PALM SUNDAY/SUNDAY OF THE PASSION
Processional Gospel: Mark 11:1-11 or
Passion Gospel: Mark 14:1-15:47
Prayer of the Day: Everlasting God, in your endless love for the human race you sent our Lord Jesus Christ to take on our nature and to suffer death on the cross. In your mercy enable us to share in his obedience to your will and in the glorious victory of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
It was early afternoon on Valentine’s Day in 2018. Broward County sheriff’s deputy, Scot Peterson, was in his office at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School. Peterson had spent most of his twenty-eight year career as a resource officer at a vocational school charged with enforcing safety procedures on campus and intervening as necessary when more than normal disciplinary action was required. Only rarely did he have to make an arrest and it appears that he was never required to use the gun he was authorized to carry. In 2010, he was transferred to Stoneman Douglass. Though the environment at Stoneman was more challenging in terms of requiring intervention, Peterson’s work involved chiefly dealing with student behavioral issues. He routinely, broke up fist fights, investigated claims of student drug possession, theft and bullying. Nothing in his career prepared him for what he was about to face on that fateful afternoon.
It was just after two in the afternoon that Peterson got a report over the school radio that there were “pops,” possibly fireworks, coming from a nearby building on campus. He climbed into a golf cart and headed toward the building with two other school employees. He arrived about three minutes later and, standing about ten feet from the door, heard a few more pops that he now suspected were gunshots. Switching on his radio, he entered a “code red.” By this time, Nikolas Cruz, a former student who had entered the campus with an AR-15 Assault rifle had already killed eleven students and wounded twelve others. Rather then enter the building, Peterson took cover behind a concrete wall at an adjacent building seventy-five feet away while Cruz killed six more students. He did not ever attempt to enter the building where the killings were taking place to confront the shooter.
Families of the Stoneman Douglass victims, the local community and, as the details of the massacre were reported nationwide, the American public excoriated Peterson. He was nicknamed, “Coward of Broward.” He was suspended from his position, criminally indicted and faced a barrage of civil actions for damages by relatives of the deceased and injured victims of the shooting. For days after the shooting, Peterson hid in his home seeking to avoid the persistent efforts of the press to question him and the expressions of anger by members of the community who sometimes gathered in front of the house. Ultimately, he moved into a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina accessed only by a dirt road. Though ultimately found not guilty in the criminal action, Peterson still faces several civil lawsuits. In the minds of most Americans, he remains an odious coward, a man who shrank from the call of duty and protected his own life at the expense of those with which he was entrusted.[1]
Why do I tell this story? Because it is also the story of the Church of Jesus Christ. In addition to being Palm Sunday, this coming Sunday is the one on which many and perhaps most of our Lutheran Churches read through the full Passion narrative of our Lord’s arrest, trial and crucifixion. The following passages are of particular relevance here:
“When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, ‘You will all become deserters; for it is written,
“I will strike the shepherd,
and the sheep will be scattered.”
‘But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.’ Peter said to him, ‘Even though all become deserters, I will not.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I tell you, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ But he said vehemently, ‘Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.’ And all of them said the same.” Mark 14:26-31.
We all know how that ended. All the disciples deserted Jesus and fled. Mark 14:50. Saint Peter followed Jesus from a safe distance-until he was questioned about his association with Jesus. Then he denied Jesus not once but three times and that with an oath. Mark 14:66-72. Thereafter, Peter broke down and wept. I suspect this weeping saint might have had a good deal more compassion and a great deal less condemnation for Scot Peterson than the American public. Peter knew first hand how, though the spirit be ever so willing, the flesh is week. Mark 14:38. Remarkably, this is the story we tell on ourselves each year at this time. It is a story in which our spiritual ancestors, the founding members of the church, do not come off well. There are no heroes of faith in the Passion narrative, only traders, deserters and cowards.
There is a reason we pray “save us from the time of trial.” We would all like to believe that had we been with Jesus in the Garden or, for that matter, on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School on Valentine’s Day 2018, we would have acted heroically. But honestly, can those of us who have never been tried, as were Saint Peter and Scot Peterson, know with any certainty how we would perform were we standing in their shoes? Can any of us know whether our willing spirits would be strong enough in the time of trial to master the weakness of our flesh and its powerful self-preservation instincts? Peter was confident that he had the wherewithal to make good on his promise to go with Jesus to prison or even death. He was wrong. He did not know himself half as well as he thought he did. I suspect that is probably true of us as well.
As it turns out, the gospel of Jesus Christ is especially good news for cowards. We know that the Jesus who was betrayed, deserted and denied by his disciples and left to die alone, sought out these same cowardly disciples after his resurrection from death. He found them terrified and holed up behind locked doors-and proclaimed to them peace. Moreover, Jesus sent these same disciples who had failed him so profoundly out into the world to be his ambassadors of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness. Our God is the God of the second chance; the God who refuses to let us be defined by our failures, our defeats and our acts of cowardice. Our God is the one who sees in us more than we dare see in ourselves and challenges us to see our neighbors in the same way. As the Book of Acts testifies, Saint Peter’s act of cowardice did not determine his destiny. By the grace of God’s forgiveness and the power of God’s Holy Spirit, he became the bold witness of Jesus’ Resurrection to which he was called.
That good word is what enables us to make a serious moral inventory of our own cowardice. It frees us to examine with a clear eye the ways in which we betray Jesus, by remaining silent in our pulpits when a contender for the highest office in our land refers to the stranger at our southern border as “animal” and “inhuman;” by failing to articulate in clear and unequivocal terms that LGBTQ+ folk and their families are fully welcome and accepted in all of our churches; by failing to address racist, sexist and homophobic remarks made within our families, in school or in the work place. Most important, the Passion narrative and the Resurrection story that follows remind us that Jesus continues to seek out his church as it cowers behind stained glass windows, entrenched in its bureaucracies and locked into its routine practices nursing its fears of decline, membership loss and irrelevance. After two millennia of cowardice stretching from the Garden of Gethsemane to the present, Jesus still entrusts his church with another chance to tell the world of its second chance.
Here is a poem about the kind of courage that is the antithesis of cowardice and suggestive of the sort called for in every day discipleship.
Some Notes On Courage
Think of a child who goes out
into the new neighborhood,
cap at an angle, and offers to lend
a baseball glove. He knows
how many traps there are–
his accent or his clothes, the club
already formed.
Think of a pregnant woman
whose first child died–
her history of blood.
Or your friend whose father
locked her in basements, closets,
cars. Now when she speaks
to strangers, she must have
all the windows open.
She forces herself indoors each day,
sheer will makes her climb the stairs.
And love. Imagine it. After all
those years in the circus, that last
bad fall when the net didn’t hold.
Think of the ladder to the wire,
spotlights moving as you move,
then how you used to see yourself
balanced on the shiny air.
Think of doing it again.
Source: Poetry, (January 1982). Susan Ludvigson (b. 1942) is an American poet. She was born in Rice Lake, Wisconsin to entrepreneur Howard Ludvigson and Mabel Helgeland. She entered the University of Wisconsin, River Falls in 1961 from which she earned a B.A. in English and psychology. She taught school in River Falls and in Ann Arbor, Michigan for seven years. In 1973 Ludvigson received an M.A. in English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. As an adult she became committed to poetry, publishing three volumes of verse. Ludvigson’s work has earned many awards, including Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. You can read more about Susan Ludvigson and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.
[1] I am indebted to Jamie Thompson, author of Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation, from whose excellent article in The Atlantic, (March 2024) entitled “American Cowardice” I gleaned the factual information concerning Scot Peterson’s role in the horrific Marjory Stoneman Douglass massacre. I strongly recommend this article as it provides a profound and nuanced view on the role of policing and its limitations with respect to preventing mass shootings.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 