Homily for Palm Sunday 2006

It was not only the Jews and Greeks that had difficulty with a crucified Messiah. It was a most difficult problem for first disciples to face as well.

You probably have heard of the publication of a “Gospel of Judas” over the last couple of days. There have been shades of “Da Vinci Code” surrounding the news. It has always been known that there was a gospel of that name. The early Church father Irenaeus spoke against it. In the 1950s a manuscript of it was discovered in Egypt. Its significance was not appreciated at the time. It has only over the past year of so that it has been translated.

You can find information about it from National Geographic who are the publishers.

Some background information can be found on such sites as Early Christian Writings.

St Irenaeus wrote extensively about the differences in early Christian thought on who Jesus is. Try this site: Irenaeus.

It is well worth remembering that there are between 20 and 30 known gospels or fragments of gospels apart from the four Gospels of our New Testament. The choice of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, was only made definitively after several centuries of thought and debate in the early Church. Yet these four are well attested as being true to the person of Jesus by the 2^nd century by Irenaeus himself.

With the publication of a newly found manuscript you get the usual anti-Roman Catholic polemic which says that the Imperial Roman Catholic Church suppressed anything that it did not agree with. So the insinuation is that Christians have been misled for 2000 years. That kind of remark avoids the obvious question, “What do these ancient texts actually say?”

This “Gospel of Judas” seems to belong to a Christian Gnostic sect of the early centuries that flourished in Egypt. They believed that only an exclusive secret spiritual knowledge could help them rise above what they saw as the corrupt physical world. In this particular Gospel, Judas and Jesus are said to have had secret meetings before the Passover to plan Jesus' betrayal. Jesus needed to die to free himself from his physical body. He prefers a close friend like Judas, one of the Twelve, to betray him rather than an enemy. Now Judas may not have been the totally evil person he has become in the popular imagination over the centuries. But the distortion of the story in this Gospel of Judas becomes clear when you remember of what Gnostic belief was. They, like many others, then and now, could not accept the sheer physicality of the Incarnation. They could not accept that the cross was a means of salvation. For them it was simply an escape from this world. Salvation for them was through secret knowledge of God.

Today, and all this Holy Week, Jesus death on the cross is at the centre of our liturgy. The Christian story does find death difficult, but does not avoid it. It does struggle to understand why Jesus died on the cross, but embraces it as each and every person must meet death. Above all, the Christian story is overwhelmed by the Good News that God would stoop so low as to become one like us in all things but sin. St Paul, in our second reading today (Philippians 2:6-11), quotes a hymn that is the gospel in précis. It tells of Jesus emptying himself, not clining to his status as God. Our only response is to acknowledge with thanksgiving that Jesus is Lord. While accepting the evil of which human beings are capable, the Christian Gospel is a gospel about the love that God has for all creation. “God saw all that he had made and it was good.”

That perspective is a uniquely Christian one arrived at with much prayer and struggle. Without the cross Christianity would be just one of many sects for whom this earth, the physical body and all it entails, are but burdens to be escaped from. It is in embracing of the cross that the Christian is enabled to value the life and dignity of each person and their work in the world. It also enables us to believe that God will fulfil the hope within us through the gift of a new creation, the Kingdom of God. The early Christians did not take the easy option and try to avoid the difficulty the cross presented. They did not try to explain it away. They took up the cross and carried, it as we must.

Fr Graham