Brave Heart

Psalm 31

Palm Sunday

April 14, 2019

William G. Carter

Blessed be the Lord,

for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was beset as a city under siege.

I had said in my alarm, “I am driven far from your sight.”

But you heard my supplications when I cried out to you for help.

Love the Lord, all you his saints.

The Lord preserves the faithful, but abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily.

Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.

“Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.” It’s clear why the church has chosen this Psalm for Palm Sunday. Jesus is riding his donkey into a city that will kill him.

According to the Gospel of Luke, he can foresee what will happen: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed (9:22).” It is the inevitable clash between God’s servant and God’s rebellious people.

Have an stories about courage? Here's one. When we took our three daughters to Scotland, I promised we would not wear them out with a lot of sightseeing. The agenda, I said, is one island, one cathedral, and one castle. The island was the mystical island of Iona, which did not impress them at all. They like watching the puffins who accompanied our boat ride. The cathedral was the Glasgow Cathedral. “A big, empty church,” said one of them; they were far more impressed with the Necropolis, the enormous hilltop cemetery which gives you a great view of the whole city.

But the castle was the Stirling castle. They agreed that was really cool. They gazed at the tapestries in the Great Hall, sized up the suits of armor along the walls, and stared at the skull of a medieval soldier who must not have been wearing a helmet.

We walked along the ramparts, gazing out on the River Forth and the foothills of the highlands. One of them pointed across the valley. “What’s that?” I looked at the map and said, “That’s the National Monument to William Wallace.” They said, “Who’s that?”

I almost said, “Did you ever see the movie ‘Braveheart,’” but thought, that’s not a movie I want my children to see. So I simply said he was one of the great freedom fighters of Scotland, back in a very brutal time. He fought valiantly against Edward 1. His death became the inspiration by which Robert the Bruce led the army to win the country’s freedom at the Battle of Bannockburn.

Then one of them said, “How did he die?” Again, that was not something I wanted to describe to the women of my family. I said, “It was a brutal death. Let’s just leave it at that.” And I thought about his courage. Captured near Glasgow, he knew his end was near, yet he remained strong and courageous, come what may.

That’s a Celtic story I recall as we begin Holy Week. The biblical story is that Jesus rides down the hill into a city he loves. He has set his face toward Jerusalem for half of the Gospel of Luke. It is clear he knows what this will mean. There is no premonition that things will turn out well, no easy assurance that the opposition will disperse or the troubles will evaporate. Yet he goes into the city, as an amazing act of courage.   

Have you ever thought about this? How courageous Jesus must be?

The road is easy when the crowds are cheering and everybody is excited to see you. They celebrate the great work he has done, and start singing at the top of their lungs when he appears. There are critics, of course. The Pharisees don’t want any trouble from the Romans for the Passover holiday. Some of them say, “Teacher, tell your disciples to be quiet.” Jesus keeps going.

He comes around a bend in the road and sees the whole city spread out before him. He stops the donkey to wipe the tears from his eyes. The crowds are still cheering behind him, but ahead of him is trouble. Before Jesus ever appeared on the scene, one prophet after another has gone into the Holy City to tell the truth about God. None of them had a pleasant time of it. Many of them didn’t live to tell about it. And Jesus keeps riding.

It’s the courage of the Christ that connects to the painful psalm that we put into the air this morning. If we were to simply hear it, we would think, “Here’s a person in a whole lot of trouble.”

“Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also… I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me…For I hear the whispering of many— terror all around!— as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.”

This is the kind of psalm that we usually skip over. It begins and ends cheerfully enough, but in between, it doesn’t sound like things are going to work out very well. The probability of embarrassment is high. Humiliation is going to happen right out where everybody can see it.

It’s tempting to skip over all of this and move on to something cheerful, just like it’s tempting to skip from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the alleluias of Easter. In between, you could miss what really happens. And that’s what Jesus, with all courage, rides down the hill to face.

Clearly this is somebody who trusts in God. He looks to the Lord and says, “My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love.” There is no question in my mind that Jesus prayed this psalm as he enters the city one last time.

He knew the psalms. He surely knew this one. In his last breath on the cross, he speaks Psalm 31, verse 5: “Into your hand I commit my spirit.” It’s a prayer of quiet trust, on the order of “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” It’s the final laying down of arms, the abiding affirmation that, no matter how real the darkness, God is in the midst of it all, and God will make things right.

There is a lesson here for us, a lesson on prayer, especially for Holy Week. When we come upon these honest, difficult psalms, pray them anyway. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr, said don’t dismiss the psalms that speak of pain. Rather, read them as the prayer of Jesus Christ. In his little book Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, he wrote, “It is the incarnate Son of God, who has borne every human weakness in his own flesh, who here pours out the heart of all humanity before God, and who stands in our place and prays for us.”^[1]

The bottom line of such a prayer: “Lord, into your hand, I commit my spirit. Save me in your steadfast love.”

Bonhoeffer knew this first hand. In a Nazi prison camp for working to get rid of Adolf Hitler, he scratched out a final poem. A psalm, really. The words were made into a song in our hymnal:

By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered and confidently waiting, come what may,

We know that God is with us night and morning, and never fails to greet us each new day.

Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented and evil days bring burdens hard to bear;

O give our frightened souls the sure salvation for which. O Lord, you taught us to prepare.

And when this cup you give is filled to brimming, with bitter suffering, hard to understand,

We take it thankfully and without trembling, out of so good and so beloved a hand.

Yet when again in this same world you give us the joy we had, the brightness of your sun,

We shall remember all the days we lived through, and our whole life shall then be yours alone.[2]

And when he had finished writing those words, he stepped out of his cell to face his accusers. The threat was real, the end was certain, yet he had the courage because he trusted in God.

So what are the challenges in front of you as we step into this Holy Week? Maybe there aren’t any visible enemies conspiring to take you down. Or maybe there are.

Just a week ago, one of my friends sat on this first pew on an afternoon when none of the rest of us were here. She was feeling overwhelmed and said, “What should I pray?” I offered her the prayer known as the “Breastplate of Saint Patrick,” which we have heard a number of times this Lent: Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me. Name the power of God in every direction, as a way to trust that, no matter what, we are loved and we will persist.

She said the prayer helped; when she left, she stood a little taller.   

Courage is not a character trait that we pull out of the air. It’s a gift that we tap from a great reservoir of trust. If we live through enough challenges, I suppose we can trust our own strength and move ahead with confidence. With time and proper mending, the woman who broke her leg can walk again. The child whose friends abandoned him can make other friends. The guy who loses his job can find something else purposeful to do.

But the deepest courage is a gift from God, the gift of hearing and trusting the Good News that our times are completely in God’s hands, and we don’t have to be afraid. I think of my friend and mentor Dick Armstrong, who passed away on March 11 at the age of 94. He was one of my seminary teachers. We kept in touch. I wrote music to some of his scripture-based poems, and one of them is in the file of our choir anthems.

I went to visit him in October when I learned he had pancreatic cancer. I walked into the assisted care facility, and here he comes on his walker, in coat and tie, his hair combed back like he was going on an interview. Big smiles, big hug, “How are you doing?” We found a piano in a lobby and played a duet. He insisted on buying my lunch. It was a great reunion, the last time we were together.

At one point, we talked about his disease. We both knew it was terminal. But then he sat up straight in his chair, clasped my hand, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “That’s why I put on the coat and tie, every single day. It’s my protest against the disease. The day I stop dressing up is the day I give in, and I’m never going to give in.” I will never forget that moment. The final lesson from teacher to student, from friend to Christian brother.   

It comes down to courage: to look squarely at death, destruction, sin, and despair, and declare, “You have no power over me.” Then you can look through them to the God who made us and loves us, and you can say to anyone with ears to hear, “Love the Lord, all you his saints. The Lord preserves the faithful. Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.”

And tonight, as the shadows lengthen and you prepare to close your eyes in sleep, you can pray with Jesus one more time, “Lord, into your hand, I commit my spirit.”

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1974) 20-21.

[2] “By Gracious Powers,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated Fred Pratt Green. Glory to God, 818.