March 18, 2005
Palms
Palm Sunday Mt 21.1-11
“Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
That cry and all its accompanying “king talk” was all the Pharisees needed to shift into red alert. They smelled treason, and they knew the consequences. If alone for their own sake, they warned Jesus to tell the people to cool it, only to hear him say in response…
“I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
That simple affirmation could be the most overlooked and unsung song of perceptive wisdom in all the events and words that surround us during our celebration of Passion Week.
Bennett Sims reminds us in his book on servant leadership that the quantum physics theorists are certain that there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos. Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, outraged his time when he said that the “molecules make love.” This, of course, got his books banned as a consequence. (The notion of “making love” and who or what does it and how and with whom never seems even now to sit all that well with the orthodoxers.)
In Jesus’ time, it might have been — indeed, was — seen all along that the created order in all its facets always knew and recognized in their own way who and what was present in him among them. The daemons, the loaves and fishes, the storms, winds, and waves, the human maladies, the fig trees, Satan itself in the wilderness, all were on to what had happened and was going on to happen when the Word became flesh.
No wonder Jesus could say that if the crowds were silent, the very stones, themselves, the seemingly most inert and mute of all creation (and, by the by, the epitome of efficiency), would burst forth in adulation. We call it atomic energy, but by whatever name, it remains, Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.”
If the events we celebrate during this Passion Week tell us nothing more, they remind us once again how inseparable are we one from the other and from the very stones along the way. They may be inert, they may seem to have no freedom at all, but when it comes to presence and endurance and dependability — and even to praise — we can learn from them a thing or two.
And furthermore, my loverlies, we mustn’t ever be all that sure just what those molecules are up to and right before our very eyes quite unpretentiously.