- Apr 12
- 3 min read
Beloved Members of St. Martin’s,
As a word nerd, I actually have favorite words, usually words that I encountered in a poem or a story. Words like “petrichor” which means the pleasing smell that comes from the ground after the rain.” Then there are words about the study of words. When I was a kid, one of my first of these was “onomatopoeia” which is a word created from a sound—like boom, or moo, hiss, or cuckoo.
One of those kinds of words about words that comes to. mind every year around this time is contranym, also called a “Janus word” after the two faced Roman god. Of course, we hear this kind of thing all the time in our kids’ slang—“bad” meant “respected” when Michael Jackson sang about; “dope” means “cool,” as does “sick;” and “phat” means “trendy.” In early modern English, “awful” could mean both “horrible” and “awe-inspiring.” “Original,” for instance, can mean both “traditional” and “never done before.” “Bolt” can mean both “leave quickly” and “hold in place,” and “fast” similarly can mean “quickly” or “in place.” Cleave” means both “to cut in two” “and “to cling to.”
Since the 1960s, this Sixth Sunday in Lent has had a “Janus word” quality to it, after the liturgical churches in Western Christendom followed the lead of the Roman catholic Church in combining two separate Lenten Sundays into one. Before the 1960s, Passion Sunday was the fifth Sunday in Lent, Palm Sunday was the suxth, and the following Sunday was the observation of easter. At least now we don’t get Jesus’s death proclaimed TWICE, and two weeks apart, to boot.
So this weekend, we will start with joy, and an hour later we will be plunged into grief, and depart in silence. All in one Sunday. We’ll carom from the Palm procession, with its joyous choruses of “Hosanna!” to the silent finality of the Passion, with it angry shout of “Crucify!” followed by the silence of the tomb. Both emotional outbursts allegedly done and said by the very same people, just within the short span of a week.
Contradictions, antitheses, and paradoxes are more common than we think, after all, as Charles Dickens reminded us: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he famously began his novel A Tale of Two Cities. And most of us can probably agree that living in such paradoxes is deeply disorienting and uncomfortable. And so it is even when we live vicariously through the bookended highs and lows of this coming weekend’s combined observances.
But what if we were to lean INTO these paradoxes? Jesus, after all, was and is a contradiction. Human and God. Son of God and peasant. Humble and yet a king—that’s what the whole riding of a donkey rather than a steed of war is meant to symbolize, after all.
Jesus was and is a wisdom teacher who promoted teachings thought foolish. Victim and Victor. And—especially true for those of us who encounter him and his teachings today— Jesus remains a proponent of an ethic of loving living that was deemed so threatening and dangerous that he was executed for it during his life. This same message of love is still so dangerous that the same man who refused to defend himself even at the point of death has also been used as the justification of wars throughout the centuries.
Perhaps the best message this coming single worship service can reinforce to us is that Jesus truly IS our companion throughout the broad spectrum of our experiences, from the brightest joys to the bleakest sorrows.
Perhaps embracing these contradictions and paradoxes can lead us to reassess the costliness as well as the benefits of discipleship. Perhaps the emotional extremes we will experience in an hour’s time, taken seriously, can forcefully remind us that as much as we are loved, we too are called to love. That as much as we need to receive mercy, we need to be merciful even more.
In Christ,
Mother Leslie+
