Homily for Orthodox Christian Palm Sunday at St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church, Lewisburg, PA, today (April 15, 7532, or 4/28/24 on the civil calendar), following the account in John 12:1-18.

There is a Russian Orthodox animated film from nearly a decade ago called Seraphima’s Extraordinary Adventures. It tells the fictionalized but historically contextualized account of a young girl whose life is forever changed on Palm Sunday or Holy Sunday. A group of armed revolutionaries burst into the Church where her Father is priest and where she and her family and other faithful are celebrating the start of Holy Week, looking ahead to Pascha. The Bolsheviks take away her father, who is then killed. The Church is vandalized and looted and blown up. Seraphima is taken away from her mother and sent to a Soviet orphanage for re-education away from her faith. Yet with God’s help and the prayers of her mother and of her martyr-father and the intercession of her patron Saint Seraphim of Sarov, Seraphima remains faithful and experiences a new life in Christ at the end, despite the historically accurate depictions of persecution of her Orthodox Christian faith. This account reminds us of a lesson from the Gospel reading today and our experience in Church and in procession of Holy Sunday: Between Holy Sunday and Pascha lies our commemoration of our Lord Jesus Christ’s betrayal, trial, Crucifixion and suffering. Then comes the Resurrection.

As Orthodox Christians, we can remember St. John Cassian’s explanation of the four ways of reading Scripture when considering today’s Gospel reading (John 12:1-18). First is the (1) literal reading, and we know this from our belief as Orthodox Christians in the historicity of the Gospels. Although slight differences in detail may exist between the accounts of the Four Evangelists, they are the united but distinct perspectives of four witnesses to the events in Jerusalem that changed the world almost 2,000 years ago. They represent their four inspired perspectives as sainted human beings who were witnesses and knew all the primary sources so to speak as well, starting with God’s own grace acting on our heart to bear witness of the Truth, Jesus Christ. The event in today’s Gospel reading also fulfilled the witness of prophecy, the words long before of the Holy Prophet Zechariah, in the context of all the witness across the Old Testament to Jesus’ coming.

Then there is the (2) moral reading or way of understanding. This convicts us as believers. Would we be with the crowd, hailing Jesus emotionally as king, only to turn on him later in that same week, through cowardice or apathy or being swayed by the malice of leaders of the establishment?  And to personalize it further, is this our attitude toward our faith? Do we cheer it when it is easy, and in effect ignore or deny it or even turn against it when we think it serves us to do so, to please others? Finally, on a very basic personal level, how in our own lives do we respond to short-lived worldly trials and triumphs, however small? There is a message here that we are not to pursue self-assertion but to lose ourselves in God to find ourselves.

To give an example, several years ago, I was elected Chair of my university department to lead about then 35 faculty by a landslide. Immediately after news of the results of the election, which was held by secret ballot, I drove to Michigan to a conference for work. On the way I was very full of myself. What a nice recognition and career success! Then, however, my email inbox began to fill with messages from those opposed to my election, who sought to overturn it, and really to ruin my career. Basically, their enmity came from falsely drawn allegations that my Orthodox Christian traditional cultural identity was not in accord with their modern secular elite-Eurocentric culture of sex, marriage, and family, and therefore I would not be in accord with university values and those opposed would not want to work with me. This became very stressful. Messages kept coming in, shared also with administrators and faculty in other departments. When I arrived in Michigan, I came to the room where I was staying with a former student, now a professor. He said when I laid down to sleep, exhausted from the drive and events, it was like a scene from the film The Exorcist. I was talking in my sleep and rolling my eyes, stressed out. Sic transit gloria: Thus passed earthly glory for sure, even when as silly as chairing a college English department. But the issues of bias and malice against me as an Orthodox Christian at work continued.

Unworthily, as a sinner I know I did not learn the lesson well of not being prideful. But, in talking with my spiritual father, I felt forced to stick more closely to prayer at work in the ensuing three years in that role, including praying for all by name silently at every department meeting. In that time, in God’s plan, perhaps sinner though I am I did some small helpful things for others, and maybe helped at least temporarily keep the window open a little to any students and colleagues with traditional Christian beliefs. In the year before I left, I was unworthily made a Reader in the Church, and following tradition began wearing my cassock to work on campus, as I did when made a Subdeacon, Deacon, and ultimately a Priest, thank God. I also at the end of my chairship received a research fellowship away from campus for a year at a topmost university, among a group of academic colleagues not biased and hateful, or acquiesing silently in the same, but supportive. I returned on weekends to serve at the mission and to be with my family during that time away. Meanwhile some alumni had begun supporting free expression on my home campus, including free expression of various cultural perspectives and faith, and their efforts helped me and my work on my return.

Sometimes the lesson of Holy Sunday can be replicated in small ways in our lives as followers of Jesus Christ. It reminds us of the humility and struggle that must precede or accompany our new life in Him, and in my case not to get carried away with what others think. That is most treacherous when it seems like others are thinking well of us. This is why we should Cross ourselves and say “Glory to God!” whenever we receive a compliment.

The third way of reading scripture is (3) allegorical. Here the entrance of Christ our Savior into Jerusalem can be taken as the precursor to the initial glory of the Church following the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. That initial glory and rapid growth was followed soon after by massive persecution of Christians by the pagan Roman Empire. But then would come the public establishment of Christianity under Emperor-Saint Constantine, with the emergence for centuries of the Christian Roman Empire as a place to nurture the Ecumenical Councils of the Church, and Orthodox mission work including to the Slavic peoples. Then, again, came in Russia the Tatar yoke of persecution, Westernization following Tsar Peter the Great disrupted the Church again, and within living memory the severe persecution under Communism. But the result of the Bolshevik yoke was the spread of Orthodoxy globally, including the Russian Church in exile of which this mission is a part. So, allegorically, for the Church initial glory combines with humiliation and persecution and requirements of real self-sacrifice, which lead to resurrection and new life, for all of which Holy Sunday shows us the pattern of the Church patiently bearing both suffering and triumph. The Seven Messages to the Churches in Revelation in Scripture can be read as messages to seven ages of the Church across all those varieties of experience.

Finally, the fourth way of reading Scripture is (4) anagogical or spiritual.  This way of reading can be taken to be about the after-life and the life of the age to come. To be reborn in Jesus Christ, our baptism by immersion, as we saw yesterday on Lazarus Saturday again at the baptisms of our new mission members, signifies our death and rebirth in Him. Likewise, we all must pass through the humiliation and trial of physical death, even with any spiritual glories that have been given us unworthily at the end of our lives, or earlier on earth, by God’s grace. In this we, God willing, will find the Kingdom of Christ our Savior. It is a Kingdom not of this world. We also learn with the good the lessons that the people of Israel experienced at great cost in the aftermath of the Entry into Jerusalem, their fickleness and their exile, spiritual lessons that we also commemorate today. With God’s grace and faith, in the bosom of His Church, tragedy transformed into a part of the story of Israel’s global spread as the Orthodox Church. How much more so does God’s grace open up for us the New Jerusalem in the life of the age to come. As one of our American missionary saints put it, the Serbian St. Nikolai Velimirovich, the Sunday of the Entry of our Lord into Jerusalem is also a time to remember how: “No one in this world is happy unless he has opened wide the gates of his spiritual Jerusalem – his soul – and received God into himself. A godless man feels lonely to despair. The society of others does not make his loneliness go away, but only increases it. However, he who has taken God into his soul will never feel lonely even in a desert. No one dies an eternal death other than one in whom God has died.”

Brothers and Sisters, may we say, “Hosanna, blessed is He Who cometh in the name of the Lord,” knowing that it is Jesus Christ Himself Who comes, and that we follow Him this week unworthily walking in his struggle, death, and Resurrection. All this He did for each and all of us. Glory to God for all things!