Palm Sunday 2011

04/17/11

Matthew 21:1-11

Hudson UMC

As we come ever closer to the end of the season of Lent and towards that most joyful celebration of the Christian year known as Easter, we find ourselves considering the events of Holy Week, the last days that Jesus was ministering among the people until they put him to death.  I always find it interesting to reflect on the events of Holy Week because they seem to stir up the entire range of emotions.  What is perhaps amazing is that it isn’t that all the events, taken together, generate all the emotions, but that, in many cases, any individual event does so.

The reason for this is because it is during Holy Week that the holiness and majesty of God came into closest and most intense proximity with human brokenness and evil.  These events are simultaneously the most joyful events in of all history and they are, at the very same time, the most tragic and heartbreaking events.  As it is Palm Sunday, let me use the events of this day to demonstrate what I mean.  When I look at this story and think about how, in Christ, God is entering his very own kingdom and is being welcomed by the masses, I rejoice because that is how it ought to be.  When God comes, we should welcome him, we should stand and shout and wave banners, or palm leaves if that’s what we have.  We should get so excited that our God is here that those who do not love God would be absolutely baffled by our celebration.

However, when I look at Palm Sunday and I remember that this crowd of joyous celebrators will, in only a matter of a few days, reject the one they have welcomed; instead of crying “Hosanna!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” they will cry, “Crucify him!” I weep because that is just how we often are.  We get really excited that someone is coming or that something is going to happen and then, once the hype wears out, our excitement turns to indifference or even hatred.  I get so excited to think about the detail we hear from another Gospel, that if the people kept quiet, even the rocks would cry out in their place.  However, when I see just how short-lived those shouts of praise really were, it breaks my heart.  Theologically speaking, we could say that, when God comes close after seeming far away, we are overwhelmed with emotion and we are so happy that God has come, but when God keeps coming closer and closer, not stopping until we have been catapulted out of our comfort zone, and yet he comes closer still, we don’t react so well.

Let us consider what is going on in the story of Palm Sunday.  First, we need to ask ourselves what it is that we see in the story.  This doesn’t call for any deep reflection on the meaning of the text, but a relatively superficial reading of it.  We see that there is a crowd of people who are shouting praises.  The words we read are, “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!’”

It doesn’t take too much thought to realize that the people are welcoming a king to the city.  The crowd surrounds Jesus but does not hinder his traveling, they are laying out their garments and branches to “pave” this royal road, and they are shouting out, calling him the Son of David.  Now, it is true that Jesus was, ultimately, a descendent of David, but the real point being made by calling him this is that they are deliberately connecting this man Jesus of Nazareth, a Rabbi from Galilee, with the mightiest and most well-loved king from Israel’s past, the one of whom God said, “He is a man after my own heart.”  There is no doubt that the people see themselves as welcoming a mighty king.  Indeed, they are doing so, but we need to ask a few more questions.

What is a king?  This might seem like a silly question to anyone who has read their share of fairy tales, but I am being absolutely serious.  What, at the end of the day, is a king?  Judging by popular culture and the history of Europe, we would say that kings are people of tremendous power, who rule over a nation, often with absolute authority, though this is sometimes limited by some kind of parliament.  This power was gained, most often, either by killing or overthrowing the previous king, or by inheriting the throne from their parents.  They live in splendid palaces and are surrounded by an extensive entourage.  It is important to do what you can to curry their favor, either by serving in the king’s armed forces, or by making a special gift, or by setting yourself apart in some other way.  It is very important that you do this because, if you get on the king’s bad side, you might be put in prison, or worse.  Kings are powerful, they are fantastically wealthy, and they can, more or less, do whatever they want.

Perhaps that is a bit of a caricature.  Some would say, rightly, that not every single king in the history of the world has been quite like that.  But, if you speak to people, especially in America, where we are not all that excited about royalty, this is the kind of king they will often think of.  Though there indeed have been some, or perhaps many, kings who have loved their people and actually done whatever they could for them, there is a reason that various countries have revolted against their monarchy after generations of abuse by the ruling class.

Alright, if that is the kind of king that comes to mind for many people, we have another question to ask.  What does it mean that Jesus is king?  When we think about it, Jesus seems to be a pretty funny kind of king.  After all, he doesn’t have a large entourage, just twelve ordinary people like fishermen, tax collectors, and others.  He doesn’t live in a large palace.  In fact, he says, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  He is a homeless, itinerant preacher who is so far from living in luxury, he gave away all the money he had.  He doesn’t have an army.  He wasn’t in dialogue with other great leaders until he was on trial.

It almost seems like, if what we usually think of when we think of kings is the definition of what a king really is, then it is hard to believe that Jesus is a king.  On the flip side, if Jesus is the real definition of what it means to be a king, then we have to imagine that all these other things we associate with royalty might not have anything to do with being a king.  As Christians, we proclaim that Jesus is Lord, that he is God, that he is king.  What we need to realize is that, if it is Jesus who is king in its fullest and most absolute sense, whatever we mean when we say that other people are kings, we can’t mean it in the same way that we do when we say that Jesus is king.  The very fact of Jesus utterly transforms our understanding of the word “king.”

We find that, when we look at what we see in Christ, that all kinds of words get radically transformed, to the point that, if we aren’t very careful about how we use the words, we might be very much misunderstood by others, who are not using Christ as their center.  Just two chapters later in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says the somewhat astonishing, “Do not be called Rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers.  Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, he who is in heaven.”

We Protestants like to pull this text out to critique the Roman Catholic practice of calling their priests “father.”  I once read a famous Catholic biblical scholar who retorted, reminding us Protestants that we refer to people as “doctor,” that is, “professor,” as well as “teacher,” which is what Rabbi means.  I would take it a step further.  Even if we do not call our pastors “father,” we are not free of Jesus’ command.  After all, we call people “father” all the time.  We call our male parent “father” without a moment of hesitation.  People will often try to find a way to explain this practice to make it seem that those other people are violating Jesus’ words but we are justified in what we say.  And yet, when Jesus says, “Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, he who is in heaven,” we have to come to terms with the fact that Jesus fully intends to overthrow and radically redefine what we mean when we say “father.”  We will often talk about God being Father by starting with human fatherhood and then reading that kind of fatherhood back into God.  Jesus is saying that, if we really want to understand what fatherhood is, we must start with God, learn what it means for God to be Father, and then we can decide whether or not the male parents we know are really fathers like God is Father.

By coming and teaching us how we need to understand these words that seem to be so incredibly self-evident, Jesus is showing us in no uncertain terms that we need to be saved, not only from our evil deeds, not only from our natural inclination to take the place of God as the one who gets to call the shots in our lives, not only from our participation in the abusive and unjust social structures that exist all around us, but that even our words and concepts need to be redeemed.  If we look at this Jesus on a donkey (and an awkward donkey at that, since it had never been ridden on), surrounded by the dregs of society, waving branches instead of banners, and say, “Whoever this person might be, he is certainly not a king,” then we are told by the gospel that the problem is not with Jesus’ royalty, but with our understanding of royalty.  Such a reaction would mean that our whole way of thinking needs to be readjusted in light of who God actually is in light of God’s self-revelation in Christ.

As we continue into Holy Week, we must be prepared to have the framework of our knowledge shaken to its core.  When we see Christ hanging on a cross, we see a new definition of what victory is.  When we see Jesus forgiving those who betrayed him and interpreting his death as an atoning sacrifice for us all, we see a new definition of mercy.  When we see the Jesus we know as God in flesh sweating blood in the face of the suffering he was about to endure, we see a new definition of obedience and agony.  When we see the God of the universe laying down his own life for people like you and me, we see a new definition of love.  When we see Jesus interpreting his offering as taking our place and answering for us from within our personal responsibility, we see that even our way of understanding repentance needs to be reshaped.  In all of these, we see that our standard way of thinking does not even come close to doing the work of God justice.

Surely there has never been a time, either before or since, when God has so radically reshaped the world as we know it.  Surely there has never been a time when we have seen love manifested so powerfully.  If we place ourselves at the mercy of God, we will find that we begin to live differently, that we begin to speak differently, and that we even begin to think differently.  As we have taken this Lenten season to reflect and to sacrifice, let us even be prepared to sacrifice the definitions of our words and concepts, so that they might be molded and shaped by God.  Let us pray. AMEN