Dark Triumph

Propers: Palm Sunday of the Passion, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The greatest and most coveted of all Roman civic and religious rituals was the Triumph. It was a ceremony awarded only to the worthiest of generals and then only rarely. The victorious commander would enter the City, dressed as a king, and painted as a god. He would be acclaimed by the Senate and People of Rome, parading through the City the spoils of war: foreign treasures, exotic animals, and most importantly, proud conquered royalty in chains.

The Triumph was how the Roman people learned about the world. It was what connected them to the conquests of the Legions in ever-farther flung corners of the globe, in bizarre lands whose names they could not pronounce and whose people they cared not to understand. And it re-presented to them the spectacle of Roman power, the innate superiority of the Republic over the barbarous kings and savage tyrants of the wide, wild world.

The conquered, mind you, had to be played up, had to seem noble and strong and impressive, because every good story needs a good villain. There is no honor, no dignitas, in defeating weaklings and waifs. The stronger the king, the greater the Triumph. And the whole thing would culminate at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus atop the Capitoline Hill—that is, the “place of the head”—where the captives would be flogged before the army and the people, and then executed as human sacrifices to Jupiter Greatest and Best.

The irony was that the victor, the Triumphator, ceased to be king-for-a-day, god-for-a-day, when the life of his victim ceased. The Triumph was the end for them both.

And this is how the Gospel of Mark presents Jesus’ Passion, Crucifixion, and death. Jesus is both Victor and Victim in an ironic inversion of the Roman Triumph.

He rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday as Triumphator, hailed by the people as King, perhaps even as God. And His triumphal procession leads Him through the city right up to the Temple—but here He abruptly and unexpectedly breaks off. For the Temple, it seems, is not worthy to be the ritual climax of His Triumph. It is a temporary structure, He says, destined for destruction. Mark then picks up the narrative a few days, and a few chapters, later, with the Passion of our Lord.

Here, in the Passion narrative, Jesus is mocked and beaten by the cohort, some 600 armed men, then dressed as a king, publicly flogged, and taken to Golgotha, the Place of the Skull—that is, the place of the head!—and there crucified. Sound familiar? Golgotha is the cultic site now, the true Temple, the climax of Christ’s triumphal march. Here, on the Cross, He is both Victor and Victim, both the God-King and the Sacrifice. Here, on the Cross, is the ritual and religious imagery of Rome mocked and subverted, lifted for the world to see in all its blood-soaked horror.

Here in the shadowland between ritual and reality is the is the deep truth of our world unveiled: the truth of the God who so loved the world that He gave His only Son; and the truth of our own wretched, ritualized, bloodthirsty sin, ever demanding the sacrifice of human flesh. God did not invent the Cross. We did.

This proves all the more poignant when we remember that Mark was committing his Gospel account to pen and parchment right around the time that the Legions of Rome had sacked Jerusalem, ravaging the countryside, burning the Temple, and putting the inhabitants to the sword—just as Jesus had warned would happen. Titus and Vespasian, the father-son generals who spearheaded that campaign, were of course rewarded a Triumph in Rome for their victory. But it couldn’t climax at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, because they had burned that temple to the ground as well. A fitting tribute indeed to their “Triumph.”

Alas, my brothers and sisters. Nothing has changed, not in 2000 years. Still we celebrate the world over glory and conquest and mechanized mass murder. Still we demand human sacrifice to sate the dignitas of the Republic. Still our great men, our strong men, parade the spoils of war, be it on the battlefield or in the boardroom, treading all the while upon the bones of all those nameless, faceless fools who were hapless enough to get in their way.

And still atop the Place of the Skull there stands the Cross as silent witness to our horrors, putting the truth to all of our lies, and proclaiming to the world the depthless mercies of the God who forgave us even as we murdered Him, and who loved us even unto death—even death on a Cross!

For not even all this hell can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. For the Cross is the Triumph of the King.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.