Every year as we’re planning for today, the question comes up, are we celebrating Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday? Can we focus on the palms, the loud processions, the shouts of “Hosanna to the Son of David” and “Blessed is the One who Comes in the Name of the Lord”? Or, are you going to try and cram the entire passion reading into the Gospel section, which, the common argument goes, is super long and no one can really follow all of it anyway?
I get the question every year, but for me it’s not really a choice. For me, the weird shift in tone of immediately following up the Palm Sunday procession with the passion narrative, as jarring and tense as it feels, sets the tone for what this day, and this week, is all about. Today we, like the crowd traveling with Jesus in the reading from the procession of the palms, stand outside the gates of our most holy place, about to enter in. And like how the crowd ended their procession at the Temple, we too will finish this week at the center of our faith, at the cross. But while the crowd only had Jesus’ seemingly far-fetched predictions of the destruction of both the Temple and his life, we have the gift of hind-sight to know how it all turns out, to know that the end of this journey, the center of our faith, is the uncomfortably unbelievable assertion that the salvation of the world lay in the death of a man on a lonely hill at the hands of the most powerful empire in the world.
It feels important to me every year on this day to remind you that Holy Week is not about remembering the past, but about the promise that God is making to us right now in the present. In Holy Week, we are not Civil War re-enactors, recreating an event from long ago; we are disciples living out what it means to be people of God today.
If feels important to me to say that every year, but this year as I was working through the passion story in Mark in preparation for this morning, the truth of this statement, that Holy Week is not past but current, struck me even more strongly. Because as I read into the Passion according to Mark, the similarities to current events filled me both with terrible fear and incredible hope. Fear, because the time Mark is addressing, both his own and that of Jesus, were not known as periods of safety and security. During Jesus’ life, Jerusalem was a tinder-keg, with tensions between the religious elites, the Roman invaders, and the oppressed commoners ready to explode into chaos at the slightest spark. The Gospel of Mark was written immediately after the inevitable explosion, when the Temple was destroyed in a battle so violent that Josephus described blood running through the streets of Jerusalem.
Recognizing the similarities filled me with fear, but it also filled me with hope. Because in the end, the point of the passion story is that love wins. The point of the passion story is that through the whole mess of humanity’s creating, God still leads this seemingly impossible journey through death to life. And if that promise became reality during a time so fraught with terror and violence as the Roman occupation of first century Palestine, how much more true must it be today. So what I want to do with this sermon is talk through some of the similarities I found in the passion. And as you hear them, and as they bring up other experiences, similarities, and fears in you, I invite you to lean in to the discomfort. Lean in to whatever this story awakes in you. Lean in to your fears, to your hurts, to your longings. But also, lean in to the hope. Lean in to the promise that as often as we screw this thing up, God is still in control. Lean in to the promise that life follows death, that light drives out darkness, and that the curtain of the Temple is continually being torn in two, because God will not be separated from God’s people. This week we walk not in the past, but into our future. So let us start, as the crowd did, outside the city.
After a year of journeying, in the palm procession Gospel, Jesus and the great crowd of his followers finally reached the gates of Jerusalem. There Jesus commanded his disciples to find a colt that had never been ridden and bring it back. If anyone asked what they were doing, they were instructed to reply, “The Lord needs it and,” weirdly, “will send it back here immediately.” Why is that second part weird? It’s weird because every single part of this description, the gathered crowds, the riding in on a horse, the spreading of cloaks and branches, the loud shouts of “Hosanna” and “Blessed is the coming kingdom,” every single part of this echoes the parade of a conquering Roman war hero entering his vanquished city. Mark’s audience had certainly seen the triumphal entry of the Emperor Vespasian after the fall of Jerusalem. They would have heard the shouts of “Hosanna” or “Save us” and “Blessed is Caesar, the son of god.” Mark’s audience knew what a military parade looked like, and Mark’s description of Jesus’ triumphal procession is a mockery of one. That precedent was set right from the beginning, when the disciples were instructed to return the colt. Because Roman soldiers commandeered things, horses, beasts of burden, and even people could be constricted into the service of the Emperor. But while Jesus took a colt, he also promised to return it; this triumphant procession is not conquest by force.
Then there’s the animal itself. It is not a war horse, a stallion fit for battle. It’s a colt, a baby, who has never been ridden. Put aside for a minute the impracticality of trying to ride an unbroken horse, and just imagine the image itself. Jesus’ choice of steed is more likely to bring cries of “how cute” than the might, power, and fear such a scene should portray. The kingdom Jesus is bringing reigns in very different ways.
So we jump forward to the passion, and it feels jarring because it is. Palm/Passion Sunday reminds us of the fickleness of crowds. We’d all like to believe that we would have been different, that we would not have fallen away, but honestly the psychology of mob mentality says more than likely we would have responded just like the crowd. More than likely, we too would have shifted from cheering to jeers. Or at the very least, like the disciples, would have drifted away to obscurity. In a few weeks, we’ll hear Jesus describe us as sheep, and sheep are very good at following, but they are not very good at discerning who to follow. So too, unfortunately but truthfully, is the nature of crowds.
We entered the passion story this morning as the religious leaders decided to hand Jesus over to Pilate. Mark seems to paint Pilate in a positive light, concerned about Jesus’ innocence, but himself captive to the crowds and the religious leadership’s desire to see Jesus dead. Such reading has allowed this story to be used for centuries to justify persecution of the Jews, who sought the death of Jesus. Mark’s Jewish audience would have made no such assumptions. They knew what historical audiences do not, that Jesus’ death, while having cosmic effects, was local not global, the result of local power struggles, the jealousies and jostling between various groups and bodies as they try to assert themselves as the dominant force. It would be nice to think we’ve matured from such struggles, we have not. I heard an interview this week with a legislator who, after going on about how there ought to be a ban on all special councils, recommended the solution was to create a special council to investigate the special council. The fact that the government now shuts itself down on a regular basis demonstrates to me that we’ve only gotten more sophisticated in our various machinations for power.
As part of the trial, Pilate offered up Barabbas in exchange for Jesus. The irony is thick, Barabbas is in prison for the very crime of which Jesus is accused, inciting the people to riot. But the crowd, already riled up by the accusations of their leadership, show another dangerous aspect of the game of power politics, people lose their ability to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, the truly frightening from those we are told to fear. We may not know, or even care, who the real dangerous people are. There are a million examples I could make here; I’ll let you fill in the blank.
As Jesus hung on the cross, he was mocked by all. First those who passed by, then the Sanhedrin, the Roman soldiers, and even those crucified with him. Until he was eventually abandoned by even his closest followers. Because if the Barabbas trick doesn’t work, and we are not fooled by the slight of hand to disguise the guilty from the innocent, the next move is to depersonalize the victim, so the violence seems more normal. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone makes the argument that this trick permitted the lynching of African Americans in the south for years. If the person is not a person, then the evil can be justified.
It was right about here that I texted my best friend, “I don’t know what to do with the passion story this year. It feels too true, too real, too current. Two-thousand years later, how can this still be our truth?”
And then I read on, “when it was noon, darkness came over the land until about three… [and] Jesus cried out a loud voice, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’” This is the opening line from Psalm twenty-two, a psalm that ends in praise, confident in the promise that God is with us, even when things feel at their darkest, “For dominion belongs to the Lord.”
“Then [he] breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” The curtain, which set apart the Holy of Holies from the rest of the congregation, which represented the veil between heaven and earth, which held together the life of the Temple, that curtain was not just opened but was ripped apart, like the skies themselves were torn apart as Jesus came out of the water at his baptism, and the Spirit of God rushed into the world. And “the centurion who stood facing him” echoed the words that the voice from heaven had spoken at his baptism and again at the transfiguration, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’”
This is the promise of Holy Week, that just as we are the same, just as we are as fickle and power hungry and violent as ever, so too is God the same as ever. The God who ripped apart heaven, who spoke from the skies, and who died on a cross, that same God is still doing those things here and now. In the breaking of the bread and the passing of the cup, we see Christ broken and poured out for all. For all. Christ comes to us, we who are fickle and power hungry, grumpy and violent, not caring if we earn it or whether we deserve it, but to this broken world, to our broken time, Christ comes. To be Christian is learn to see God at work in the midst of this broken world, not in our short-sighted struggles for power, but humble and patient on the back of a colt. This is the good news of Easter, as true today as it was two-thousand years ago, Jesus is standing at the gates of the city, and he will not rest until he has reached the center, of the Temple, of the world, of our lives, to rip down whatever is holding us captive so God can break in. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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