The campaign nears its end. The arrival in Jerusalem promises finally to trigger the social change so many anticipate for so long. The campaigner himself approaches the capital city without press agents, a media campaign or the latest poll. A few advance people circulate stories describing astonishing desert encounters, but for others the approach to Jerusalem stirs only expectation and rumors grounded in a colonial people’s yearning for freedom.
And the city itself? Excited, festive; the Passover celebrations getting underway; pilgrims pouring into the city, their memories and hope rekindled. After generations of colonial domination, they grasp at anyone who might break the foreign hegemony. The city swarms with zealots and prophets and terrorists and dreamers; but this latest campaigner, this Nazarene, this Jesus, seems to promise more than most. “Thus,” writes one commentator, “there is an abandon about the procession that leaves its neat and careful calculations at home in the ledger, snatches off its coat, throws its hat in the air and tosses on the road any token of devotion it can get its hands on.” Matthew implies an occasion equivalent to what? George Bush’s red carpet treatment in Lima, Peru, yesterday; the New England Patriots’ parading outside our front door, a triumphal entry, a grand celebration. And, in tribute to it, we do well to sing “All Glory, Laud and Honor.”
I
Or do we? Could our Palm Sunday rejoicing miss the point? Could this triumphal entry signify, to use the expression of one high government official about another matter, could it be this triumphal entry signifies “irrational exuberance?” Surely the previous three years demonstrated little to excite this kind of passionate public response. Remember? After traipsing around the countryside for three years taking flak from the religious establishment, picking up a stray enthusiast here and there, Peter asks, “Hey Jesus, what’s in this for us? We contributed early to your campaign, we threw in with you when your name recognition went barely beyond Nazareth. Now with this welcome in Jerusalem, you’ve made it! What’s in it for me? Can I pastor a big church? Will you assign me to a cabinet post? I’d love to be an archbishop!”
Talk about “irrational exuberance!”
“Oh, Peter,” replies Jesus, “How blind can you be? You receive no accolades, no prestige assignments in this enterprise. Simply know the joy of being available when a disintegrating relationship needs mending. I offer no spoils except the satisfaction of being party to a fresh start in a cleansed and forgiven life. Do you covet a special assignment? Go to the points where people hurt; where life falls apart; where healing and hope seem in short supply. That is all you’ll find in this endeavor; that’s what is in all of this for you, Peter.”
Or again, at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus, wanting some feedback from his friends, asks, “What’s the word about me out there? How am I perceived; what do the focus groups say about the planks in my platform, the direction of my campaign, the quality of my character?” His friends paw, jab, and cast about. “Some say, ‘It’s about time. You’re the one to take on Caesar.’ Others think you’re intent on founding a new religion.” And then Peter, again that prototype for well-intentioned, opaque and apostate disciples ever since, Peter says, “You’re the one we’ve been waiting for; the one who can attack and resolve our problems. You are sage, chief, hero. You are the Christ!”
“Oh, Peter,” barks Jesus ,” Do you know what Christhood entails? A trip to the capital steps, then a death sentence.” Peter, shocked, replies, “Since when does a Savior end up dead? That’s not in my plans.” And Jesus, exasperated at Peter’s misdirected enthusiasm, curses him, labels him an impediment to his mission, and junks Peter’s Satanic ambitions.
And as we have suggested, this Palm Sunday celebrity works out amid misplaced exuberance. Throughout his ministry Jesus steadfastly resists those who seek to cast him as the answer to their particular social dreams, religious visions, military designs, and psychological needs. He represents a social reality contradicting the one we live in or would design in its place shuffling around power hierarchies, ideologies and turf. Jesus proves an alternative to the orders we construct and try to accommodate. The new community he bears, with its racial and gender, its social and economic equality, its mutuality, service and interdependence runs counter to the illusions of that Palm Sunday crowd. They covet a crusader who can dump an oppressor, a charismatic guerrilla fighter who will chase out the colonialists. And thus, within a week, what begins on Palm Sunday as great promise ends up on Friday as sullen disillusionment. In those five days cheers stop, hosannas turn to sneers, hopes become phantom.
II
You see, Palm Sunday and Holy week finally bring to a head our Messianic expectations and the stark reality of our world’s stone wall resistance. The kind of world and human community Christ represents does not configure to ours, but rather turns it inside out. Palm Sunday pictures Jesus as the Christ riding into the teeth of political, social, religious, military power. The disciples expect him to confirm and coalesce these powers—and he does, but not as allies, rather as antagonists. Indeed, my friends, if we look carefully at those six days, Sunday to Friday, we will see something about Christ’s way in our world obscured by our Western Lenten traditions. Our Hymns during Lent and Holy week, the depiction of the Passion in Renaissance art, the personal piety of Roman Catholicism and the Reformation all magnify the vulnerability, the weakness, the innocence—the innocence—of Jesus. He dies as some melancholy, passive, pathetic victim surrendering to the powers that be. Nothing could be further from the truth. His world encounters ours and causes, first of all, friction, then finally a confrontation to the death.
Do you recall the first thing Jesus does when he arrives in town? He takes on the Temple machinery in vigorous and indignant dispatch. The Temple symbolizes the purity of Israel’s vision for a new human community. And what does Jesus find? He discovers in the precincts of that Holy Place financial deals for religious favors excluding the lame, the blind, the poor; he discovers cloisters set apart for practitioners who consider themselves religiously privileged; he finds Mafia types taking kickbacks on the sale of religious articles, indeed, a menagerie of petty law breakers sheltering themselves in the temple secure in the delusion that they hide in a safe place. “No way”, cries our lord. “Scripture says this shall be a house of prayer and you have made it a den of robbers.” And he drives out the religious racketeers, the exploiters of spiritual sentiment, corrupters of religious integrity. And friends, we see nothing shy in that confrontation, nothing melancholy; no sitting down with prelates to discuss the matter at hand; no appointing a committee to explore the processes of orderly change; no pleas for reason. Here lies outrage directed against a dissolute religious institution.
And our Lord might have avoided the Cross had he stopped there; but turning the temple upside down marks only the beginning. The parables of the last weeks reflect urgency, crisis, dramatic, decisive, almost cataclysmic choice. On one occasion Jesus makes clear to some of those who take their religious commitments casually, that those with no religious pretensions, the junkies and prostitutes, if you will, respond to the possibilities of the Gospel with an eagerness shaming the complacency of the religious elite in their self-righteous cocoons.
At another point, Jesus faces those calling themselves stewards of the Biblical hope, ministers of churches and seminary professors who lack the imagination, the tenacity, the profound commitment to put that hope to work; he calls them frauds and condemns them to existence beyond the pale.
Again, he indicates those of the so-called better classes who perceive of their privilege as a vested interest separating them from what they consider “the common herd,” rather than an opportunity for service, a high calling to pursue avenues for justice and fairness among the human family, he indicates forcefully they can take, as far as he is concerned, all they have and fry in hell.
What a week! We see here sentiments hardly calculated to win friends and gain a long life.
The themes of the Passion Week, you see, reflect neither passivity nor shyness. Our Lord confronts the way we do things in this world with an alternative that shakes us up and turns us off. The religious authorities and political power mongers of first century Jerusalem do not put crazies and passive, vulnerable pansies on the Cross. They put people there who threaten the order of their empires, their churches, their status quos, their best-laid plans. Jesus goes to the Cross as a consequence of an alternative quality of life those in power cannot stomach. When he refuses to call the Samaritan, the Roman, the Syrian an “axis of evil” but rather neighbor, brother, sister; when he includes in the Divine embrace those whom the respectable exclude; when he suggests we might really gain new truth from those outside, maybe even alien to our own culture and tradition; when he mocks those who confuse their political, military and economic objectives with the sanction and favoritism of God; when he insists the essence of the religious life lies not so much in the cultic practice as in throwing ourselves in the middle of the human crisis and counting of value nothing beyond Love’s agenda; when he shows himself to bear the social order of the future—a social order determined not by who’s up and who’s not, but rather a social order eradicating those barriers and power pyramids, a social order dissolving the racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural walls we live behind, a social order abolishing the fences of gender, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability we construct—when Jesus carries to our world this kind of human future, he sets himself up for rejection, exclusion, destruction.
Do you see, friends? We deal here with no soft touch, no bleeding, sad- eyed savior, meek and mild. Jesus possesses a great heart, to be sure, but he possesses conviction and integrity and these elicit the worst in his opponents. If only he pulled his punches on that last week, hung back just a little, prudently calculated the risks, accommodated sensibly to the way we want the world, there is every chance he might have avoided the Cross.
Why, then, in six days, do those Hosannas stop? Because in his person, through his words, by his activity, Jesus in that Holy Week bears truth about the way Love wants our world, setting in bold relief the way we want it and for many the Cross cannot come soon enough.
III
And so, friends, we stand this morning at the threshold of Holy Week; we stand confronted with Christ’s Way in our world. What happens on Friday occurs because all too frequently Christ’s way and our way conflict. Like Peter at his side so long ago, we persist in an incorrigible misunderstanding. Yet the choice lies before us still: his way, our way. God grant this week we may follow Christ to Jerusalem, choosing finally Love’s way, risking, with our eyes open always, risking the consequences of consecrated and loyal, courageous and compassionate discipleship.
Scripture Reading
Matthew 21:1-11
When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately. This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
“Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”