We’ve just heard a long and demanding story [Mark 15], one that looks deeply into human evil and God’s self-giving love of humanity and the ways those two collide. It’s a story that’s hard to add anything to by way of preaching, but, this year, I’m going to offer you an alternate story, one that turns out quite differently but may give us some help in understanding the one we just heard a little better.
The story comes from a Czech poet of the last century, Milovan Bureš, and it begins in a village church, where:

The gentle Mother,
complaining in the darkness of the church,
descended from the altar and passed through candle light.
Like thrifty peasants do,
she took off her sandals
when she came to the edge of the village.

In that country of rocks and rivulets,
where the azure was cut up by swallows’ wings,
she met her son there in the field.
The blood on his hips had long gone rusty,
and the wounds by thorns pierced the mother’s heart.
Without the aureole, her face a little wrinkled,
between the creases of her dress the fragrance
of the glades,
in the shade of the cross, the widow was seated.

“Sweet son of mine,
they jailed my heart in stone,
and I would like to live again.
Why ever is your and my plight
so often engraved in stone,
and at my feet cold candlesticks placed?
I wish I were like other women,
with joy as part of me, not only suffering.
Bare-footed, I would like to step on the primrose.”

“Sweet mother of mine,
I wish that not my bood but love would save humankind.
For is it not enough
that in their hands grain waits for salvation,
and that its blossom bears the whole heaven’s weight?
May this mouldering stone fall off our shoulders,
and towards blue skies the captive heart be set free.
May all the statues come out of the dark
and may all the saints be changed to people
from that land of butterflies and forget-me-nots.

The pious villagers discover that their Virgin has gone missing and rush out to look for her.

Meanwhile, she, in a robe of ripening rye,
her hair uncombed, unwashed,
after the simple village people’s habit,
rushes toward the brook, its waters chilly in the morning.
In her fingers she holds wind, like a comb,
running it through her long hair. . . . .

They did not recognize her as they rushed past,
they saw only their meadows and their fields,
and by the brook, a peasant maid—
a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave. . . .
They did not recognize her.

At length, the searchers return without success, but news spreads that
Some lads who grazed goats on the slopes,
as it were, found Mother of God.
She was well and in good health.

They tell their story to the doubting elders:
“Well, as we grazed our goats there in the fields,
there she was, sitting amidst the farmhands relishing buttermilk.
Each of them shared his bit with her.
Like on the altar, her hair was of gold,
only in place of the halo she wore a flowered scarf,
and she was wiping sweat off her brow,
as if she’d been with us for ages.”

All the elders can do is mourn over what they have lost. But the story concludes:
Mother of God, cousin of rowan-tree, clear as a flame,
has found her Christ
in these lads full of life and strength.
What use would she have for the dark church
with its candles’ tears,
if now all around she saw the sunflowers agleam.
The good mother of springs and light,
without whom, it’s said, not even daises will reach bloom,
lives on in our midst, eternal.

It’s a happier ending, isn’t it? And it’s an attractive story. The saints, for a moment, become people and simple working folk become saints. We go out of the church to a warm spring day. And we humans are at peace not only with one another but with the whole world—the goats, the sunflowers, the primroses, the daisies, the cold water from the brook, the wind. Mary is as close to us as nature itself.

But right at the heart of it all is that question Mary asks Jesus, “Why ever is it that your and my plight is engraved in stone?” And Jesus’ answer: “I wish that not my blood but love would save humankind.” Yes, how deeply we wish that. What attracts us in this story is a kind of picture of heaven, where harm and hatred and cruelty and suffering and alienation are things of the past.
I believe we were starting to think, not so long ago, that we ourselves were coming within sight of such a world. A world of democracy, respecting the sacredness of human rights, discovering a new sense of justice toward the creation as well as toward one another. The whole world has had a rude awakening from that dream. Not that the dream is dead, not that it is no longer worth working toward. It is still the goal of every loving heart. But we see now that the path will be more rugged and perilous than we had thought.

And God, confronted with this reality, does what? This is what the Passion Story today has been telling us. It’s not enough for God to join us only in the moments of sunshine and flowers and butterflies. If God is going to be with us in our world, God has to be with us even in the worst that our world deals out. If God is to be with us in such a way, the Passion story becomes inevitable.
The other story that I set alongside it, the one that ends with Mary watching over our human life and joy—there is no direct path that can lead us, once for all, to that one. But hang onto it, anyway. It is an image of heaven, an image of the life Jesus wants to invite us into even as he walks the Way of the Cross. The goal of the Passion Story is not the cross, but life lived in the power of God’s love.

This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, 2019 at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. It draws heavily on Milovan Bureš’s poem translated by Hilda Hearne as “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” I have taken it from the booklet to the Supraphon CD of Cantatas by Bohuslav Martinů, performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Lukáš Vasilek. Copyrights by Ms. Hearne (2016) and Supraphon (1993).
Incidentally, Martinů’s music for this piece is wonderful! I highly recommend this recording.