What a great line. I hope you recognize it. It has become a famously misquoted quote from the Bogart classic, Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This was the reply of the “bandito” to Humphry Bogart’s question, ‘If you are police, show us your badges?” The gold-toothed bandito replies, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”
It is Palm Sunday. The palm is such a powerful symbol of our Faith. Deeper than that, it is a symbol (sacramental) of the One in whom of faith rests. The palm is a sign of Christ. It reminds us of both triumph and seeming tragedy…Acclamation and Betrayal…but most especially it reminds us of the Procession of Jesus to Jerusalem for one purpose. Not for a crown given by a crowd, but to embrace a cross to redeem them…and you and me. But for most, there will be not Palms this Sunday…fear of spreading an invisible virus has halted some distribution.
In Matthew’s Gospel narrative of the Passion of the Lord, there is a line that I believe can give us spiritual perspective, thoughtful reflection and comfort as we enter this holiest of weeks in our Christian calendar.
“They stripped off his clothes…” Mt. 27:28
These last four week of Lent have been “stolen” from us, in a way, by this global pandemic. Our churches closed, our Eucharist from afar, our community at a distance. All of the “things” for which we have become accustomed have been stripped away. Perhaps this is one of the gifts of the Covid-19. I truly think it is. As Christ was stripped, humbled, humiliated, and ultimately abandoned and crucified, so we are stripped bare of the familiar.
Think back to Ash Wednesday. What was your spiritual intention for this Holy Season? Still on the same course? If you are anything like me, you have been set in an unexpected direction. But here we are now, on Palm Sunday…and for some of us…we will not even have Palms. Just as Jesus was stripped, we are stripped. We are laid bare of all the things we sometimes cling to, that we may be freed to truly cling to Christ…and Him Crucified! We have been stripped bare so we can embrace our spiritual heritage.
Our faith rooted in the Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of our Savior Jesus Christ has been an experience of spiritual “stripping.” The Jewish Believers of the new way, were not only stripped of their place in local synagogues and the Temple itself, they were persecuted. Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles, while the greatest of evangelists, could not shed his past as a persecutor of the church itself!
This is our spiritual heritage. It has been stripped and laid bare for twenty centuries now, internally and externally. How have we been stripped in the past?
- Paul fought Peter over ritual
- Roman emperors used games and genocides
- Politics created a convenient marriage between the Church and Empire
- Church embraced power over faithful practice
- Leo excommunicated Luther and Luther walked away
- At times we chose armies over angels
- Iconoclasts broke windows and burned crosses and statues
- Enlightenment tried to put revelation of a book shelf
- Stripped bare … it is our spiritual heritage
- Iconoclasts broke windows and statues…
- Totalitarianism has tried to extinguish the Church’s light
- Secularism has tried to push Faith to the margins as fantasy
- And most recently, we as a faith community have experience broken trust by our leaders who hid secrets and sins of some clergy…protecting their place over the safety of its members.
All things stripped bare.
But I dare say, this could be our greatest Lent, Holy Week and Easter ever!! If being stripped, we embrace the cross like Jesus, walk the road toward Golgatha and by grace, allow ourselves to be crucifed with him, we know we shall rise with Him!
This is our spiritual heritage. This is our spiritual journey. Despite our sin and our infidelity…despite forces that rage against us, the Church, when stripped bare has proclaimed from its core, the depth of its FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST, Son of the FATHER. In Him and in the power of the Holy Spirit, God has kept his promise made to Peter. “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Mt. 16:18
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