Spiritual Sunday
In today’s Advent poem, Richard Wilbur references a Palm Sunday passage, which is confusing until you realize that both Advent and Lent express the belief that dawn will break following the darkest hour. God will enter the world in the bleak midwinter and Love will triumph over Death come the spring.
Upon Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Pharisees disapprove of the adulation Jesus receives. There is no silencing the joy the world feels at the prospect of new hope, however. If humans were forced to “hold their peace,” Jesus tells the naysayers, then the stones themselves “would immediately cry out.”
Wilbur’s poem has the feel of a ballad with its repeated fourth line and its simple diction. The poem proceeds through a series of opposites: a simple stable-lamp wakes the sky, straw shines like gold, a barn harbors heaven, a stall becomes a shrine, a child rides in triumph, dull stones pave the roadway to a kingdom.
In the Christmas story, angels appear to shepherds and divinity takes human form in a manger. On Palm Sunday, children sing Hosannah as Jesus rides in on a donkey. As “the low is lifted high” and stars bend their voices, we encounter the promise of worlds reconciled.
A Christmas Hymn
And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. – St. Luke XIX.39-40
A stable-lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine.This child through David’s city
Shall ride in triumph by;
The palm shall strew its branches,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
And lie within the roadway
To pave his kingdom come.Yet he shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
For stony hearts of men:
God’s blood upon the spearhead,
God’s love refused again.But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.