HW: "My song is love unknown": shifting the strangeness of the story of Holy Week

A reflection for Palm Sunday, written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA. 

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
D08 F8NW
29 March 2026
Palm Sunday

Welcome
On this Sunday, exceptionally, we hear two Gospels. The chief one is the Passion according to Matthew but before that we have the Gospel of the Entry into Jerusalem. The Gospel of the Entry is an invitation to each one of us, too, to make our entry once again into the events of Holy Week. The story we are about to re-enact, to re-tell ourselves, is familiar, at the same time strange and always new. It is familiar, familiar to us all our lives — each element, each character, each anecdote is known to us. At the same time, the story is also also new simply because we are different with the passing of another year. 

Topic
The story is also strange… and I would like do dwell for a moment on that strangeness.

Steps
(1) It is strange, when you think about, to have the story of a judicial execution at the centre of our faith. Edwin Muir’s poem The Killing captures something of the strangeness in its final lines:

Did a God
Indeed in dying cross my life that day                                                                            
By chance, he on his road and I on mine?

In our western tradition, to add to the strangeness, Jesus’ death was traditionally understood as the price paid for Adam’s sin and Jesus’ suffering was the punishment that we all deserved. Such an understanding — never used in the churches of the East — no longer really makes sense to us today. We don’t really believe in God punishing anyone, much less his own beloved Son, even for the sin of Adam. We need a different way of looking at it all. The words of another poet can help here. In My Song is Love Unknown, Samuel Crossman wrote:

My song is love unknown,
my Saviour’s love to me,
love to the loveless shown
that they might lovely be.

The writer is picking up the central theme of the Gospel of John — a gospel which can help us gain a new and life-giving understanding of the events of salvation.

(2) In fact, in Holy Week, the Gospel of John stands on the centre of the drama of Holy Week: on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday we hear from John’s Gospel. On Thursday, we enact the washing of the feet, from John 13. This gesture is much deeper than might seem at first glance. With this apparently simple moral example, John’s Gospel is telling that Jesus’ death and resurrection are the disclosure of the God’s extraordinary love. As we read in the Gospel:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16) 

This love of God both serving and healing. In Mark’s Gospel we read
 
For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

The washing of the feet is graphic illustration of the paradoxical reversal of roles. Such a love is also pictured as healing.

And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. (John 3:14–15)

This is yet another graphic illustration, this time a therapeutic image of God healing humanity of sin and death and from the power and even the fear of death. It echoes the story of Moses helping the Israelites by lifting up the bronze serpent. On Good Friday, we hear the Passion according to John, the story of the lifting up of the Son of Man, on the cross and into resurrection, the story of our healing.

(3) Suddenly we are very far away from the received Western tradition. This is not a story of sacrifice to satisfy God’s just anger, a story of punishment, but the exact opposite: the disclosure of God — the lover who loves, the healer who heals, the Creator who paradoxically serves. Each aspect we understand: service, healing and love. In a sense, the strangeness of the story has shifted — no longer as story of anger and punishment but a story of unbelievable love, bordering on the incredible.

Conclusion
This is the great story we tell ourselves in Holy Week, in word and gesture and sacrament. It is a love story, the greatest love story ever told. Samuel Crossman closes his poem My Song is Love Unknown with these moving words:

Here might I stay and sing;
no story so divine,
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like thine.
This is my friend,
in whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend!

In Holy Week, we are called to allow ourselves to be loved beyond measure.