No Turning Back

NO TURNING BACK Palm Sunday (March 20, 2005)

“I did not turn backward.” Isaiah 50:5

From the earliest days of the Church the one book of the Old Testament which has meant the most for interpreting what Jesus did in his final week has been Isaiah, and the portions of Isaiah known as the “suffering servant” passages. So much of what Jesus did and what he went through are seen in the figure of the suffering servant. “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, and with his stripes we are healed….all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

And as the week begins we hear the words so clearly “The Lord God opened my ears and I did not disobey or turn back in defiance.” This fits Palm Sunday precisely. Jesus, just like the suffering servant “set his face like flint”, toward Jerusalem , where he surely knew what awaited him, and that the crowds shouting the songs of triumph would turn on him so quickly in a few days. But there was for him no turning back.

Surely one of the great lessons of Palm Sunday is the inner courage of Jesus Christ as he faced what lay ahead of him. His disciples had urged him not to go up to Jerusalem , but he went anyway. He went on ahead because he knew this was God's way of righting wrong, God's way for it was expedient that one man should die for the people, and God's way of bringing humankind back to himself – the only way – through the sending of his only son to die for humans, and to show his incredible love for us: greater love has no man than this that he should give up his life for his friends, Jesus himself had said. And unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it cannot bear fruit.

It was because of the goal that there could be no turning back.

It is within us to admire truly someone who faces adversity and presses on nonetheless. Perhaps some of those in the crowd that first Palm Sunday were waving their palms precisely because they knew this trip was no walk in the park for Jesus, and they wanted to show him they were with him, if only for the moment. Perhaps they wanted to say, “I know I don't have that courage myself, but I want to show my respect for someone who definitely does.”

What brings someone to do that – to go onward in the face of adversity and not turn back – is certainly some kind of combination of inner resources plus the clarity of the goal: the parent who struggles on against mounting bills and pressures because he or she has a goal for the children. The teacher who gives of himself or herself day after day not for the paycheck but because of an inner belief in the value of education. The politician who refuses to go along with the crowd and stands up for an unpopular cause, perhaps casting the single nay vote. All do it because for them there is that mysterious combination of inner strength and clarity of purpose that spells out no turning back.

This week we had the sorry spectacle in Washington of famous major league baseball players unable even to say what any child could have told them, that taking steroids is cheating. How have the mighty fallen, I thought, a parade of the hall of shame. “Say it isn't so, Mark, say it isn't so!” But they cannot say it isn't so, and the reason is obvious. The public, however, can draw its own conclusion. They are thinking more of themselves and their own now tarnished records than the integrity of the game itself, the game which made them what they are. But then what else is new in America these days? It's always thinking of number One.

Then I thought of a baseball player who was a true hero, who set a record of the heart that will stand long after the current lot of fake heroes has been forgotten. Jackie Robinson was told by Branch Rickey just what lay ahead of him if he agreed to play for Brooklyn . He knew what racism was in the America of the 1940s and how virulent it was. He knew that he would be the object of jeers and epithets, of race baiting and threats on himself and his family, and all the rest. He literally ran a gauntlet of hate.

But he agreed to take it all in silence, his eyes straight ahead, and his eyes on the prize, because he had a clear goal. A biographer of Robinson said that until that time “No black American man had ever shone so brightly for so long as the epitome not only of stoic endurance but also of intelligence, bravery, physical power and grit.” Robinson faced adversity and for him, just as for Jesus, there was no turning back.

Jesus could have taken the advice of Peter and the other disciples and avoided Jerusalem and avoided the pain, but he did not. But to have done that would have denied his own understanding of the depth of the Father's love, of the absolute need to bring about a wiping away through his sacrifice of the great gulf separating humanity from God. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” wrote St. Paul, and the only way to do that was to empty himself of his divine prerogatives, come among us as one of us, taking the form of a servant, humbling himself, and being obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

That is how the great hymn in the second chapter of Philippians describes Jesus, and it is always read on Palm Sunday at the beginning of the week of our Lord's Passion so that we know exactly why Jesus could not turn back. It was for us and for our salvation, and as a result God has highly exalted him and given him a name above every name.

His pain was great – and even if you haven't seen Mel Gibson's film on the Passion of the Christ you have heard of it – but the pain is not really the point. The pain is the adversity through which Christ walks his lonesome valley. But the pain is not the main focus in the gospel accounts; in fact, the gospel accounts are much more reserved: “they crucified him,” is how Luke puts it, almost laconically. None of the gospel writers will allow the actual adversity to overcome the dominant reality, in this drama the God of love is reaching out to us, calling us home. What is important is the benefits Christ wins for us through his sacrifice.

One of the great New Testament words is endurance. In Greek it is hupomone , which William Barclay calls one of the noblest of New Testament words. Jesus himself predicted that he would have to “endure much suffering”. He spoke of seed falling on rocky ground and having no roots endures but for a while. “Suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope,” writes St. Paul to the Romans. St. Paul prayed the Colossians would be “prepared to endure everything with patience.” The writer of James says “the testing of your faith produces endurance.” In every case it is this noble word hupomone .

If there is one Sunday in the Christian year when this word should be in our minds it is the Sunday we now call Passion Sunday in which Our Lord rode in triumph into Jerusalem on the back of donkey and received the adulation of the crowd but knowing all along what lay ahead of him. And he did not turn back. As Isaiah said, the Lord God would be his helper.

We are told that in the early days of Christianity there were some believers who went out of their way to seek adversity so they could the more fully be identified with Christ. Some of them got carried away and went to ridiculous extremes, such as sitting on pillars for years. This impulse within our Christian Faith has fortunately passed. God surely does not call on us to seek out hardship.

But when it comes, when adversity strikes, or when strength seems to give out, or when the dark clouds of turmoil or trouble or tragedy loom large in our lives, we have a Savior who is able fully to sympathize with us in our distress, as the book of Hebrews affirms, and who himself faced adversity squarely, his eyes fixed like flint, because he had a larger goal. He knew he had to walk that lonesome valley, he had to walk it by himself, that no one else could walk it for him, and so he rode on in majesty.

For him there was no turning back.

Special acknowledgement to:

Robinson quote from Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography , Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. New York Times review, 10/17/1997