The Things I Never Took - Palm Sunday
Sunday 13th April
Palm Sunday 2025
Psalm 69.1-20, Isaiah 5.1-7, Luke 20.9-19
In 2011 I moved from parish ministry in Cambridge to Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford and, as a Canon of the Cathedral was expected to attend Choral Evensong throughout the week, something which was new to me. I’d been to choral evensong many times before but never on a daily basis.
Gradually I got to know the choral repertoire, the different settings of the versicles and responses and the canticles and the huge range of anthems. But it was the psalms that got to me most.
One evening I was sitting in my stall. The appointed psalm was the one we heard earlier psalm 69. I was just letting it wash over me when suddenly I was overwhelmed by these words: ‘I paid them the things that I never took, God thou knowest my simpleness, and my faults are not hid from thee’.
I paid them the things that I never took. Quite suddenly I found myself in tears. I paid them the things I never took. Or, as a more modern translation puts it, ‘I gave back what I never stole’. I was simply overcome by the pathos of it. This poor person, described in the psalm as accused, shamed, trying to find solid ground, dry throated from crying, ‘I paid them the things that I never took’.
With the unexpected tears came a vague recollection of childhood humiliations, nothing specific or extraordinary, events which have happened to lots of people. I’m talking of times when I felt excluded from a group, or teased for wearing glasses. Though there were events I could remember, there was no single occasion, just an overwhelming sense of helplessness, which came with a desperate longing to make things good, to pay some unspeakable debt which I had never actually incurred. Take that experience and multiply it in millions of playgrounds and schools and businesses and homes. ‘I paid them the things that I never took’. ‘Must I now give back what I never stole?’
We now have words for what is happening to the one whose voice is echoed here in this psalm: gaslighting, bullying, abuse. More recently the words, ‘I paid them the things I never took’, ‘Must I now give back what I never stole’ brings to mind the Post Office scandal and the TV series about it last year. All those poor men and women baffled by the wrong numbers flashing up on their computer screens, and some trying to make up the missing money from their own resources, only to find themselves not only still in debt, but accused, persecuted, punished. I paid them the things that I never took. How human that is. And how tragic.
This psalm, Psalm 69, is one of those which seems particularly close to the Passion story as it is unfolded in the Gospels. The details are mirrored in the New Testament: ‘Zeal of thine house hath even eaten me…’ Think of the zeal of Jesus in the temple driving out the money changers. And later in the psalm, beyond the part we heard this evening, there are details which seem to echo, or rather foretell, the loneliness of Gethsemane and Jesus thirsting on the cross. The waters have come in, even unto my soul. My inmost self is inundated, drowning, turning to mush and chaos. This echoes the conviction found in the psalms and the prophetic books that God’s act of creation was a victory over primeval chaos. For the Old Testament writers this chaos was represented by the sea; turbulent, unpredictable, full of monsters. To be helpless in the sea was the worst possible fate. Think of Jonah, cast down, hair tangled in weeds, swallowed up by a huge fish.
The sufferer in the psalm is simply overwhelmed with no more tears to cry. And the root of it is the chaos of being alone, falsely accused, isolated, friendless, no one speaks for him or cares for him. Even his family have turned their faces away from him.
If the psalm reminds us of what happens to Jesus in the stories of the passion, it also illustrates a universal theme. Groups of people, institutions, companies, families, nations have a tendency to look for scapegoats, to pick on a person or a group to carry the blame for whatever might be going wrong. ‘The things I never took’ represent the failures of the group who have persuaded themselves that if only they can get rid of ‘x’ whoever ‘x’ is, everything will be well.
You have seen this scapegoating happen, I have seen it happen, in families, in schools, in parish churches and cathedral chapters, in diocesan offices, in factories, in political parties and choirs and sports clubs and pubs, between regions and nations and ethnicities. When things go wrong or there is discontent or even rumours of discontent the attention of thegroup begins to focus on a particular person who for one reason or another does not seem to have the ability to fight back, and they begin to attract gossip, scorn, criticism and eventually rejection. Quietly it begins to be murmured ‘X must go’. And unconsciously the group begins to isolate x, talk about them, blame them and manoeuvre their removal. It happens all the time. Awkward people, truth-tellers, whistle blowers, those of the wrong gender or the wrong colour or the wrong background, the angular and the critical and the over honest, and those in the wrong role at the wrong time. I saw it happen when I worked for the BBC. I saw it happen at Christ Church cathedral. It’s happening in the Church of England all the time in spite of all the effort and form filling and hand wringing that goes into our efforts at safeguarding.
The sufferer in the psalm eventually reaches the conclusion that even God has joined the opposition. A later verse has the words to God, ‘Thy rebuke hath broken my heart’. The sufferer is left, literally without a prayer.
This psalm provides a lens through which to look on the sufferings of Christ. Remember, those who persecuted Jesus, who delivered him, judged him and abandoned him were not simply wicked people. They were actually good people on the whole, merely convinced that by getting rid of Jesus they were doing something necessary, even virtuous, even that they were acting in defence of God himself.
And this conviction, the certainty of the self-righteous persecutor, gets through to the victim. Christ experiences the sense of guilt that we human beings pile on the innocent in the hope of saving ourselves. He is drowned, overwhelmed with shame and isolation, and perhaps a terrible sense that his whole mission from God has been a mistake from the start.
The passion of Christ moves us, year by year, not because it is about some unfortunate miscarriage of justice 2000 years ago, but because it echoes our human experience in the present tense. Yes, the waters do come in and flood our inmost souls through through the malevolent projections of others, and also through illness, depression, anxiety and grief. And yes, we find ourselves horribly alone and estranged. Yes, we cry out to God and even feel blamed by God. And yet, and yet.
I think we can be in little doubt that there is a woundedness in humanity, a wound which runs through our relationships and our inner lives. It is in part about envy, we want what others have; in part it is about fear, we are afraid of what others might to do to us; it is in part about violence, the rage that rises up within us when we feel threatened, it is in part about that deep loneliness which we seem unable to communicate to anyone, even God.
And this is the woundedness which God seeks to heal. God sends his Son into the world that the world through him might be saved. The point at which we are most conscious of pain is that point when the wound is opened up and cauterised.
Here is the hint that runs through the Holy Week story that it is only the victim who can save, only the rejected one who can gather us all in, only the one who is envied, victimised, excluded and destroyed who can return us to health and healing. Do not be afraid. By his wounds we are healed.
Thirsting on the cross,
your Son shared the reproach of the oppressed
and carried the sins of all
in him, O God, may the despairing find you,
the afflicted gain life
and the whole creation know its true king,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Canon Angela Tilby