Palm Sunday 2022, 8:00am Holy Communion

Angela Tilby

Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and being obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. (Philippians 2.7b-8)

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1.1-14)

This week in the post I received a copy of a 500 page commentary on written by an old friend on the Gospel of John. David Ford, former Regius Professor of Theology at Cambridge University, a layman, an Irishman, one of the leading theologians of the Anglican communion, has been writing his commentary on John for almost as long as I have known him. It was always intended to be his retirement project and from the 1990s he took every opportunity to study, lecture or converse on the theme of John’s Gospel. David is a big, loud, extraverted, person, full of laughter and sometimes anger at injustice or wrongdoing. I haven’t got far with it yet, but I did just look at the beginning, last week, the beginning of the Gospel and the beginning of his commentary. The first chapter which starts: ‘In the beginning was the Word…’ David Ford calls this ‘John’s manifesto..what it means for the Word to become flesh’.

We usually hear John’s manifesto at Christmas. Yet they are words for all times and seasons, the very heart of the Christian message. And here on Palm Sunday they can be compared to Paul’s words in Phillippians of how Christ humbling himself and becoming obedient unto death. Both texts tell us of the extraordinary grace, truth, mercy and love of God in Christ in his birth and living and dying.

God with us, the Incarnation. If I were to go to the stake on any item of Christian belief for me it would be what is expressed in these two texts. Christ the Son of God taking on the form of a servant, and the Word being made flesh and dwelling among us.

The word for flesh is sarx in Greek, a rather harsh sounding word. Flesh in English has a dense sound, with overtones of a butcher’s shop, a hospital and a brothel where fleshly pleasures are bought for money. Yet neither flesh nor sarx are used in the Bible with any particular moral connotations. The word refers simply to our condition in this world. Flesh is what it is to be mortal, to have the form of a slave, to be the kind of body and soul which can be injured and incapacitated, to be the kind of being that will die. Being flesh is hard and exposing. Being flesh is both the shame and the pride of being human. And there is no other way we can be.

In difficult times we can’t help but be aware of this. Sickness, war, the dreadful images of the slaughtered in Ukraine, the random and inexplicable accidents of life, constantly hammer home to us that we are mortal.

And nothing can simply change this, not our prayers, nor the sincerity of our motives or the rightness of our convictions. But then there is this extraordinary declaration: the thunder clap of John’s Gospel: ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’. At Christmas the paradox of this is homely and familiar and poetic. It is lovely and comforting to think of the great Word of God as a human baby, to rejoice that the Immortal One God becomes small, heaven lives here on earth, Love comes down at Christmas. But then Jesus being found in human form becomes grown-up flesh and we see how tender he is to those whose flesh is a burden, who are humbles and enslaved by illness or disability. And now we approach Holy Week and encounter Jesus riding on the donkey towards his death. ‘Ride on, ride on in majesty’….the 11.00 congregation will sing today, and I wonder if you have ever noticed that it’s sung to the same tune,

Winchester New as the Advent hymn ‘On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s cry…’ Advent and Holy Week come together.

Here is the Word made flesh still coming into the world, coming into the holy city that is at one and the same time the most pious and the most violent place on earth. There is prayer and sacrifice and the knowledge of God. There is conflict and confrontation and cruelty and defeat.

In Holy Week the light shines in darkness to show us, through what happens to Jesus, in Holy Week what we do to each other all the time. First we adore him as though he were a celebrity, then we challenge him, as though he were a threat, then we run away from him, as though he were a danger, then we judge him as though he were a criminal, then we kill him, because we cannot stand him seeing our mortal weakness. Here is our complicity in all that is wrong with ourselves and our world. In all this the light is still shining in the darkness and the darkness is still not quite managing to overcome it. Holy Week and Easter are where we recognise the worst aspects of our human nature and watch helplessly while the best of our nature is destroyed. To be flesh, to be found in human form is to have death overshadowing our every moment; not only through violence or accident, but through our genes, through our temperament and make-up though our desires and addictions, through our loves and hates.

But the light shines on. And when the light shining in darkness has shown us the worst of ourselves; when we have destroyed the best in ourselves; when we have hidden both from judgment and from hope; we find we are not abandoned as we always imagined we would be. Finally the darkness gives itself up, the Word made flesh is restored to us at Easter, but now as the first begotten, the first born, of the dead. Our flesh is still doomed to die but we are now part of a living Body animated by God’s Spirit. Our fear is contained, our loneliness overcome, and Life has the last word. That I think, is the heart of the Christian Gospel: the word made flesh, dwelling among us, Christ the Son of God taking on the form of a servant. This is the

Gospel of love which is not a Gospel of condemnation but mercy, grace and truth. And let mercy, grace and truth lead us through today and this week, until our joyful celebration next Sunday.

Angela Tilby