Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fifth Sunday of Lent 2026

Every generation learns its own language of lament, a deep cry of sorrow. There are the private griefs we carry quietly; illness, loss, and disappointment. We gather in a place where stone remembers what people often forget. Here, the powerful have knelt sometimes humbly, sometimes reluctantly perhaps, before a truth greater than power itself. This place reminds us that history is not neutral. It judges us. We meet today in a world whose order is fractured, economically, politically, morally. The postures of cooperation that once held nations together now strain under the weight of suspicion. Markets move faster than mercy. Borders harden while hearts grow weary. Systems built in the language of progress too often deliver inequality, extracting wealth while eroding dignity. Too many flourish because others are forgotten. Let us be clear: injustice is not accidental. It is designed, normalized, and defended. When systems reward accumulation over compassion, when they treat people and the earth as expendable inputs rather than bearers of sacred worth, they stand indicted. Scripture reminds us that God hears not only prayers but also cries, especially the cries produced by an unjust order.

And it is here that we begin to see more clearly, that what binds these generations together is not only praise, but protest; not only thanksgiving, but lament. For lament is not a failure of faith; it is one of its most truthful expressions. Lament dares to speak the truth before God. It is the prayer that arises from a stubborn, wounded faith that continues to cry out, trusting that even in the depths, it is heard.

On this Passion Sunday the Church invites us to stand within that truth. This is the day when the Christian year begins its solemn turning toward the road that leads toward betrayal, violence, injustice, and death. The shadows of the cross lengthen across the Gospel story. We do not approach that story as distant observers. We approach it as people who know something of suffering ourselves and who live within a world where suffering is painfully visible.

The voice we hear in the Book of Lamentations emerges from precisely such a world. It speaks from the ruins of a city destroyed. A people scattered. The structures that once gave life meaning have collapsed. Faith itself trembles under the weight of catastrophe. The words are stark: “The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall.” (Lamentations 3:19), powerful images of bitterness and anguish. There is no attempt to soften the truth. The Scriptures allow grief its full voice. They do not silence the cry of pain. Instead, they give that cry a place within the life of faith. And that matters. Because the world often pressures us to look away from suffering, to accept injustice as inevitable, to learn the dangerous habit of indifference. But lament refuses indifference. Lament remembers. It remembers the victims of violence. It remembers those whose suffering the world would prefer to forget. It remembers that injustice exists, and that it wounds real human lives and the life of the earth. To lament is therefore not only an act of faith. It is also an act of moral clarity. And perhaps that is why the Scriptures preserve lament so faithfully. They know that faith which cannot weep for the world will soon lose the ability to love it. Yet within this cry from Lamentations something unexpected happens. Without warning, the voice shifts. In the midst of devastation comes a quiet but astonishing declaration: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:21-23). The ruins are still ruins. The suffering has not disappeared. The injustice has not yet been undone. Hope does not arise because the circumstances have improved. Hope arises because something deeper is remembered: God’s faithfulness and God’s justice. Not a denial of suffering, but a stubborn conviction that cruelty, violence, and injustice do not have the final word in the story of the world. Hope is then an act of resistance. It is the refusal to believe that the brokenness we see around us is ultimate.

And it is precisely at this point that the Gospel leads us onto the road with Jesus. Saint Matthew’s account holds together two movements that seem irreconcilable. Jesus speaks with stark clarity about suffering and death, while the disciples drift toward dreams of rank, proximity and power. The request for seats at his right and left is, in a tragic irony, a request for the places of crucifixion, positions that will indeed be occupied, but by unnamed criminals. What the disciples imagine as glory is, in truth, participation in self-giving love: “You do not know what you are asking.” (Matt. 20:22). Power often seeks elevation without surrender, recognition without suffering, a high seat without a cross. The logic of the Kingdom is where greatness is measured by proximity to suffering and authority is expressed as self-emptying.

This is why the healing of the persons who are visually challenged is not incidental. They see what the disciples cannot. They name Jesus rightly, “Son of David” (Matt. 20:30), yet ask only for mercy, not status. Their cry cuts through the noise of competing ambitions. In them, we glimpse the true posture of discipleship, that which is not grasping, but pleading; not climbing, but receiving insight. And once they see, they follow, not toward earthly glory, but along the same road that leads to the cross.

This is the invitation that Passion Sunday places before us. Not simply to remember the suffering of Christ, but to allow that suffering to reshape how we perceive the suffering ones around us and the groaning creation. The cross reveals a God who does not abandon the wounded; a God who refuses to look away from pain, a God whose love persists even when confronted by violence and death. And if that is true, then those who follow Christ are called to the same stubborn faithfulness; to resist indifference; to stand with the most marginalized of the earth; to refuse the quiet lie that injustice is simply the way things must be.

None of this is easy. (At least in the place that I come from). Yet the Christian story insists that love, even costly love, is never wasted. Because the power revealed on the cross is not the power of the moment. It is the power that shapes the present and the future; the power that refuses despair in lament; the power that continues to create hope in places where hope seems impossible. Passion Sunday does not ask us to admire the cross from a safe distance. It asks something more unsettling. It asks whether we are willing to see the world as God sees it; to see its beauty and its suffering, its dignity and its injustice. And having seen, to follow Christ on the road of mercy and justice. Not because suffering is good. Not because pain is holy; but because love refuses to abandon the world. Amen.