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SERMONS

Palm Sunday
April 5, 2009

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

In the Winter of 1931, Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of non-violent revolution in India, was traveling in Europe, and established contact with the Vatican. There were hopes of a meeting between Gandhi and the Pope, but they never materialized; some speculated that Gandhi’s attire, a single piece of cloth about seven yards long called a “dhoti,” was deemed inappropriate and offensive by Vatican officials.

Others speculated that the Vatican did not want to risk offending England.

Later, India’s Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, would say that the real reason is that the Vatican would not recognize saints and mahatmas outside of its own jurisdiction.

Although he was snubbed by the Papacy, Gandhi, “that little brown man,” as Winston Churchill called him, was granted a tour of the Sistine Chapel.

You know the Sistine Chapel - Michelangelo IMAX theater. Up on the ceiling there is the familiar image of God reaching, straining, to touch Adam his child; and Adam, like so many children, barely finding the interest necessary to lift a lazy finger.

On the back wall of the Sistine is another Michelangelo vision - The Last Judgement and the second coming of Christ. It is a grand and beautiful mural, extending some sixty or seventy feet behind the altar.

In the center of the mural, this glorious almost golden image of Christ, as a human being in full, muscular, strong, almost striding back into the Creation, with his right arm raised, administering judgement. With the saints and angels in splendid movement all around him.

I have not been there, but I imagine that as you are walking into sanctuary of the Sistine Chapel, this wall captures you; steals all of your attention.

But it is not the only image of Christ in the room.
If you let your eyes fall from this shining, all-powerful Christ, there, in the center of the altar, directly beneath this Michelangelo festival of color and energy and movement, is a crucifix. It looks to be about four or five feet tall. Hanging on the cross beneath this explosion of art is an emaciated Jesus, with his head bent, and turned to the side.

This figure of Jesus is gaunt, slender like a reed. His body the exact opposite, the exact theological and physical contrast, to the great Michelangelo parade of Biblical humanity surrounding the Sistine Chapel.

After walking the length of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo exploding all around, Gandhi became still before this small emaciated Jesus, crucified, hunkered down beneath the pomp and circumstance of Michelangelo.

Gandhi’s companion, Mahadev Desai, recalled that Gandhi then “walked several times around it, as if executing the Indian ritual of the circumambulation of a cult object. “It is not possible to avoid being touched to the point of tears,” Gandhi said with tears in his own eyes.

Of this day Gandhi would later say, “What would not I have given to be able to bow my head before the living image at the Vatican of Christ Crucified! It was not without a wrench that I could tear myself away from that scene of living tragedy . . . I saw there at once that nations, like individuals, could only be made new through the agony of the Cross and in no other way . . . Joy comes not out of affliction of pain on others . . . but out of pain voluntarily borne by oneself.”

It has long been my own theory that the more history we study, the more life that we live, the longer journey we take with God, we will find that every significant political and personal question of this life is ultimately a religious question. We will share this insight that Gandhi had in the Sistine Chapel.

On this day, reading of our Lord’s Passion, we hear the answer to these questions. Of course, Jesus could have taken an easier route.

It could have all been so different with a little strategic damage control, a little ducking and spinning here, a little posturing and compromising there, and the authorities would have been pacified.

So much easier to pretend, to hide, to wear a mask or costume. So much easier to run, rather than stand. So much easier to play their game, keep his options open, rather than close the exists and the fire escapes.

It could have all been so different, if say, Jesus had simply been like Pilate, take the weak and pragmatic path out of this problem; do anything to keep the peace and avoid the controversy. Please the crowds, and save his skin.

It could have been so different if Jesus would have just lied about his identity, lied to the chief priests, lied to his friends, lied to himself; the way any one of us might lie about who we really are. So much easier, so much less pain, just to smooth things over, and pretend to be someone else, rather than who he really is - the Son of God.

But Jesus comes into this world to speak the truth in love. And the truth, the answer, Jesus speaks to this world is that without his life and his death at the center of our many and varied universes, we will die, we will perish, we will be lost. Forever floating, compromised, between heaven and earth. We must have someone who will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We must have someone build the bridge and repair the breach that we cannot build for ourselves.

His death becomes our life, so that His kind of love might become our truth. When you look closely at the crucifix sitting on the altar of the Sistine Chapel, the same one that Gandhi saw, it is there today, perhaps you will notice why the great Indian mahatma stood before it with tears in his eyes, and then regarded it as some kind of a sign in his world.

The figure of our Lord that hangs there is small, slight, slender, with a kind of “dhoti” wrapped about his waist - he is a little brown man. A little brown man with the weight of the new Creation resting upon his shoulders.
My friends that is how Jesus comes for each of us - within the walls of whatever beautiful Chapel that we visit . . . we are one human being, standing before another human being, who wears our garments, our “dhoti,” who has taken the weight of all the world that we carry, and put it upon his shoulders, and upon his cross, so that we might know the truth of God that is love.