Palm Sunday, April 13, 2014 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Confession and Closure

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 109:1–7, 26–31
Matthew 21:1–11
Matthew 27:1–2, 11–26

“Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’”
Matthew 27:25 (NRSV)

Endings are more important than beginnings.

Dad

“Let the little children come to me, . . . do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

“Give, therefore, to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? . . . Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

I could go on listing the teachings of Jesus. So could you. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are full of them. According to the Gospels, people were constantly coming up to Jesus, asking him questions, and when he responded to them, they hung onto his every word. How many times in the Gospels do we find people listening for Jesus’ words, after which the Gospel writers say, “And when they heard it, they were amazed”?

So it is stunning when we come to Palm Sunday, for from this point on, as Jesus enters Jerusalem—the capital city and the seat of the temple, the center of religious authority for Jews—at a time when the city is swarming with crowds more concentrated because the religious festival of Passover is taking place, Jesus’ voice will recede into the background. By the time he is taken into custody and interrogated by the authorities, he will hardly say a word. While Jesus’ voice recedes into near silence, multiple other voices will come to the fore. And if we don’t want to get caught up in the drama, we have to sort through it and somehow live with it.

When I read this story each year, I am overwhelmed by its cacophony. False claims, malicious rumors, inciting accusations, relentless interrogation, threats of riot, soldiers mocking, and crowds shouting, at first “Hosanna!” and by the end of the week “Crucify him!”—all these voices, alongside the painful behind-the-scenes betrayal by Judas and the multiple denials of Peter, overtake the words of our Lord. Amid the chaos and competing voices, is it any wonder that Jesus chooses not to amplify his own? Wanting to turn down the volume in search of Jesus’ voice, I am reminded of the verse in John Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in which he writes, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.”

In Raymond Brown’s massive commentary on The Death of the Messiah, the four Gospels are compared to one another, not to find out exactly what happened but to find out what each of the Gospel writers intended to convey about the suffering and death of Jesus. How did they understand the significance of these events? Although the four Gospels recount a generally similar narrative, there are nevertheless significant differences in their presentations.

What I want to focus on today is Matthew’s presentation. By doing so I think we will, with Matthew’s help, be better able to sort through the messiness. Matthew helps us to identify an issue—an issue that preoccupied the generation of Jesus’ followers to whom he wrote and that continues to haunt peoples throughout the world today. How does a group—any group—undertake soul-searching? When a group consists of so many different voices, the voices of adults as well as of children, and so many different perspectives, those of bystanders, observers, as well as activists, of opponents as well as followers, how can they examine themselves to ask, What did we do? What did I fail to do? What could I have done differently?

What Matthew introduces to us is the haunting issue of taking responsibility for the blood of the innocent. In scenes particular to Matthew’s Gospel, we find multiple parties being concerned not to have blood on their hands. Pilate declares his innocence in Jesus’ death by publicly washing his hands. Earlier Judas tried to shake responsibility for his part in the plot by returning the silver paid him for betraying Jesus, and the religious authorities who paid him in the first place don’t want to keep the blood money, so they purchase a field with it. While all the parties involved are guilty, Matthew makes a point of showing that responsibility most clearly falls on the people—the crowd who, in the Gospel of Matthew, voluntarily shouts, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, p. 28).

By the time Matthew was writing, a generation after Christ’s crucifixion, Jerusalem itself had already fallen and the temple had already been destroyed. Raymond Brown finds evidence in non-biblical texts from those days that the people to whom Matthew was likely writing were themselves going through a period of self-examination. At the hands of Roman authorities, they had suffered badly, and in their suffering they turned to examine themselves. After all, for a people imbued with an understanding that their history was guided by a just God, it would have been insufficient for them to explain all their suffering in terms of only tactical and political mistakes. They had to go further and deeper to ask what part they themselves played.

It was in this climate of self-examination that Matthew wrote his Gospel. How sobering it must have been for him and his audience to be able to recognize themselves in the crowd of people who, at the beginning of the week, yelled out “Hosanna to the Son of David” and then, by the end of the week, cried out, “Let him be crucified!” We can understand this, because even though we too weren’t there, we are well aware of how easy it is to go along with a crowd and how hard it would be to stop a crowd. I’d like to think that no one, if honest, could escape pointing a finger at himself.

So what does it mean when the crowd voluntarily shouts out: “His blood be on us and on our children!” Is this an admission of responsibility or a confession? An admission, we know, is no confession. There is a moral distance between the two. In his book Troubling Confessions, Peter Brooks, a Yale professor whose interdisciplinary work is known for cutting across law, literature, and psychoanalysis, looks at how ingrained the imperative to confess is in our culture. It permeates the way we raise our children, our religious imagination, psychotherapy, and even law. “Confession of wrongdoing,” he writes, “is considered fundamental to morality,” because only when we recognize ourselves as wrongdoers can we start the work of rehabilitation (Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions, p. 2). Confession is what allows judges to feel secure in their pardon or their punishment; it is what enables the hurt party to forgive, and it is what allows the wrongdoer to reenter the community.

In the news lately there have been remarkable stories about a generation of Rwandans who have been struggling to cover the moral distance between admission and confession. Two decades after nearly a million people were killed in the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu perpetrators are now being released from prison. Having served their time, they must find a way to reenter their villages and live among the survivors, but they cannot unless the whole nation engages in an effort toward reconciliation. At the heart of this moral work is the hard and formal work of confessing, of requesting forgiveness, and of granting forgiveness. Last week in the New York Times Magazine (6 April 2014), photographs taken by Pieter Hugo portrayed Hutu perpetrators paired with the Tutsi survivors of their crimes. All who agreed to be photographed and interviewed had taken part in a pardoning process. In one case, a perpetrator said, “I asked him for forgiveness because his brother was killed in my presence. He asked me why I pleaded guilty, and I replied that I did it as someone who witnessed this crime but who was unable to save anybody” (New York Times Magazine, 6 April 2014, p. 38).

The survivor explained, “Sometimes justice does not give someone a satisfactory answer. . . . But when it comes to forgiveness willingly granted, one is satisfied once and for all. When someone is full of anger, he can lose his mind. But when I granted forgiveness, I felt my mind at rest (p. 38).

In an interview of another perpetrator, the perpetrator said, “I burned her house. I attacked her in order to kill her and her children, but God protected them, and they escaped. When I was released from jail, if I saw her, I would run and hide. Then . . . [with training] I decided to ask her for forgiveness. To have good relationships with the person to whom you did evil deeds—we thank God (p. 39).

The survivor, when interviewed, explained, “I used to hate him. When he came to my house and knelt down before me and asked for forgiveness, I was moved by his sincerity. Now, if I cry for help, he comes to rescue me. When I face any issue, I call him (p. 39).

Though the relationships between perpetrators and survivors vary in degree of closeness, the process of confessing and being forgiven has in so many cases brought about the closure needed for new beginnings. Without confession, there can be no closure, and without closure we are handicapped from beginning anew. From time to time my father would say to me that endings are more important than beginnings. I think he knew that the care we take in creating closure, especially when it comes to our relationships, is critical for next, new beginnings.

The prospect of a new beginning must have been unimaginable for Rwandans twenty years ago. All order had disappeared. If anybody had spoken out, the world couldn’t have heard it, because the chaos would have drowned it out. Times like this make you wish that life could imitate art.

In his New World Symphony Antonin Dvořák beautifully demonstrates what, in art, is possible. Composed in 1893 while he was living and working in the United States, the piece is said to have incorporated Dvořák’s reflections on and admiration of the American setting. In music, all sounds can, in some way, contribute to the whole. Even sounds that may at first be discordant and oppositional can somehow be incorporated into the composition. This is what we find in the New World Symphony. In the first movement a medley of sounds, not yet thematically defined, sets the stage. We hear different instruments with different timbres chime in here and there, some high and airy, some low and intense. Eventually some voices get louder and last longer, but after a bit, they recede. It is into this environment of sound that, at the start of the second movement, the main melody is introduced. It is clear to the ear that what we hear must be the hero, the main melodic theme. From that point on we don’t want to lose it; we want to follow the sound throughout. But, we notice that from time to time it too subsides, taking turns with other voices. And sometimes when different musical personalities get caught up in each other, almost to the point of clashing, the voice we have been wanting to hear comes back in and we know whom to follow once again.

But in the third movement, that melody does not resurface. Instead there is a furious frenzy of strings and a host of other sounds so intense and active that the only thing I notice is the absence of the melody I have come to love and for which my ear has been straining to hear. It is silent for so long that I wonder what has become of it. And it never does return. But in the final movement something new emerges. Out of the cacophony of the third movement, a new theme emerges. It is as though it is a culmination of all the sounds we have been hearing. Though it is definitely not a replica of the original melody, the new theme has powerful resonances with it.

Today on Palm Sunday, we stand at the threshold between the second and third movements, between the time when we have been able to hear Jesus’ words and have followed him because of them, and the time when his voice recedes into near silence. In the week to come, Jesus’ words are about to be overtaken by the cacophony of competing claims, false charges, cowardly denials, relentless interrogations, and the fickle cries of the crowds. And given the absolute moral chaos, no matter how you look at it, it’s hard to imagine the possibility of a new beginning. And yet that is what we know will happen. Easter will follow Good Friday. The resurrection will follow the crucifixion. But if Easter is really going to be about new beginnings, not replicas of the past, not more of the same, you and I—all of us—must engage in the hard work of self-examination, of confession and closure. Amen.