Scripture: Mark 11:1-11: John 18:33-38
As the title of the sermon might suggest, I have several things on my mind this morning, and when I started writing I wasn’t sure what would make it into the sermon or how it would all fit together. I do have Palm Sunday on my mind of course. It’s an important day in the life of the church, and the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem at the beginning of the last week of his life is naturally at the center of my thoughts. One way or another I need to interact with that story, privately and publicly. I have Palm Sunday on my mind. But I also have the war in Iraq on my mind. I would anyway, but especially so since it is the fifth anniversary of the start of that war this Wednesday, and so I have the war in Iraq on my mind maybe a little more than usual. And I have the question of the church and politics on my mind, partly because of the war and partly because of the issue I spoke about last week where the IRS is investigating the UCC because of a speech Barrack Obama gave to our national meeting last summer—and now more recently because of all the attention focused on Jeremiah Wright, Barrack Obama’s pastor and the retiring minister of Trinity UCC in Chicago. It’s not that these particular issues are so much on my mind but they cause me to think more broadly about the question of the church and politics or more broadly still faith and politics. And speaking of faith there are some things on my mind that have to do with how easy or hard it is to be a person of faith and a follower of Jesus, and I’ll have to come back to this in order to explain more specifically what it is that I have on mind.
But first, Palm Sunday, which always presents me with some challenges. I often find myself a little bit uncertain how to react to the Palm Sunday story. So here is this crowd, treating Jesus like some war hero or some politician on a roll, shouting out phrases that showered greatness on him, waving palms and spreading garments in his path as though he were some heroic figure, preparing the path for the messiah as Isaiah and John the Baptist had said: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” The crowds were doing what you would expect the crowds to do for the messiah, any messiah.
But of course we know that these crowds were terribly misguided crowds. That’s the way I’ve always been taught the story anyway. The people who lined the road and waved their palms, we are told, were expecting a kind of political messiah, a leader who would save them from the Roman occupation and oppression, who would restore the Jewish nation, an heir of King David who would restore the throne of David, someone who maybe was going to lead an insurrection against those who were running the show, both Roman and Jewish show runners. They were mistaken, we are told. Jesus was clearly not going to lead any insurrections. He was going to be a different kind of savior from what people were expecting, clearly indicated by the fact that he entered Jerusalem in humble fashion, riding on a donkey, and clearly indicated by such statements as the one we hear in the gospel of John where Jesus says quite clearly that his kingdom is not of this world. The crowds were just plain wrong about the kind of messiah Jesus would be.
And this interpretation of the story then goes on to assume that Jesus therefore is not to be thought of as a political messiah at all. He came, in this way of thinking, not to save us from the Romans but to save us from our sins, to save us essentially from ourselves. And he does that by presenting himself as a sacrificial offering, who dies on the cross in order to suffer the punishment that the rest of us really deserve, thereby earning for us a forgiveness we don’t deserve but that is ours because Christ endured our suffering for us.
If this is your view of what Christ was about, then Palm Sunday becomes the beginning of the consummation of Christ’s saving action for us and the modern believer can join in the celebration not in the same way the crowds did, since they had this mistaken notion of Jesus as a political messiah, but in a different way, not so much celebrating exactly, because terrible things lay ahead for Jesus, but honoring him and giving praise and glory to him for what he is about to do for us.
I know there are lots of people who understand Christ this way and people for whom that way of understanding Christ is deeply meaningful and who believe with all their hearts that Christ is a personal savior for them in this way. So I don’t want to say what I’m about to say in an argumentative or dismissive spirit, but I do need to say that I don’t believe that is the only way to relate to Jesus and that for me and for others there needs to be another way. I have just never related very well to the idea that God would require blood sacrifice as a pre-condition for the forgiveness of sin. I have never related very well to the notion that that is what Jesus was all about, that all the other parts of the story are just a prelude to what begins to take place on Palm Sunday where Jesus enters in to these horrifying but sacred events on our behalf. Where does that leave me? Not with those who celebrate Jesus as a political insurgent nor with those who celebrate him as a sacrificial offering for our sins and thus totally removed from politics.
But there is another option. I have come to believe, or at least consider the possibility, that the crowds with their hosannas and palm branches were not quite as misguided as they have been made out to be. The kind of political analysis that says that people wanted Jesus to be some kind of military messiah is not so convincing to me any more. Practicing political punditry when you’re right in the middle of the situation is a questionable enough undertaking. Practicing political punditry at a distance of 2000 years is much more questionable. What Jesus represented to the people who came out to see him that day is largely a matter of guesswork. We can try to make educated guesswork, but it’s still guesswork. And the idea that the crowds were mistaken in thinking of Jesus as a political messiah has led us too often to the equally mistaken conclusion that he had nothing to do with politics. I want to suggest that although Jesus clearly was not leading an armed insurrection and was not hoping to install himself in any position of power, that what he was about was very political in the most basic sense. If you’ll bear with me, I think a short digression from the Biblical story may help me say what I want to say.
Some years ago I was part of a small group of clergy who met once a week for Bible study and to share ideas about preaching and other things. One of the people in the group was a Methodist minister who later became the focus of national attention because he was put on trial and found guilty in a church court for violating the Methodist code of discipline for ministers. What he had done was preside at the wedding of a gay couple in his church. Actually he had done this thirty three times, but the thirty-third time was after the Methodist Church passed a provision which forbid Methodist ministers from presiding at marriages or holy union ceremonies for gay couples, or allow them to take place in the church. This minister was found guilty and suspended from the ministry until he signed a pledge not to preside at such ceremonies in the future. This minister, along with a few others who found themselves in similar positions, came to be at the center of vigorous and emotional debates within the Methodist church and elsewhere over church policies and positions regarding the church’s stance toward homosexuality. He became a symbol for people who were engaged in debating this issue of what some people might think of as church politics.
But here’s my point. This did not start out as a political matter for Gregg. It was never primarily a political matter for Gregg. It was a matter of relating humanly and pastorally to two people who he knew loved each other, who wanted to commit themselves to each other, and who intended their relationship to be a lasting one. He did not participate in these commitment ceremonies in order to make a political point. His involvement became a political matter against his will really. It became what people would think of as political when the Methodist church forbade him to be pastor to two people in the congregation he served who came to him with a request that he help them celebrate their love and make a commitment to each other.
Now, back to Jesus. In Matthew’s account of the events of Palm Sunday, the first thing Jesus does after entering the city is to enter the temple and drive out the money changers, turning over chairs and tables in the process. I won’t go into the details of the money changing system. It was rigged against the poor. It was rigged to take advantage of the poor. And Jesus took what was a recognizably political action, made a public protest, created a public disturbance, committed civil disobedience against an unjust policy.
The next thing Matthew says is this: “The blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he cured them.” A very different thing we might think. Jesus turns from becoming the political protester to being the compassionate healer. But let’s not jump on that way of thinking too quickly. It’s true, I think we can safely assume, that Jesus didn’t heal people to make a political point—any more than the Methodist pastor shared in the consecration of gay relationships as a way of making a political statement. Politics was not the point. But neither was politics completely beside the point.
The way I have come over the years to read not just the story of Palm Sunday but the story of Jesus in the gospels altogether is that nothing Jesus did was completely non-political. Or to put it positively, everything about Jesus, everything Jesus was about was in a certain sense political. When he reached out to heal a leper, of course it was not a political act in intention or in the most immediate sense, but it was political. When he stopped to speak with, and to heal, a woman with a hemorrhage, the intent was of course not to make a political statement, but it was political. When he stopped along the road to speak with the hated tax collectors and called one to be a disciple, of course it was not a matter first of all of politics, but it was political. Whenever Jesus turned to heal the blind or the lame, of course his interest was not first of all to comment on some policy, but what he was doing was political. We modern people with scientific worldviews get so hung up on miracles, wondering whether such things are really possible and maybe debating in our minds what we are supposed to make of such things, that maybe we get distracted from other things that may be going on in the story.
What Jesus was doing—sometimes in obvious protest such as the cleansing of the temple, sometimes in healings, sometimes too through his teachings—what Jesus was doing in all that he did was to slowly bring into being around him a new kind of community where the excluded were embraced, where the poor were valued, where the ritually unclean were declared beloved of God, where the outcast were part of the family. This was all political in the most basic sense of the word. The people who Jesus called, the people who gathered around Jesus, were about creating a new way of human beings being together, creating a new kind of community. The people who gathered didn’t always get it, even the people closest to Jesus. Just before Palm Sunday there was an incident where James and John wanted to be declared the winners in the discipleship game and be seated next to Jesus in the positions of honor. Needless to say, Jesus had to remind them of what they were about. But sometimes, I have to think, they did get it, at least a little bit. Sometimes people maybe caught a glimpse of this new kind of community Jesus wanted to create. It was a vision not for me or you or you or you but for us. It was a vision of community that was not based on privilege. It was a vision of a community not based on force or violence. And in that light the cross signifies a refusal of violence to the end, and a keeping alive of the vision of non-violence. When Jesus said “my kingdom is not of this world”, he didn’t mean that he was concerned only with matters that had to do with the hereafter. I believe he meant that the community he had spoken of and lived, the community of his imagination and God’s was not one that could come about by tweaking a few things in the way the world is. There is, there needs to be, a whole other way.
You tell me that all those people who lined the road on Palm Sunday were delusional, that they were all expecting Jesus to give the signal for some guerilla-style uprising that would overthrow the Romans or that they thought he had some miraculous powers to make that happen, you tell me that and I will say, “Maybe so. Maybe they did think of Jesus in that way. I don’t know. But for my part I have to think that there were at least some in the crowd who because of Jesus had caught a glimpse of a new order, had experienced a hint of what such a new kind of community might be like, who had been ministered to by Jesus and others who had tried to embody a different way of being together, who had been comforted by the possibility of a different way, who had been given new life by the possibility of a different way. If there were such people along the road that day, then I will be glad to be counted among them and to join in the praise and the prayers of hope. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 16, 2008