This weekend the winners from March Madness will cut down the nets. This month some golfer will don the Green Jacket. In June someone (not the Black Hawks) will hoist the Stanley Cup. In the fall one ball team (could it be the Sox?) will put on their World Series Rings. At the Olympics they will change USA, USA. Next year a team other than the Bears, (no surprise but hate to be the bearer of bad news,) will be awarded the Lombardi Trophy. And, as we began our service today, in Jerusalem they marked the triumphal entry of Jesus with the waving of palms. Many different ways to designate a victory. What there aren’t a lot of are symbols of defeat, of losing, of downfall. Except in the last case – in Jerusalem the waving palms were put aside and they erected a cross to declare that the way of mercy, of compassion, of forgiveness that Jesus preached had lost. Power, force, authority, violence, cruelty asserted control. They nailed love to the cross. At the defeat of goodness all that we can do is weep.
For three years Jesus had gone about doing good. He brought healing to those who were hurting. He preached of God who loves us without counting the cost. He welcomed the Samaritan, he embraced the leper, he calmed the storm and walked on water, he enabled the lame to walk, the blind to see and the deaf to hear, and raised the dead to life. He multiplied loaves and fish and changed water into wine, he forgave sinners and ate with them, he gathered a community of mutual support around him, And the people loved him. “Hosanna to the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” they shouted. They loved him until they didn’t. Until they treated Jesus as a loser. Until they betrayed, denied and abandoned him. All that work, all that effort, all that love seemed for naught as he climbed Calvary’s hill. Jesus had lost.
Or had he? We don’t have in the front of this Church, or for that matter any other church around the world, a wreath of palm leaves, a trophy, or any other such symbol. It is not the signs of his triumphal entry that we place before us but the cross, the seeming mark of disgrace. We must reverse our understanding of what it means to triumph, to win in order to understand how the cross has been transformed into the sign of victory. We ordinarily think we’re winning when we get what we want, when we achieve the prize, when our desires are fulfilled. But St. Paul says that Jesus operated differently. He did not grasp after. Instead of getting, he was about giving. Instead of filling up, he gave it all away. He emptied himself, the Apostle says, emptied himself of his own plans, his own desires, his own wishes to surrender himself completely into the will of the one he know as he Loving Father. Not my will but yours be done, he had prayed. And because of that emptying, because of that surrender, the world was irrevocably changed, humanity was given a path to a new and richer life, we can be sure that in God all manner of things will be well. The cross is placed before us as the ultimate sign that God always wins.
