Mark 11:1-11

03/28/10
Mark 11:1-11
Hudson UMC

Just five weeks ago, we heard John’s account of the Triumphal entry into Jerusalem. That reading came up in the normal course of our plowing our way through the Gospel of John. Here we are, five weeks later, considering the same story, only now, we come across it, not as pure chance on our way through a particular book, but because we find ourselves in a very specific time of year. Today we consider this event, not just as the next thing in the story of Jesus’ ministry, but because today we are entering into Holy Week, where we remember the last few days before Jesus was executed. We will have several worship services this week to commemorate these significant days and to help us to sustain our thinking and thanksgiving about what God has done for us.

I mentioned that we are thinking about the same story that we thought about a few weeks ago, so there might be some people who wonder why we are going over the same ground again. You might raise the question, “Why didn’t you just skip that passage in John and use it today instead of preaching on the same story twice.” Well, that had crossed my mind, but, in a way, it isn’t quite the same story. When we thought about John’s telling of the story, I emphasized the ways that the radically different context of John actually highlights different things in the story.

Because what I have to say depends so strongly on the context of this passage in Mark, I want to remind you of two major things. The first is that none of the Gospel writers make any kind of claim to be telling the story of Jesus in absolutely chronological order. We read the same stories in different orders depending on what Gospel we are reading, but that should not bother us. After all, we will often tell people stories where we don’t make any point to set it at a particular time and place, and yet the stories are still absolutely true. Most of the time, whether the story you are telling happened last Wednesday or a year ago last Wednesday doesn’t really matter. The story is not dependent on that particular detail in order to be true.

The other major thing I want to remind you of is that the entire ministry of Jesus is not and indeed can not be exhausted by any individual gospel or even all of them together. John tells us at the end of his version of the events that, if we wrote down everything Jesus did and said, the world not be able to even contain the books that would be written. This is important because it means that, whenever anyone tells the story of Jesus, they select some stories and teaching and pass by others. This is not meant to hide anything or to falsify the facts, but simply out of necessity. You can’t relate everything, so you have to choose what you do relate and how you arrange it will speak as loudly as the words themselves do. Think about it this way. If you were to go through the four gospels that we have and put together a new Gospel to help people who live in Hudson learn about Jesus, what would you pick and how would you arrange it? Whether you mean to or not, those choices will reflect this time and place and the points that you want to make sure you get across.

All of this is to say that, even though this event is something that actually happened in Jesus’ life and each of the gospels includes this scene, Mark is trying to bring out different ideas than John was. This doesn’t make it any less true, but it means that we shouldn’t be surprised if we see it with different eyes. However, it means that we are going to have to take a few minutes and understand some of the major themes in Mark and where this story falls in his account.

Mark emphasizes more than any other Gospel writer that, in the ministry of Jesus we have the clashing of two forces, the force of God and the forces of evil. Just the presence of Jesus causes evil spirits to cry out for mercy. When Jesus is among people, their evil thoughts are known to Him and He points them out, bringing the evil that nobody would ever have known about because it was so carefully hidden out into the open and confronting it with the very presence of God. When Jesus is accused of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, He rejects the claim and says, “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” Throughout the whole Gospel, Jesus is portrayed as the one who is stronger than the strong man, the one who has the strength and authority to overturn the kingdom of evil.

The other major theme that is important to talk about is the way that Mark uses geography in his Gospel. For Mark, where he has a particular story taking place is extremely important. For example, Mark tells of Jesus feeding five thousand people on the West side of the sea of Galilee, where the Jews lived and four thousand people on the East side where the Gentiles lived. He didn’t forget he had already told basically the same story; he was making a very distinct point, that God’s work in, through, and as Jesus Christ breaks down the barriers that stand between people, even those so serious as the one that divided Jews and Gentiles. You get a little bit of theological use of geography in other gospels, but nobody uses it as much as Mark does.

The reason that I bring this is up is because almost exactly halfway through Mark, Jesus gets as far away from Jerusalem as He ever does. He is way in the north in the villages of Caesarea Philippi. What is significant is that, from that moment on, Jesus makes a steady journey south, straight to Jerusalem. On the way, He explains to His disciples three times that He is going to die and be raised from the dead. There are two points that I want to make about this. First, that Jesus is on His death march. He knows exactly what is happening and what He will suffer once He gets to Jerusalem. He is on the brink of suffering a painful and terrible death for you and for me and He did so willingly and with open eyes. The other thing is that it almost seems as if Jesus is making a final charge on Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is a very important city in the Bible. It is called the City of David, but even he did not found the city. He took it over from the Jebusite people but built it up and made it his capital. Under Solomon, it became a center for culture, wealth, and the location of the Temple. During Jesus’ time and in the early church, because it was where the Temple was and, for the church, because it was where Jesus was put to death and resurrected, it was referred to as the City of God. Indeed, the location of the city is so important that, even today, people are fighting over it. It was called the City of God, but nothing could be further from the truth. In Mark, Jesus does not come to Jerusalem until this last minute. What does it say about a city if, when God takes on human flesh, He avoids it? What is more important is that we see that the leaders from Jerusalem are the ones who set themselves most fully against Jesus. Jesus is marching into the heart of human evil, to the one place where, more than anywhere else, human beings have usurped the authority of God for themselves and used it to rule over the people, and the very presence of Jesus is going to cause the whole situation to erupt into an explosion of conflict between the ways of human beings and the ways of God.

This invasion of God into our life and situation is exactly what we are celebrating during Holy Week. This entry into the heart of human rebellion shows us that God is not afraid of our evil, is not afraid of our stubbornness, is not afraid of our shortcomings. God never leaves the work undone, but sees it through, even when it costs more than we could possibly imagine. This is one of the most decisive moments in all of history. The first and greatest use of geography to tell us something about God is when Jesus was born and, for the first time ever, God stepped into our world of space and time. We read that Jesus is called Immanuel, “God with us.” Truly, God was with is in a way that He never was before. He was not only with us in spiritual ways, but with us in our every day lives of flesh and blood. When Jesus came to Jerusalem, He was intensifying His presence, but it was nothing new; He was just bringing to a climax what He had already started thirty some years before.

Here, in the story of Palm Sunday, we have a brief glimpse of God’s kingdom breaking in. Before this time, to most people, Jesus was just an itinerant preacher, wandering around the region of Galilee. The peasants liked Him and the religious leaders hated Him, but He was just a preacher, carrying on the long tradition of prophets in Israel. Here was have an impromptu parade. Jesus riding an animal rather than walking for the first time. In fact, since people who were coming to Jerusalem for Passover were expected to walk in if they were physically able to, that Jesus choice of this moment to ride a colt is extremely significant. He is riding, not because He is tired, but because He is making a point, that He is Israel’s king, even if He doesn’t live in a palace and never will. He is the ruler of the people of God, even though Pilate, Herod, and others are the ones who have stolen that right from Him. Nobody planned the event, but a crowd of people all of a sudden get a tiny bit of understanding of who Jesus is and they cannot contain themselves but feel compelled to celebrate.

In Mark, even more than in the other Gospels, it is emphasized over and over again that the people who seem to be on the inside really don’t understand and those who seem to be on the outside, and them only, are the ones that really do get it, who can see with eyes of faith. It is because of this running theme that Mark is perhaps the most dangerous Gospel to read in the church, because it calls us to reflect on ways that we might not be understanding Jesus while those outside of our walls, who seem to be living in darkness and shame, who are our modern equivalents of the tax collectors and prostitutes, might see a Jesus that we have learned not to see in our world of comfort and security. Where we often look for a Jesus who is going to provide us with a stamp of approval on our status quo, those who have not grown up in the church are often met with a Jesus who radically challenges their lives and, in doing so, transforms them into new people whose faith is often greater than we can imagine.

But regardless of those who we think are on the inside or outside, we have Jesus overturning all of our preconceived notions about everything. The God of the universe becomes a man, not a man who spends all His time being catered to, but living among the poorest of the poor, sleeping on the ground, being misunderstood and attacked by the leaders of the day. His riding on the colt in this one instance highlights the fact that, for the rest of His ministry, He refused special treatment, but showed compassion on those the world had thrown out. Here comes God into the city that is supposed to be dedicated to Him and, just for a moment, receives a joyful welcome. Yes, that welcome soon fades; yes, God quickly finds Himself unwelcome in His own city, but for one moment, people throw their dignity to the wind and welcome Jesus.

Jesus came to invade our world, to launch an attack on the ways of human beings that have strayed entirely too far from their Creator. God does not sit idly by and hope things work out for the best; He does something about it, He gives of Himself to right the wrongs. Everything that human glory stood for was about be turned upside down and Jesus’ attack on the corruption of Jerusalem in Mark’s Gospel begins with His storming the Temple and exposing the sin that was entrenched in the place set aside for worship. And yet, in spite of the fact that all the leaders of the people, and especially the religious leaders, thought that what Jesus was doing was the worst thing ever, He did not stop but pressed on until He had finished what He came to do.

This matters to you and to me because, if we give our lives to God, it will only be a matter of time before we see God standing against something in our lives. Perhaps it is how we use our time; maybe God convicts us of a tendency to gossip and show one face to some people and another to others; often, He challenges us in how we spend our money. No matter how God’s judgment manifests itself in our lives, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel, no matter how much we might think that God’s ways are not the best for us because they go against our way of thinking and our plans for our future, we have the divine promise that, as we are changed, we are changed for the better. As God attacks the sin in our lives, it may hurt for a time, but God died for us to live, and we can trust the God who does that to do nothing but the best. The ancient church liked to use the image of a surgeon inflicting pain in order to remove a dangerous infection or other problem. That image must have been even more potent in those days before anesthesia.

So, as we have gathered to celebrate the welcome that the least of society gave to Jesus as He entered into Jerusalem, to greet Him as He joined them in their celebration of the work of God, let us welcome Jesus into our lives; again, or for the first time. Words cannot express how important it is that we are ever welcoming God to do His will in our hearts and lives. And yet, we must not stop there. We are in the climax of the season where we remember and celebrate the incredible self-giving of God for each of us that we might have life and not death. Let us be joined in Christ’s mission by giving of our selves to others so that they too might have the life of Christ dwelling inside of them. Let us pray.
AMEN