Coronavirus Pandemic Palm Sunday

 

 

Palm Sunday, 5 April 2020  by Rev. Jerry Eve

 

Hello everyone, I’m speaking today from the Manse Garden. I’ve a little palm cross with me because it’s Palm Sunday, but it’s another palm I’d like to talk about, and that’s the one on your hand. Mine have never been cleaner, and yours will be the same. I hope the skin’s holding up.

 

I want to mention two people, and the first is Thomas Chalmers, who was from Anstruther. He’s someone who, when attending classes in Scottish Church History, I used to abbreviate as TC in my notes; so much so that I began to almost think of him as Top Cat. He’s been described as ‘Scotland’s greatest nineteenth century churchman.’ But like that other TC, he too was smart – he wrote Encyclopaedia Britannica entries on mathematical topics as well as Christianity. And, in the way he opposed the system of patronage by which Lairds were able to place their ‘men’ in what they thought of as ‘’their’ pulpits, he too cocked a snook at authority like Top Cat did with Officer Dibble (or Dribble), and stood up for all the little people.

 

It was Dr Chalmers who led a third of the commissioners during the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1843 to leave and found the Free Church instead. Known as the Disruption, he then set about encouraging not just new Church building, but libraries, penny savings banks, industrial schools, and wash-houses too. And it was for these, I always remember being told, that although it’s now been lost to history, he devised a new, and better, way, he claimed, for people to wash their hands.

 

The second is Pontius Pilate. And I just love the legend that tells us he was born here in Scotland – at Fortingall. But let me read Matthew 27:24:

 

When Pilate saw that it was no use to go on, but that a riot might break out, he took some water, washed his hands in front of the crowd, and said, “I am not responsible for the death of this man! This is your doing!”

 

To wash our hands then, in a metaphorical sense, is to absolve ourselves. It’s a fascinating conversation Jesus and Pilate have (“And what is truth?” for example, Pilate asks), and there is much we could say about it.

 

But today, if I have any message in the run-up to Easter we call Holy Week, then it would be to say: Yes, do ‘wash your hands’ in the way Thomas Chalmers meant, but never in the way that Pilate did.

 

Pilate ought to have had the courage of his, and his wife’s, convictions, and done the right thing by an innocent man. And world leaders today need to do the right thing too, and together accept responsibility. For viruses recognise no borders, and if this one is to be defeated, then neither must they.

 

And once coronavirus has been conquered, my hope and prayer is that, as a world community, we can then turn our attention in the same way – and every bit as zealously – to other world ills.

 

And now an old Irish blessing:

 

May the road rise to meet you

May the wind be always at your back

May the sun shine warm upon your face

And the rains fall soft upon your fields

And until we meet again

May God hold you in the PALM of his hand, Amen.

 

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