Psalm Light for Palm Sunday, 2021

Psalm 31:9-16

“I have become like a broken vessel.” Psalm 31:12b

The image of the broken Christ upon the Cross is a powerful one, but it took me so long to really start appreciating it.  For most of my life, I admittedly hated looking at crucifixes featuring Jesus. It didn’t matter whether he looked like he was at peace or was in agony, whether it was realistic or abstract, or anything else – something just… bothered me about it. The main thing, I discovered, was that I didn’t want to see Jesus as dead, or suffering.  I wanted to see Jesus in his ministry, or if we had to deal with “the whole Easter thing” focus on just that, the Resurrection, and forget the rest – have an empty cross and move on with it.
That is, until I began to acknowledge my own brokenness and that of the world. All too often I, and I think all of us from time to time, discover our crumbling or cracked “vessels”, our lives, souls, minds, and bodies, with a sense of horror. We want to be flawless, we want to be whole, we want to be strong and self-reliant and blameless and so much more. We, in ways we may not even realize, try to duct tape, or glue, or tie, or somehow hold together, all the fragments or our vessel so nobody can see the cracks. The more we try to hold one piece in place, the more cracks form, sometimes major fractures and sometimes nearly invisible hairline fractures.
But when we look to the crucified Jesus we see our companion, our friend, our brother, our doctor… but we also see the one who is both fully and perfectly God and fully and perfectly human, and so we see ourselves, our loved ones, those that love us and those that hate us, those whom we remember and those whom we have forgotten, those still with us, those who have passed away, and those yet to come; and we see that in his pain, his helplessness, his abandonment, his ‘embarrassing’ body and its functions, we see our own and we know that we ourselves are not alone.  The Cross is lifted up as a mirror. The broken Christ shows us our brokenness, and shows us what the Church, the Body of Christ, is supposed to look like: vulnerable, self-giving, authentic, forgiving, never seeking revenge. But it is from that state of brokenness that we are made whole in the Resurrection, when the potter Himself has, through our and Christ’s brokenness, made us anew.

Walking in the Light:

Take some time during Holy Week, as we approach the Cross, to take account of the various “cracks” in your life. How do you see your weakness in Christ’s? How do you see Christ’s weakness in yours? How do the spaces between the fragments let light into your life? How do your vulnerabilities allow Christ’s light to shine outward into the lives of others?

+ Fr. Adam Brown