Grace Cathedral

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“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (Mk. 11)!

“[T]here is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.” We saw this in COVID misinformation and today in political speeches about “white replacement,” the “Deep State” and the “stolen election.” Directly confronting people who hold mistaken beliefs only makes them more defensive and resistant. It only strengthens their self-deception. The eighteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) points out that, “It is not easy to correct a mistake that concerns a person’s entire existence.”[1]

What about the illusions that we hold? Is there hope that we might see the truth? For many years I resisted the impulse behind celebrating Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday in the same worship service. I rebelled against participating in the joyful palm procession, singing Hosanna in the highest on the same day that we walk with Jesus through his abandonment, suffering and death. For me these two moods could not reasonably occupy the same space at the same time.[2] Today I see that the purpose of Palm Sunday is to remove our illusions.

In our Cathedral’s north “Theological Reform Window” we have a delightful image of Kierkegaard sitting in his purple suit reading a book. He was born in 1813 and his biographer suggests that he was perhaps one of the first philosophers to write about “the experience of living in a recognizably modern world of newspapers, trains, [buses] window-shopping, amusement parks, and great stores of knowledge and information.”[3]

One more thing about Søren Kierkegaard is necessary to understanding him. For his whole life Kierkegaard was deeply in love with a woman named Regine. When they were young he used to read the local bishop’s sermons to her. They exchanged passionate love letters. He wrote, “Know that every time you repeat that you love me from the deepest recesses of your soul, it is as though I heard it for the first time, and just as a man who owned the whole world would need a lifetime to survey his splendors, so I also seem to need a lifetime to contemplate all the riches contained in your love.”[4]

But Kierkegaard worried that because of his own struggle with what he called “abysmal melancholia” Regine ultimately would not be happy being married to him. When he broke up with her, she pleaded saying that she would tell him she loved him every day of their life together and that he could keep her in a little cupboard.[5] Her prominent father begged him not to break the engagement.

Kierkegaard’s hero was the Greek philosopher Socrates who used irony to force his contemporaries to confront the question of how to be human. Socrates died to teach his fellow citizens how to be more human. In Kierkegaard’s time pretty much everyone was part of the state church and believed that being a Danish citizen was the same thing as being a Christian.

For Kierkegaard this way of existing had nothing to do with the Christianity of the New Testament. Even worse, it positively prevented people from seeking a deeper connection to God. Kierkegaard believed that there were three stages of life: the aesthetic stage was a way of existing just for pleasure and novelty, and the ethical stage involved being stuck in the way humans constantly evaluate ourselves and others.

But Kierkegaard taught that there is something beyond this, beyond just pleasure and judgment about excellence. He called this the religious stage. Human beings also belong a “sphere of infinite depth, which he called ‘inwardness,’ ‘the God-relationship,’ ‘eternity,” “the religious sphere,’ or simply ‘silence.’”[6] If people think that they are already Christians they cease to reach out for God. They are cut off from their deeper self, from the God who makes life worth living.

Kierkegaard put it this way, “If there were no eternal consciousness in a human being [that is no connection to God], if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting force writhing in dark passions that produced everything great and insignificant, if a bottomless, insatiable emptiness lurked beneath everything, what would life be but despair? If there were no sacred bond that tied humankind together, if one generation after another rose like leaves in a forest… if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as the wind through the desert… then how empty and hopeless life would be!”[7]

So how do you convince people into trying to become Christian when they think that they already are? You have to trick them out of their illusions. Kierkegaard did this by making up characters and then writing startling and beautiful books using these fictional voices. Our problem today is a little different than what Kierkegaard faced. These days not everyone calls themselves Christian, but I do think in our time most people in our society, both those who believe and those who do not, think that they know what Christianity is. Perhaps this has been a little true in every age.

So what are we doing on Palm and Passion Sunday? We are removing a powerful illusion of what it means to be a Christian. That illusion is that a military messiah will save us rather than the God who is revealed in the self-emptying of Jesus. In short it is the illusion that having power over other people will resolve our problems, or that our life is chiefly about experiencing pleasure, or enjoying absolute safety. It is the illusion that we have the ability to save ourselves, that we do not need the God who Jesus teaches is like a good father to us.

Palm Sunday readings dispel this illusion in three ways. First, they force us to see what is real. Have any of you ever heard of the Victorian editions of William Shakespeare’s plays?[8] People had such a strong sense of moral optimism in the latter nineteenth century that Shakespeare’s plays offended them. And so they re-wrote the endings of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, etc.

That version of Romeo and Juliet described the two lovers recovering from being poisoned and stabbed. Not only that but they are reconciled. And their families are reconciled. And the local parson comes along to preside at their happily ever after wedding.[9] In contrast our readings today force us to see a violent truth about life in the suffering of Christ.

Second Palm Sunday helps us to become more like Jesus. My friend from seminary Matt Boulton says that ancient people regarded the Bible as something like an empty jacket that is tailored perfectly to fit us.[10] Scripture becomes fulfilled when we give these stories shape, when we put them on ourselves. We are not just passively watching Jesus. We are “putting on Christ,” in the way that the Apostle Paul encourages us. This is how we practice our reliance on God.[11] When we accompany Jesus we share his sorrows. We weep with him at the brokenness of what was meant to be whole.[12]

Finally, on Palm Sunday we love Jesus. Barbara Brown Taylor describes a woman who still high on drugs wandered into the Passion Sunday reading at their Episcopal Church, sitting quietly in the back row and then sobbing, “O my Lord no! Don’t kill my sweet Jesus! You’ve got to stop! You can’t kill my sweet Jesus! O Lord make them stop!” The well-meaning congregants tried to reassure and comfort her. One of the teenagers said, “I tried to tell her it wasn’t real but I realized that for her it was.”[13]

In the reading we are about to hear there is one kind act that will never be forgotten. A woman loves Jesus so much she anoints him with oil imported from India that costs a year’s wages (is that $40,000?). The disciples bitterly criticize her for the expense, but Jesus says she teaches us how to love extravagantly with our whole self. We can love Jesus like her.

As we embark on the holiest season of the year I cannot exactly say what illusions God is trying to dispel in your heart. I also could not say whether Kierkegaard’s conviction that he had to break his engagement with Regine was an illusion. I do know that for 14 years he thought of her every day and never heard her voice until one morning in mid-March of 1855. In the street near his house Regine walked purposely up to him and quietly said, “God bless you – may all go well for you.” Later that day she moved with her husband to his diplomatic post in the Caribbean. Kierkegaard never saw her again. But I think this helped him to become reconciled with what he had done.

In the first volume of Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology she writes. “And just this is… the good news we greet with joy. There is One who has looked into the abyss, who has examined the formless horror in its breadth and depth, who encompasses it, its sickness and malice, with the Wisdom that is good, and remains utterly sovereign and utterly undefiled by this sight. The gospel consoles us in our folly and in our fear with the truth that no evil and sin, no deformation and terror, no clawing guilt in the night watches or icy regret, no assaults of our enemies, can be outside the good Wisdom of Almighty God.”[14]

“[T]here is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.” It is hard to correct a mistake that concerns one’s entire existence. But there is more to life than just pleasure and judgment. We are more than the mistakes we have made. We belong to a sphere of infinite depth and stillness. Let us walk with Jesus. We have this lifetime to contemplate God’s love for us.

Let us pray: “Father in heaven! That which we in the company of other people, especially in the throng of humanity, have such difficulty learning, and which, if we have learned it elsewhere, is so easily forgotten in the company of other people – what it is to be a human being and what, from a godly standpoint, is the requirement for being a human being – would that we might learn it, or, if it has been forgotten, that we might learn it anew… would that we might learn it, if not all at once, then learn at least something of it, little by little – would that on this occasion we might… learn silence, obedience, joy!”[15]

Søren Kierkegaard’s Prayer

[1] “Either/Or was the first in a series of ‘aesthetic’ works, written for the kind of reader who ‘thinks he is a Christian and yet is living in purely aesthetic categories.’ This is the widespread ‘illusion’ of Christendom: in a culture so steeped in Christianity as nineteenth-century Denmark, it is possible to do all the things expected of a Christian and yet never embark on the task of faith that takes a lifetime – perhaps longer than a lifetime – to accomplish.

            Before Kierkegaard began his authorship, he had learned from Socrates that ‘there is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion’ – for a direct confrontation only makes people more defensive and resistant, and strengthens their self-deceptions. It is not easy to correct a mistake that concerns a person’s entire existence. As a Socratic missionary, he has tried to teach his readers ‘not to comprehend Christianity, but to comprehend that they cannot comprehend it’. And so he entered into their illusion in order to draw them out of it: ‘One does not begin directly with what one wishes to communicate, but begins by taking the other’s delusion at face value.

Thus one does not begin in this way: It is Christianity that I am pro-claiming, and you are living in purely aesthetic categories. No, one begins in this way: Let us talk about the aesthetic.”

Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (NY: Penguin Books, 2019) 132.

Quoting Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 43.

[2] Peter J. Gomes, “Beyond Tragedy,” Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998) 68ff.

[3] Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (NY: Penguin Books, 2019) xv.

[4] Ibid., 24.

[5] Ibid., 28.

[6] Ibid., xviii.

[7] Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI, Volume 6: Fear and Trembling / Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 12.

[8] Peter J. Gomes, “Beyond Tragedy,” Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998) 70.

[9] In case we are tempted to sympathize with Pontius Pilate or blame the crowds, we have other non-biblical descriptions of what he was like. The historian Josephus writes about how he ordered Romans to disguise themselves as Jews carrying clubs under their garments and then murdering people in the crowds.

“Two contemporary Jewish authors portray Pilate with characteristics that flatly contradict the equivalent ones in the Gospels. One is his method of dispensing justice, the other is his method of handling crowds.

The philosopher Philo’s On the Embassy to Gaius describes Pilate as “a man of a very inflexible disposition, and very merciless as well as very obstinate.” It speaks of “his corruption, and his acts of insolence, and his rapine, and his habit of insulting people, and his cruelty, and his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never ending, and gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.” Pilate was “exceedingly angry, and . . . at all times a man of most ferocious passions.” Pilate is Philo’s posterboy for a bad governor.

The historian Josephus records, in both The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, that an unarmed crowd came before Pilate’s tribunal at coastal Caesarea to demand that he remove from Jerusalem the pagan images on his military standards. He surrounded the crowd with soldiers “three deep,” and people were saved from slaughter only by a willingness for martyrdom. But the next time they tried the same nonviolent resistance, Pilate infiltrated them with soldiers dressed “in Jewish garments, under which they carried clubs,” and “many of them actually were slain on the spot, while some withdrew disabled by blows.”

Finally, according to Jewish Antiquities, the Syrian governor, Vitellius, removed Pilate from office and sent him back to defend himself before the emperor Tiberius in Rome. You can probably guess for what offense. His soldiers attacked a Samaritan crowd on Mount Garizim. The high priest Caiaphas, by the way, was removed from office at the same time, and that ended his ten-year collaboration with Pilate, a collaboration ultimately judged unwise even by Roman imperial interests.”

John Dominic Crossan, “Crowd Control: A Critique of The Passion of the Christ,” The Christian Century, 23 March 2004.

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2004-03/crowd-control?code=x499VcQUk1MOryRKRMsg&utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=be1cc749b4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2024-03-18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-31c915c0b7-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

[10] Matthew Boulton, “Palms and Passion, SALT’s Commentary for Palm/Passion Sunday,” SALT 18 March 2024. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2021/3/23/palms-and-passion-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-palmpassion-sunday

[11] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Worship” in The Preaching Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993) 63ff.

[12] Peter J. Gomes, “Beyond Tragedy,” Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998).

[13] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Worship” in The Preaching Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993) 63ff.

[14] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015) 357.

[15] “Father in heaven! That which we in the company of other people, especially in the throng of humanity, have such difficulty learning, and which, if we have learned it elsewhere, is so easily forgotten in the company of other people – what it is to be a human being and what, from a godly standpoint, is the requirement for being a human being – would that we might learn it, or, if it has been forgotten, that we might learn it anew from the lily and the bird; would that we might learn it, if not all at once, then learn at least something of it, little by little – would that on this occasion we might from the lily and the bird learn silence, obedience, joy!”

Søren Kierkegaard, “The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air,” Three Godly Discourses tr. Bruce H. Kirmmse cited in Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (NY: Penguin Books, 2019) 263.