There’s something remarkably humbling about encountering the souvenirs of a moonshot.
The first thing that hits you is scale: just how BIG the Saturn V rocket is, how complex its engineering and construction, how focused its mission – all that hardware, assembled and operated … just to send trios of men to the moon and get them safely back to earth again.
The mechanical scale is one thing. The human scale, more impressive yet: how many thousands of people toiled in obscurity and anonymity to put it all together … from concept to design to manufacture to testing to training to monitoring to recovery to post-mission study (and who-knows how many other steps and disciplines in between).
Interesting, too, how the most celebrated moonshot – the mission that merits the only bronze statues inside Rocket Park at the NASA Space Center in Houston – is Apollo 13. “Hey, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
We tell ourselves “failure is not an option.” And then we let out a collective gasp of relief when it turns out (by the grace of God) to be true. Failure … chaos … malfunction … do not triumph in this moment.
Yes, impressive … on many different levels … are the artifacts of a moonshot. Human achievement, writ on a memorable tableau. And yet, “ancient history” too. You get a sense for that when you visit NASA with your grandsons … and spend at least some of the time explaining to their parents what it was like to live in the heady days of the Apollo program.
Time marches on. Eras come and go. Human accomplishments – even the biggest of them – eventually get relegated to museums.
How very different is the “mission lift-off” we experience in the liturgy today – Palm Sunday. It contains elements of glory, to be sure:
“Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; hosanna in the highest!”
But that’s just the start of the story, isn’t it? Soon enough, chaos, failure and malfunction take center stage in Jerusalem. And Jesus – the Son of David – winds up victim, not hero. Lifted up, not lifting off.
Still, we see there’s something remarkable about this Saving Victim. He descends. He accepts human failure – and by accepting it, blesses it from eternity on behalf of all of us.
This is surely a great mystery: God’s way, not our way. And so, we sing in wonder:
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
We sing … and as Holy Week begins, we rush forward to embrace a Power that is far beyond our own power to escape the gravity of a broken world.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 