Palm Sunday, cycle B

Mark 14:1 – 15:47

I spend a lot of my time visiting elderly people. Many of them are impaired, physically or mentally or both. Sometimes over a relatively short time I'll witness further deterioration. One of the things I am told over and over again by many of these people is “I don't want to be a burden”.

Recently the assisted suicide issue has reared its head again. We will probably have it on the ballot next time, and I predict it will win. The last time this was on the ballot it barely lost and I don't see our society getting more religious. Part of the reason assisted suicide is popular is because people dread being a burden, dread being helpless.

We've just heard the Passion of Jesus read from the Gospel of Mark. First we heard the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem – pretty short and to the point. Then we hear the Passion. It took too long when I was a little kid and it takes too long now. If you take the time Mark devotes to the Passion, it makes up a bit more than one fourth of his Gospel. And that is probably as it should be – Christians see Jesus as a great teacher, and that's true, but Jesus didn't teach anything terribly new. What makes Jesus central to Christianity is the fact that he suffered and died and rose again. The word “passion” conveys to us modern people intense emotion, and we naturally associate Jesus' suffering with that. But the word really means “to have something done to you” – it comes from the latin root “passio” which means “I am moved”. One fourth of Mark's gospel tells us about when Jesus was helpless, when people were doing things to him, when he had no control over what was going on.

Saint Louis Martin, the father of Theresa of Liseaux, had seen his wife pass away from breast cancer; had seen three children die in early childhood; had known hardship, including a time when he and his family were forced to care for soldiers involved in a civil war. His daughters, all but one had entered the religious life and he had very little contact with them since they were in a cloistered order. One day he told his pastor that he worried about not becoming a saint because he had not really suffered. God must have been listening, because over the next ten years until his death he suffered from physical and mental deterioration due to vascular disease involving the brain and needed to be taken care of.

I think all of us will experience, if we have not already done so, some point in our lives when we will be helplessness. We will be like Saint Peter, whom Jesus predicted would be lead where he did not want to go. Some of us will know that we won't get better; the rest of our days will be increasing helplessness, increasing loss of physical and mental abilities. And we naturally dread this, we don't want to think about it. And when those days come we might very well say, “I don't want to be a burden!” and we may even feel sympathy for those who have the courage, or perhaps it isn't courage, to end their lives with the help of a few pills.

But Jesus has been there; he's been helpless, in such pain that he probably couldn't think straight, experiencing minutes that seemed to last hours, hanging there between heaven and earth. And someday, Jesus may invite you or I to enter into his passion. I dread that invitation. But I hope I remember, and if not, I hope someone reminds me, that it is my body hanging on that cross; it is my body that will be placed in the grave; and God willing, it is my body that will be raised on the third day, a body with no limitations, a body like Jesus' resurrected body..

That, after all, is the reason God became Man, lived and died for us, so that as he told us, “... this is the Father's will which has sent me, that of all which he has given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.” With our baptisms we were given to Jesus, and nothing of us will ever be lost.