Scripture: Mark 11:1-11; 2Corinthians 4:7-12, 16-18
So we come today to what many people consider to be the heart of the Christian story, the events that begin on Palm Sunday, take us through the last days of Jesus life, his last supper with the disciples, the arrest and trial, betrayal and abandonment, crucifixion and resurrection. These are all events that Christians are supposed to approach with great attention and reverence. It is also the part of the story that I believe we need to approach with the greatest degree of care.
For one thing we need to be always aware of the un-Christian uses to which this story has been put over the centuries. It has inspired or at least been used to justify the worst kinds of anti-Semitism, portraying “the Jews” as the people who murdered Jesus. With the rallying cry that Jews are “Christ-killers”, Christians have committed atrocities against Jewish people in the name of Christ. This sermon is not about that, but I need to at least mention that this morning because some years ago I promised myself that I would not let a Holy Week go by without at least acknowledging this sorry history, so that we do not read this story that is so important to our faith without realizing that it is a story that for Jewish people has been a story that is filled with terror, and so that we do not perpetuate a reading of this story that makes “the Jews” into the bad guys. That is still done far too often, often without Christians quite realizing what they are doing.
This is not just a question of acknowledging horrible things that have been done in the past. There can be more subtle forms of anti-Semitism that are still very much with us. For instance, the assumption that Judaism was an inferior religion and that God sent Christ to supercede Judaism, to make it better, to replace Jewish truth with a higher truth, to offer salvation where there had been none before. All these kinds of Christian condescension and assumed superiority can easily creep in to the ways we observe holy week, as Christians enthusiastically celebrate “what Christ has done for us”. There are lots of ways that Christians just sort of quietly imply, or not so quietly, that Christ is the way to heaven, the pathway to God or salvation, the only pathway to God or salvation, and we need to acknowledge that tendency as well, and do our best to avoid it. We need to tell the story with care, in a way that does not imply that Christ is the only means of salvation, or that Christians are the only people who know about the love and grace of God.
We also, I believe, need to avoid the tendency to treat the story as though it were a story that is just about Jesus. What I mean by that is that we often in our attitudes and our theologies look on Jesus in this climactic part of his story as a kind of hero, not the kind of hero people expected to be sure, that point has been made over and over again, that he was not a military messiah as some expected, but still in the end we may tend to treat him as a hero, who went through this terrible ordeal on our behalf, who endured unimaginable pain and then finally in the end emerged victorious. When we read the story this way, our job, yours and mine, becomes just to stand aside and watch it all happen, let the story unfold again before our eyes, standing in awe as Jesus lives through his assigned destiny, enduring the most extreme hardship out of love for us, and of course the more extreme we imagine his suffering to be, the greater we believe him to be, and because of what he did, we praise him and worship him.
It is often pointed out that the crowds on Palm Sunday were misguided, thinking that Jesus was making some kind of triumphal entry into Jerusalem, not realizing that he was entering Jerusalem not in order to be acclaimed as the messiah but in order to be put to death. I’m not so sure they got it wrong though. What holy week is often about is treating Jesus as a hero who goes through great trials and does emerge victorious, and as a result we praise him, worship him, as the crowds did at the side of the road on Palm Sunday.
Now, I realize that what I’m about to say may sound heretical, and I don’t say it in a spirit of just being contrary or denying all the other meanings people have found and do find in this story, but I can only speak of how I relate to the story. And I have to say that I don’t believe Jesus wants us to worship him. And when we come to this story of the last week of his life, I don’t believe it is my role to stand aside, watch from the sidelines, be an observer, no matter how appreciative an observer I might be, a praiser, a worshiper. I believe I am meant to be drawn into the story myself, so that it becomes my story too. I believe the scriptures invite me into the story. I believe Jesus himself invites me into the story. But if the story is just all about the heroic acts of Jesus, then it is not my story, because as I was saying last week, mostly my Christian living is not going to be very heroic. And so if this is a story only about Christ’s great suffering and sacrifice and ultimate victory, it leaves me standing on the sidelines. I need some kind of an entry point so that the Christ story becomes my story too.
There are surely lots of ways that can happen, but here’s a thought that has occurred to me this year. What Jesus is doing here—intentionally making the journey into Jerusalem at this time, with tensions running high, rumors swirling that there are people who would like to see Jesus out of the way, facing what we must assume he knew would be almost certain arrest and possible death—what Jesus is doing here makes no sense from any ordinary human standpoint. The disciples have been telling this to Jesus all along, and in my opinion we don’t give them enough credit. When Peter, no doubt representing other disciples as well, says to Jesus “Oh, no teacher, you don’t want to do this. This is not a good idea. God forbid, that this should happen to you,” Jesus responds to him pretty harshly, even calls him Satan. So who are we to argue with Jesus? Peter must be really dense or faithless to be trying to stand in Jesus’ way.
But as I say, I think Peter has reason and common sense clearly on his side here. Scripture doesn’t say what his argument was, or if he had one, but I don’t have too much trouble making up an argument for Peter. It would go like this: Look Jesus, this is just crazy. You’re gonna go and get yourself locked up or killed, and you tell me what good that’s going to do. Be sensible here and back off for a bit. It won’t do any harm to go on vacation for a couple of weeks. Lie low. Then we’ll get back to work—someplace safe. And by the way there’s still a lot of work to do. You’ll do a lot more good if you stick around for a while. It’s just been—what—two or three years for God’s sake. Think of all the places we haven’t been. Think of all the people we haven’t reached. Think of what we could do if we had just two or three more years, to say nothing of if you decided to live to a ripe old age and had thirty or fifty more years of teaching and healing ahead of you. So this idea of going off and doing something that will likely get you killed, it will accomplish nothing except getting you out of the way, and frankly we need you here with us, not in the grave, or in heaven. This is what I imagine Peter might have said to Jesus.
Now the point here is not that Jesus is calling us to forsake all reason and pragmatism and adopt some martyr complex or messiah complex. I’ve tried to say in a fair number of ways now in the last two weeks that that’s not the point. But I do tie in to the story in a certain way at this point. I confess to having a deeply cynical part of myself. I tend to be pessimistic—pessimistic about the possibility of real change in our world and how quickly it comes about and how much effort it takes for even very small change to occur, pessimistic about answers of any kind, left wing, right wing, or middle wing answers to any significant problem that faces us as human beings, pessimistic that any answer will really turn out to be an answer, pessimistic that we have the power or wisdom to say how things will turn out, pessimistic because so often our schemes do provide answers to one set of problems and end up creating a whole other set of problems, pessimistic because love so often seems so helpless in this world of ours (and if the story of Jesus speaks to us about nothing else, it surely speaks to us of that), pessimistic because the suffering of the world seems so great and the possibility of putting some kind of a noticeable dent in it seems so small. I have a deeply pessimistic, cynical side and I have to admit that the question “what good will it do?” haunts my life at many points and it is one of the ways I have of connecting to the Jesus story.
I see Jesus not as someone who offers me a more optimistic view of the world, nor as someone who has a clear and convincing answer to the question of what good it will do, but who, without a good answer as to what good it will do, chooses the way of love. Cynicism is, after all, spiritually speaking a kind of death, a very real kind of death. I see Christ facing that death, recognizing its reality and its power, and going on anyway, refusing to be deterred either by the intransigence and lovelessness he encountered in the world or by lingering questions, posed to him by others or by himself, about whether what he was doing made any kind of pragmatic sense, whether it would do any good. I am not called, we are not called, day by day, to face literal physical death on behalf of our faith or some cause of love or justice. I am not going to go out and risk life and limb, or risk very much of anything really, on behalf of what I believe in. But I am called to resist the cynicism which will make what I believe in irrelevant. We are all called to overcome the cynicism, which is also death.
And so we plug away, each of us in our own way and choosing a few things that matter to us, we plug away, without any clear and convincing answer as to what good it will do, and maybe not even so sure in our hearts very often of what good it will do, but refusing to give in to the cynicism that would be death. Because the fact is we are never in a position to see how things will come out and all we can do is follow where the spirit of God leads us, with no assurances as to outcomes. I don’t see Jesus as having that assurance either in the story. In fact the Palm Sunday/Holy Week part of the story is not the end of the story. What good will it do? Is a question that is never answered in the short term, and the story of which Palm Sunday is a part is a long term story that we continue to be part of today.
You may have noticed that I titled this sermon “The Lunatic Fringe”, and you may have inferred from that that I was going to be preaching about someone else. But I really meant the phrase to refer to us. Tongue-in-cheek of course. Well, pretty much tongue-in-cheek. In the sense that I believe we are people who have committed ourselves to certain things that are not strictly speaking pragmatic or commonsensical. We are lunatic enough to do something like gathering to worship God, which is, as Bill Gates is famously quoted as saying, from an economic point of view not an efficient use of time. We are lunatic enough to continue praying without knowing for sure or in what way it will do any good. We are lunatic enough to believe in peace in a world where violence holds sway. We are lunatic enough to keep trying our best, according to our best lights, to do justly and to love mercy, even though our victories tend to be small and hard won, and even though we cannot be sure that any specific stand we take along the way will be the right one. From a certain perspective there is a lunacy about faith, perhaps from many perspectives there is a certain lunacy involved in being people of faith. It is because there is more to our living than we can explain and more to the living of our faith than results we can foresee or control. And it is because we are called not to give in to cynicism, no matter how strong or good the reasons for cynicism may seem to be. And today Palm Sunday reminds me that whenever our spirits continue to act out of love in the face of cynicism and in spite of it, there are hallelujahs to be sung. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 9, 2006