"What's Going On Here?" - Sermon for Palm Sunday

Sermon Text - Matthew 21: 1-11

I invite you to take just a few moments here at the beginning of the sermon and re-enter the text from Matthew’s gospel that we heard earlier in the service. I’m going to read it again and I want you to do whatever you need to do to get fully present, really listen, and become a full participant in the story. That might mean that you close your eyes. Or get out the pew Bible so you can read along. Or put your head down on your arms. But take a moment and allow yourself to enter the text. Notice the cast of characters. Notice your vantage point…are you walking along next to Jesus? Or perhaps you’re watching from far away. Notice what your senses are telling you…what do you see? Touch? Hear? Taste? Smell?

And when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Beth'phage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, "Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find an ass tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me.

If any one says anything to you, you shall say, `The Lord has need of them,' and he will send them immediately." This took place to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, saying, "Tell the daughter of Zion,

Behold, your king is coming to you,

humble, and mounted on an ass,

and on a colt, the foal of an ass."

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the ass and the colt, and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon.

Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!" And when he entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, "Who is this?" And the crowds said, "This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee."

Take just a minute and jot down or reflect on what you experienced. What did your senses notice? What did you see, touch, hear, taste, smell? Where were you in the scene? 

My guess is, if we were to compare notes we would find that many of us noticed different things. We placed ourselves in different locations in the story…took up different characters. Some of us joined the crowd. Some of us watched from a distance. Others of us were right there with Jesus on that donkey and colt.

The story of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem for the final days of his earthly life is one that can be experienced from multiple vantage points. There is no quick and easy way to wrap up this story in a little box and tie a bow on it. For all its brevity it is complex. The great preacher Fred Craddock wrote once about this story and asked what exactly was going on here, with this strange procession into the city. Was it a parade? A protest march? A funeral procession?[1]

The answer, of course, is yes. It is all three of those things.

A celebratory parade where Jesus the King triumphantly enters into the glamorous city, surrounded by cheers, paparazzi, and glitz. A protest march where a ragtag group of nobodies stumble into the capital city, shouting out in desperation and hope: “SAVE US!” And a funeral procession where Jesus and his friends walk resolutely, one foot in front of the other, towards the certain death that awaits them later this week.

Palm Sunday is all of these things. And it is more, too.

It is the gateway to Holy Week. I have a professor friend who said earlier this week that she was confused about why her students were going to be missing class on Monday. She said, “I thought Easter wasn’t until next Sunday.” Well, my guess is that her students are Jewish and they are missing class for Passover. But, it certainly would make sense for Christians to be missing class during Holy Week. I remember being so thankful when I attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas for graduate school because the university was always closed for Good Friday. It’s the only time in my life when I’ve attended a Christian school and it was so good to be able to spend Good Friday focusing on the life and death of Jesus.

Christmas has become the “big Christian holiday” – the one that gets the most attention out there in the world. I’m sure most non-Christians believe it’s the most important holiday for us. And I don’t want to minimize Christmas, of course. It is important. But Holy Week also needs to be revived within our faith. We who call ourselves followers of Christ need to recognize that this week is, indeed, the holiest of the year.

This is the week that truly speaks most fully to the complexity of our faith system. This is the week where we are slapped in the face with what it means to be human. The highs are higher, the lows lower than at other seasons of the year. As a teenager, I remember enjoying the pageantry of Holy Week. As an adult, I often find it challenging to allow myself to fully abandon my defenses and be swept into the power of the week. 

I sometimes long for the days when I could more easily slip into the drama of this holiest of weeks. I give thanks for the rituals that ground me and force me to confront the realities of Holy Week. I have my own private Holy Week rituals….reading through the full Passion narrative by myself, watching Jesus Christ Superstar. And even when I don’t feel like it, I force myself to participate in the community rituals that come each year. I wave the palms and shout Hosanna. I join others to sit around a table at Maundy Thursday and recall the last meal that Jesus shared with his friends. I steady myself and confront the ugly horror of Jesus’s torture and death when I attend the Good Friday service downtown. None of this is fun. But these rituals ensure that I don’t miss out on this holiest of weeks. And they prepare me for what will happen a week from today when we gather again in this place for Easter.

The story of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem beckons to us, insisting that we find a way to enter into the drama of the week. The greeters at the church door extend a palm branch to each person who enters, luring us to imagine ourselves there with the crowd, greeting Jesus in the parade…the protest march…the funeral procession.

Because there is such a rich cast of characters, because there are so many vantage points from which to view this story, it is possible to experience it in a multitude of ways.

Professor David Lose of Luther Seminary writes about visiting a church in Washington, D.C. on Palm Sunday several years ago. The tradition at this church was not just to march around the sanctuary with palms, but to march around the entire neighborhood and then return to the sanctuary to read the Passion story aloud. Lose writes about how one of the strangest things that happened as they marched around our nation’s capital city with palms is how some people seemed to not even notice. People just kept reading their papers, staring at their phones, sipping their coffees. Lose notes that re-enacting the text this way helped him realize that although there were certainly crowds following Jesus around in Jerusalem, there were also perplexed “city folk” who probably glanced up briefly, with amusement, and wondered, “Huh. Wonder what’s going on here?” and then went right back to their regularly scheduled lives.

There are so many vantage points to this story.

Walter Wangerin, Jr., in his 1996 tome The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel imagines what might have been going through Judas’s mind as Jesus entered Jerusalem. In Wangerin’s imagined scene Judas watches  with glee as Jesus enter the city, feeling certain that the moment has finally come when the Messiah will reveal himself as the true King of his people. Wangerin writes:

Judas was delirious. The city gates began to pour forth another mass of people equal to the first. Those who came out converged with those who were coming in, so the singing was doubled and the roar of it cracked the high blue vaults of heaven. It seemed that all of Judea was spiraling down to this sole place for the praise of Jesus of Nazareth. Oh, what a mighty army! ….

Judas laughed with magnificent glee. He couldn’t help himself. He was sailing on a sea of victory, surely, surely! And the water was the people, and the ship was his Lord, and the wind was behind them, surely!

Shaking with laughter, seeking quick camaraderie, he glanced up at Jesus – and suddenly there descended to the earth a horrible silence! Or so it seemed. Judas felt as if he and Jesus were alone beneath a green sea where there was no sound but the voice of Jesus only. Because Jesus was crying. He was not rejoicing in the public acclaim nor glorying in the advent of his kingdom now. He was crying! He was gazing at the stones of the city and allowing tears to run down his face.

In Wangerin’s imagination Judas is in the midst of the highest point of his life as Jesus rides into Jerusalem as the King, but Jesus is in tears. Which is it? Is Jesus the King, high and mighty? Or is he defeated, reduced to tears? The answer is “yes.” Both of these things are happening simultaneously – held together in the Palm Sunday processional.

Pastor Melinda Quivick notices the power of allowing ourselves to sit in and be shaped by the tensions of this holy day. She writes, “Every year someone raises the question why we are celebrating both Jesus’ praise-filled entrance into Jerusalem on that donkey with all those palm fronds and then quickly turning to his murder. The answer is the most central truth about our faith: both winning and losing happen all the time together and in that complex journey is where we find Jesus … owning all of it with us while defeating it.”[2]

Jesus is with us. Owning all of the complexities of the human experience. Sitting in the mess of betrayal, temptation, murder, injustice, hatred, fear. Just sitting there with us in the midst of all of the ugliest things about who we are as humans.

But not just sitting there. Defeating it. Christ comes to us as the One who holds out hope that there can be another way. Christ imagines that there is more than meets the eye. Christ looks at the ugliest, scariest, nastiest parts of us and sees us healed and made whole. Christ faces the cruelest, sickest, most horrifying stuff that humans can dish out to teach other and somehow manages to prevail.

The beauty of the ambiguity of this day is that there is always more than meets the eye. What looks like a parade is not just a parade. What seems to be a protest march is more than that. And the solemnity of a funeral procession is interrupted by shouts of joy.

Being Christian means owning that few things in this world are certain. In our moments of great celebration, there are always those around us who carry pain within them. In our moments of deepest pain, there are always small instances of joy to be relished.

Being human means that celebration can change in an instant to deep sorrow. A vibrant life can be snuffed out in one breath. And even death – that thing that is as certain as taxes – even death is no more.

Living in a state of uncertainty can be awfully disconcerting. But it can also be freeing. Because if there is always more to the story then we are never truly backed up against a wall. There are always options. Nothing is ever final.

Thanks be to the God of Holy Week….the one who cries out with the stones in the parade, turns tables upside down with the protest marchers, and gravely carries the casket in the funeral procession.

May we each carry a bit of the parade, the protest, and the funeral procession with us into the holiest of weeks ahead. 

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[1] http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2003-04/protest-march

[2] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2019