalk. But that’s what they did. They removed their cloaks, and laid them on the ground, so that the dust and dirt of the road wouldn’t touch the royal feet; not only Jesus’ feet, but even the hooves of the donkey he rode on, were too holy and good to come into contact with the ground. They let their own coats be trampled into the dust just so they could enact a barrier between the Son of David and the dirt, between the Holy One of God and the messy realities of life—a mobile curtain between the Holy of Holies and the world.
But when Jesus dies, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two.
Now, there are several ways to understand this event. Some point to it as a foreshadowing of the destruction of the Temple, which had probably already come to pass by the time Matthew wrote these words. Others say that they reflect the fact that Jesus himself is the Temple, the place on earth in which God fully dwells, and that the ripping of the curtain parallels the tearing apart of his own body. But to me, the fact that it’s the curtain tearing and not a stone falling or some decorations crumbling is the key. When Jesus dies, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world is torn in half; the dividing barrier between creation and the glory and the holiness of God is removed. When Jesus dies, the last thing that separates us human beings from God goes away. God’s very immortality seems to have come to an end; yet we know that Easter Day is coming, and that what comes to an end this week is not God’s immortality, but our mortality.
This is some heady, theological stuff. So let me put it to you in a different way.
The story of Palm Sunday, from the Procession to the Passion, is a story in which God plays the role of an airline CEO—better yet, for anyone who’s going to be pedantic with me, he’s the owner, the sole proprietor of the airline. And God, who’s accustomed to flying on private jets, comes down among the common folk, and flies commercial—but first class, of course. He’s treated like a king. He gets to board when he wants. They come to him first with a warm blanket and complimentary drinks. The flight attendants lay down their jackets in the aisle so his shoes don’t pick up anything nasty off the carpet.
And halfway through the flight, he takes a walk down the aisle. He stands outside the bathroom in coach, waiting on line. He offers to trade seats with someone trapped between a man-spreader on one side and a nap-leaner on the other. And some of the passengers realize that hey, this is the guy who’s responsible for all this! This man is the reason we’re eating this nasty food, and sitting in these cramped seats. Let’s throw him off the plane! And as they shuffle him toward the front, he tears the curtain down. And they think that they’ve gotten rid of him once and for all, but he reappears. And he makes an incredible announcement. He doesn’t just offer a first-class seat on the next flight to anyone who believes in him. He actually starts inviting people up into the empty seats up front, people who hadn’t paid for first-class tickets at all. “There’s plenty of room up here: Enjoy.”
The curtain has already been torn down. We can already walk into first class. Jesus promised us eternal life, that we would see God face to face, and this was not a promise for the future, for heaven, for life after death. It’s a promise that’s being fulfilled even now.
“God’s desire,” writes Brother David Vryhof of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery over in Cambridge, “God’s desire is to bring us into larger life, to join us to that eternal life that the Father shares with the Spirit and the Son – not only in heaven, but now and here, in our daily lived experience… This larger life is available to us all. God has not hidden it or made it hard. The secret lies in self-surrender, in handing ourselves over to God and in trusting God completely to do in us and through us what we cannot do for ourselves.”[1]
We all seek the peace, and the contentment, and the joy of eternal life. But try as we might, we can’t seem to achieve them for ourselves. We comfort ourselves, maybe, with the hope that we’ll find them in heaven. But the curtain has been torn in two, and the kingdom of heaven is already among us. God is already here, working in us. And the God who knows the depth of human pain, the God who knows the power of death itself, is inviting us into eternal life.
“Hosanna!” we cry on Palm Sunday, every year. In Aramaic, if you don’t know this, that’s “Save us, please!” And that’s what Jesus does. He tears down the curtain that divides us from God, and God’s holiness spills out into the world and draws us back in love towards God’s very in self.
So “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mathew 21:9)
[1] https://www.ssje.org/2011/05/29/the-secret-to-self-surrender-br-david-vryhof/#more-2721