Palm Sunday 1964
Growing up in the 1950s and sixties, and going to Catholic schools, our Boomer generation hardly ever heard of things that are common today, and nobody knew that the Rockefeller foundation was funding researchers to reduce the Catholic population by finding a “Catholic contraceptive.” For instance, we all knew that some of us were conceived outside marriage, but the goal there would be to find a good adopting family for the child. This happened to both me and my best friend. But very few of us had a divorced person in the family. Nobody would have a defense for aborting a child. There was no amniocentesis or sonograms. If a child was born with some kind of birth “defect,” the family lived with it. Everyone did his/her best with the life given. In other words, our churches and our culture worked together to promote families and to nurture human life.
Take another look at St. Paul’s words for the church at Philippi today. He seems to be quoting an old Christian hymn, probably the earliest one we have access to. He declares to the Philippians (and to us) that, instead of presuming on His divine dignity, Jesus emptied Himself of that dignity and took on the nature of a slave, human nature, going all the way down to the depths of human existence by dying on the cross and descending into Sheol or “hell,” so as to redeem the rest of us and deserving the name “Lord.” That’s the highest name, Kyrios or Adonai, God for short. That’s how God has defined Himself for us, even back in the OT. Nothing for Himself; everything for us. St. Paul tells his readers to set that as our exemplar. We should always practice self-giving, not self-centeredness. At least in theory, that’s what was being encouraged seventy years ago. Self-giving; self-sacrifice.
Things changed, didn’t they? We Boomers were targets for the culture-changers, especially us Christians. We were having more children than they, as our parents had done, and were amassing political power they didn’t want to lose. So they unleashed on us their nuclear weaponry–a combination of the Playboy philosophy with the birth-control pill. They encouraged us to separate the two ends of marriage–marital union in fidelity against procreation. And that turned into lots of sex before and without marriage. And then when the contraception failed, as it does maybe ten percent of the time, the backup was abortion. Or if abortion or the birth control pill made it hard to actually have children you wanted, we demanded in-vitro fertilization, which killed millions of tiny babies, whose souls were not killed, and who, in God’s care now, await the judgement of their killers. Separating procreation from the union of man and woman led inevitably to bad outcomes like legal homosexual practices, and newer things like widespread gender dysphoria among thousands of the youngest teens and pre-teens. It’s enough to make our older generation sick.
We were amused at the word-play when George Strait, King of Country Music, introduced the song “All My Exes Live in Texas,” especially now when he’s been married to Norma Strait for over a half-century. But the plague of individualism and the collapse of families has intervened since then, so that we are shocked and horrified when a woman in a custody battle with her ex murders her toddler son and then herself in a ditch. We are shocked and horrified, but we are no longer surprised. As a culture, we’ve been legally killing children before birth for a log longer. And several states have legalized physicians killing their patients for many moons.
You see, we lost our way when we began thinking true happiness is all about our own individual feelings. If I feel good, I must be happy. But that’s not happiness, because feelings vanish like the biblical smoke. The saddest line of any song we had in the seventies was “how can it be wrong when it feels so right?” We can’t as individuals or a society make up our own rules. The Ten Commandments are a rule of life for every human being, whether he owns the Good Book or not. Good conduct is moral conduct, and there has a mess of bad conduct ruining us as individuals and as a culture. And it hasn’t ended. Nor, we can also be sure, has God’s plan for human happiness in heaven with Him.
Think of the first Gospel we heard today: Jesus brought with Him to Jerusalem an unknown number of fellow Galileans to celebrate Passover. When He entered Jerusalem, humbly on the colt of a donkey a little like King David, He got royal treatment from those who had followed Him, and maybe a few of the Gentiles and Jerusalem Israelites. “Hosanna,” they cried, and sang Psalm 118. Jesus then spent several days in conversation with the Jerusalem elite–scribes and Pharisees and priests. And they realized that they could not defeat Him in debate, because He not only knew Torah, He was showing Himself to be the real divine author of Torah. To avoid losing their power over the people, His enemies conspired, paid needed bribes, and arrested, tried, tortured and had the Romans execute Him. That’s what we heard today in the second Gospel. That’s what we commemorate all week.
But the plan of God brooks no opposition. Even in defeat, even on the cross, Jesus was declared the winner by Pilate, the Roman procurator, Himself. Nailed to the scaffold with Jesus is His crime, and His victory cry: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. As Paul and John would describe it, the cross was His throne. After Christ’s death, He would, as we profess, descend into hell, the abode of the dead, defeat Satan and all the false gods, and then. . .well. . .stay tuned next Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Blessed be God forever, Amen.
