Sermon for Palm Sunday
Scripture: Luke 19:28-44
There are just two places I know of in the gospels where Jesus is said to have wept. One was when he arrived at the side of his dead friend, Lazarus. The other was when he wept over the city of Jerusalem, just after having entered it—the passage we heard just a moment ago. That Jesus is described as shedding tears of sorrow so soon after making his “triumphal entry” into the city of Jerusalem makes me wonder again where that term came from and what this notion of a “triumphal entry” is all about.
Triumphal is not a term that appears in the texts. Where it appears is in those little headings that some anonymous editor made up somewhere along the line that tell us what we are about to read, or maybe help us find some particular story we may be looking for. Someone, sometime, somewhere thought triumph was a good word to apply to the scene that is described. Personally, I’ve never been able to relate to it very well that way.
There are certain things within the story itself, the whole story of the last week of Jesus’ life, that would suggest that the notion of a triumphal entry is at the very least an ambiguous expression. It is part of a larger story, after all, and in the context of the larger story, the entry into Jerusalem is, as we now know, the first in a cascading chain of events that leads quickly to Jesus’ arrest, torture, and execution. Of course we can see why the people in the story might have been celebrating, since they didn’t know what was coming, but for those of us who come after, it’s hard to see how the term triumphal could be used in anything but an ironic sense. Even those in the story who celebrated, it turns out, most likely were celebrating for the wrong reason, since they were expecting someone else, a conquering hero, some kind of political or military messiah. At least that’s what we have assumed was in their minds, since if they had seen Jesus as the sacrificial leader he turned out to be, presumably they wouldn’t have been celebrating. So all in all it’s a pretty bleak picture. Jesus riding to his death surrounded by meaningless cheers based on misunderstandings and false expectations.
Still, at least in our culture, Christian churches have often treated Palm Sunday as a kind of celebration, as one person has said, as a kind of warm-up for Easter. I say in our culture because I know that the widespread American custom of skipping from Palm Sunday to Easter with a kind of passing nod to the events in between, is not a universal one. For about five years, the congregation I was serving at the time shared its building with a Pilipino congregation. For them the big day of the year, the service that people came to if they only came once a year, was not Easter (or Christmas), but Good Friday.
But it would be out of character for Christians in the U.S. to have Good Friday as the central holiday, wouldn’t it. We want to just show the highlights, skip the lowlights. We want to see the clip of the envelope being opened and someone saying, “…and the winner is…” or the last second three-pointer that swishes through the hoop to win the game. We want to emphasize the good things in life, not let the hard things get us down. We want to believe in optimism and progress and an ever-increasing GNP. We have a hard time, as many social commentators have pointed out, dealing with death. And so maybe it is not surprising that American Christians in general pay scant attention to the parts of the story that come between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.
But I thought to myself this year, as I reflected again on the difficulty I have with this triumphal entry business, that for me the difficulty is not whether we are remembering the whole story. My difficulty is with the very idea of triumph as it applies to faith. It is not whether Palm Sunday is really a triumphal occasion. It is whether Christianity as a whole is a triumphal occasion, whether there is any place for triumph in the life of faith. I know I’m going to have to explain myself on this.
There’s a book by the Jewish writer Elie Wiesel called Messengers of God. It’s a series of essays about Biblical characters, and one of them is about Abraham and the incident where Abraham appears to be ready to sacrifice, to kill, his son Isaac. In the course of the discussion, Wiesel points out that although this is a difficult story, in the end Isaac is not sacrificed, and he then takes the opportunity to say that his problem with Christianity is that at the center of the Christian faith is a story where in fact the killing is carried out, that the story seems in a way to glorify death, that in Christianity meaning seems to spring from death, not life, whereas in Judaism, he said, the opposite is true.
When I first encountered this writing some years ago, I became defensive. I immediately began to marshal my arguments about why what he said wasn’t fair and wasn’t so. I didn’t think of myself as a life-denying person. I didn’t think of the Christian faith, which I after some struggle had come to embrace, as a life-denying faith. I felt Elie Wiesel had painted it that way with a very broad brush and in a rather casual, off-handed sort of way. So I was ready to do battle.
I still, of course, experience Christianity as something quite different from what Elie Wiesel describes, but I no longer feel a need to engage him in debate. In fact I now find that what he said resonates within me in a way that it did not those many years ago. Now I find myself more able to acknowledge those parts of Christianity that I too find difficult and offensive, and to stand with Wiesel in opposition to certain very strong tendencies within the Christian household.
For instance, the idea that the whole reason Jesus came to earth was to “die for our sins”. That is, I have come to admit, a very strong strand in Christian theology and a very deep part of Christian devotion and piety for many people. In this view, everything in the gospel stories prior to Palm Sunday is just a preface to the really important part, which begins today. For many people the really important part is the sacrifice, where Jesus is seen as taking upon himself the punishment which human beings by rights deserve. The story that begins on Palm Sunday is a story of how Jesus willingly enters in to a terrible ordeal and because he does see that ordeal through to the end, and is not saved at the last minute, he accomplishes the purpose for which he was sent, wins for himself a crown of glory, and for his followers, for people who unite themselves to him through belief or devotion, he wins the victory of an ultimate forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. In this light actually it is understandable to me why the events of Palm Sunday are referred to as the triumphal entry. It is the beginning of the horrible but heroic acts that Jesus performs on our behalf, and in the end he will emerge victorious.
I guess it’s pretty clear—and if it’s not, I’ll say it explicitly—that I don’t subscribe to this theology. Not only do I not subscribe to it, I consider it harmful.
This story—this Palm Sunday story, the passion story that follows it, the whole gospel story, the whole Christian story—none of it is about fighting and winning battles. It’s not about fighting your way through a series of obstacles to some great achievement. This is not a story about this fantastic thing Jesus did coming into Jerusalem, subjecting himself to physical and spiritual agony, physical and spiritual abandonment, enduring death on the cross so that he could then win a victory over death, ascend into heaven where he would sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and be given praise and glory through all eternity, world without end, amen. That is the way many read the story. For me, that is not the story.
That is a story of triumph, and I have to say that I have come to believe very strongly that Christians are better off without the triumphal overlay on the story. If Christ is the victor, then maybe it is not just death who is the loser but also by implication all the other religions whose leaders and teachings have made them something less than victorious. If Christ is fighting some battle on our behalf, then we don’t want people to get in the way, and we want Christ’s enemies to be vanquished. I don’t think it is too much to say that the triumphal tendencies in Christianity have laid the groundwork for crusades and pogroms and have produced at worst a demonizing of Jews or other presumed enemies of the faith, at best an attitude of patronizing tolerance for people of other, slightly inferior, faiths. I say again: that is not the story, not the story we need to be telling or living.
I say all this not because I want to get rid of the story, or because I have some desire to be iconoclastic or heretical, but because I continue to read, and explore, and find profound meaning in these stories, and so I have to speak against the uses of the story that lead in the opposite direction to the direction these stories lead me.
For my own Lenten reading, I recently took down a book from the shelf called Good Friday People. The author is a woman named Sheila Cassidy. I don’t know a lot about her. She wrote an autobiography, which I did not read, called The Audacity to Believe. She is, as her book titles make pretty clear, a person for whom her Christian faith is a very deep part of who she is. By profession, she is a physician. In 1976 she was in Chile donating her services in poor communities and in the course of doing so tended to several people who were suspected of being leftist revolutionary types. As a result she was arrested and tortured for some months while she was in jail. After her eventual release she took up the cause of survivors of torture through writing and speaking as well as through her skills as a doctor. By the time she was writing Good Friday People, about ten years ago, she was the medical director of a hospice in London.
I mention all this because even a sketchy account of her life vividly illustrates what she also says in words: that she has no interest in triumphalism, no interest in a faith that promises victory. She chooses, as a physician, to work with people who are not going to get better, who are not going to win their battle with cancer or M.S. or AIDS, and that means that she as a physician is never going to be part of that victory. She saves no lives, makes no one physically better. The people in Latin America she knew and wrote about as Good Friday people are people who won no victories in any ordinary sense of the word. Some were famous, like Romero. Many others were not, and they died on lonely roads or in prison cells without any fanfare, and without any visiting dignitaries at their funerals to attest to their importance or worthiness. And they died because they could not bear to leave the people they were working with, even though they knew that staying almost certainly meant that they would die young, maybe sooner, maybe later, but pretty much for sure.
Sheila Cassidy makes clear that the passion of Jesus is deeply important to her. She also makes clear that for her the story of Jesus is inseparable from the stories of the people she is writing about. At the beginning she writes: “I believe that we have much to learn about Jesus’ passion from the suffering of those more accessible to us and that it is profoundly unhealthy to concentrate on Jesus suffering and thus pay less attention to the cruelty and torture which are endemic in our world.” And later on she elaborates on that thought. “We dwell,” she says, “upon the passion story, dramatizing it in art and music, weeping over the sufferings of Jesus. We sing were you there when they crucified my Lord, and I want to scream. No I wasn’t there—but I was there in Chile when they tortured some poor bastard in the next room, and I heard his screams with my own ears. What should we do about torture, I ask myself, and I don’t really know the answer. I just know that we need to take the tears we shed for Jesus and use them to wash the feet and the faces of the Good Friday people of our own day.
The title of the sermon this morning comes from a conversation Lee Walters and I were having earlier in the week. I don’t even remember the context now, but in course of the conversation Lee said those words—it’s hard to celebrate. And I said right away, I think I need to use that phrase for the sermon title this week. It wouldn’t be hard to celebrate, it wouldn’t be hard to understand all this triumphal language if the important part of this story about Jesus is his death, if we separate what he did from the stories of men and women all around us, if we presume that what this story is all about is this heroic, saving action that Jesus did for us. Then we could celebrate his victory as though he had just won a championship.
But that’s not the only way to read the story. I need to read it differently, this story that begins with Palm Sunday and extends on through Jesus’ suffering and death. I do not read it as a story about death and the victory over death. I need to say: Let this be a story not about death but about love. Let me imagine Jesus as he rides into Jerusalem not meditating on the suffering that lies ahead but on the suffering of those around him. Let me remember that the first thing he did after the parade was to weep over Jerusalem and mourn that the world doesn’t yet know the things that make for peace. Let this be a story not about victory but about solidarity. Let this be a story about weeping, as Christ wept, at “the brokenness of what is meant to be whole” (Peter Gomes). Let this be a story that reminds us of how hard it is to celebrate in this world of ours, so that when we are gifted with moments of celebration, they may be real. Let the Palm Sunday/Passion story not be a story about dying, but about loving, and let it call us again to that never-ending task, and let it help us to take just one more step that we might not otherwise have taken. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 24, 2002