April 5, 2009
(The Sunday of the Passion: Palm
Sunday)
Anamnesis
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Mark 11:1-11 or John 12:12-16 • Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Isaiah 50:4-9a • Psalm 31:9-16 • Philippians 2:5-11
• Mark 14:1-15:47
(From
The Lectionary Page)
I’ve been keeping an eye on our side yard this spring. I got in that habit nearly a year ago. A home improvement project last June necessitated heavy equipment making repeated trips from driveway to backyard. The soil structure was no match for the weight of a Bobcat front loader. We were left with deep and ugly ruts, ruts which we backfilled with topsoil, upon which we scattered grass seed and watered and hoped for the best. Miraculously, the seed germinated, thickly in some spots, more sparse in others. So we overseeded as needed and watered some more. We could not forget a single day of care and attention in the summer’s heat. It became part of our daily rhythm not to forget to check the grass.
Not forgetting. The word in Greek is anamnesis. The last part of that word – amnesis – is the root of our English word amnesia. And it is an apt word to describe so much of the drama in our Passion Gospel. Peter forgets his own assertion that he will never forsake Jesus. He forgets Jesus’s warning about how he will deny Jesus 3 times before the cock crows twice. The chief priests and the council forget what Jesus actually said or did not say that may or may not have been blasphemous. The crowd forgets that they hailed Jesus as the Messiah days earlier when he entered Jerusalem on the donkey, and now calls for his death.
What is the root of all of this amnesis – this forgetting? In a word, fear. Human fear running amok. Judas, fearful that Jesus will not fulfill the Messianic agenda that he hopes for, tries to force Jesus’s hand there in Gethsemane. The disciples, stricken with fear at the sight of the crowd bearing swords and clubs, run off into the night.[1] Peter fears what will become of him and denies knowing Jesus. The Temple hierarchy fears what the teachings of Jesus will bring to their well-crafted, finely honed system of sacrificial worship. Others fear the reprisals the Romans are sure to visit upon Jerusalem if the Passover crowd gets out of hand because of Jesus and his subversive teachings. Pilate is fearful of what a widespread rebellion would do to his credentials with the emperor.
There is a particular region of the human brain whose only function is to process fear. It’s called the amygdala. Its purpose is to generate the fight or flight instincts that keep humans safe. Neuroscientists have discovered that the amygdala “talks” to the thinking centers of our brain. Interestingly, they’ve also found that the connectors are not symmetrical – meaning that the brain messages are skewed one way. Our thinking brains get the fear message, but our fear center does not receive thinking messages back in equal measure. It appears that once we humans become fearful, really fearful, we are hardwired to react without necessarily thinking. When our brains are flooded with fear messages, we forget to think. We can only react. When danger is mortal, the amygdala can save our life. That is its gift to us from the Creator. When that gift is, in a sense, misused, violence in its many forms can be unleashed. Such is the power of fear.
In fact, in the whole of this bitter Passion Gospel, filled with fearful forgetting, there is one person who stands in opposition to all of this. Jesus, and Jesus alone. Like the Suffering Servant from Second Isaiah, he set his face like flint in the midst of tumultuous events and trumped up charges. He did not forget who he was, nor whose he was. He did not react defensively to the provocation by the Temple leadership nor to the intimidation by Pilate. Even as the crowd made their choice in calling for the release of Barabas, a known insurrectionist, Jesus did not forget his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. He remained steadfastly on the path that would lead to crucifixion and death, the anguished, hope-filled words of Psalm 22 on his lips.
On one hand, fear and forgetting. Forgetting prophecy, forgetting teaching, forgetting miracles, forgetting sacred history of God’s mighty acts of salvation triumphing again and again over the hegemony of political superpowers. On the other hand, perfect love, emptying self of self for our sake.
The writer of the first epistle of John will later remind the infant Christian Church that perfect love casts out fear. He is speaking of the love we are to have for one another by not forgetting the love that Jesus had for us. Left to our own devices, we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves quiet the fear that can and does run amok. So God did it for us in the person of Jesus Christ. There on a cross, he embraced human fear flung at him in all its horrifying intensity, and quenched it with his own life.
We remember his death. Anamnesis. Not forgetting. Each celebration of Holy Eucharist, each liturgy of Holy Week, draws us into a place of remembrance of that great love for humankind – a love that sacrificed Self so that human fear and the death that is spawns might not have the final word. We remember his death. In time, we will proclaim his resurrection and sing of love that comes again like wheat (or grass in our side lawn) that springeth green. But for the moment, for this holiest of weeks, it is enough for us to stand in reverent awe and love for the one who hung upon the cross; who embraced human fear flung at him in all its horrifying middirected intensity, so that we might know, and not forget, that it is God’s love alone that casts out fear.
[1] The detail that Mark (alone of the gospel writers) includes of the young man running off naked into the night illustrates the disciples’ terror. In an honor-based culture, one would never shamefully expose one’s nakedness unless something more powerful than shame were driving one’s actions.
