Hilton Head Island, SC – April 1, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 21:1-11; Matthew 26:47-56
A Sermon by John M. Miller
BLESSED ARE…THE PEACEMAKERS
Out of 33 short years in a life cut short by a cruel crucifixion, Palm Sunday was the only day when Jesus may have been collectively recognized as the Messiah by a fairly large crowd of his followers. It is impossible correctly to guess the number of people who saw Jesus ride into Jerusalem on that long-ago day. There may have been only a few dozen, or perhaps there were several hundred or more. No one can ever know.
One thing is certain: Whatever actually happened on Palm Sunday, it was a sufficiently large event in the life of Jesus that all four Gospel writers devoted several verses each to describing the processional into the Holy City. The fact that all four wrote about it surely attests to its historicity. That is, Palm Sunday truly occurred. The notion of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem wasn’t just cooked up by the so-called “Four Evangelists;” Jesus did come into the city in triumph, and there was a crowd of some size or another who greeted him when he came through the gate in the city wall. There is no reason for anyone to doubt or deny that.
However, no one can be positive about which gate Jesus came through, although it is likely it was the one called the Golden Gate. The Golden Gate is in the eastern wall of the Old City, below the flat surface of Temple Mount. It faces the Garden of Gethsemane, which is at the bottom of the Kidron Valley. Jewish tradition had long declared that when the Messiah came, he would enter the Holy City through the Golden Gate. It was the most impressive and massive of all the gates leading into the walled city. Many years after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Arabs in 637 of the Common Era, the Muslim rulers of the city made it impossible for anyone to go through the Golden Gate any longer. They sealed up the two huge doorways, and piled rocks and dirt over the roadway up to the gate. Thus they supposed they were thwarting two rival religions: Judaism, because their Messiah couldn’t enter Jerusalem by the traditional gateway whenever he might come, and Christianity, because their Christian Messiah in his Second Coming could not return to Jerusalem if the Golden Gate was sealed shut.
All that, however, happened long after the Palm Sunday processional in the spring of the year 29 or so in what Christians call Anno Domine, the Year of Our Lord. But on that morning, because the crowd apparently believed Jesus was the Messiah, and because the twelve disciples may also have believed it, and because Jesus himself was perhaps convinced of it by that point at what was soon to be the culmination of his ministry, Jesus came through the Golden Gate, which then was operative, even if later it was rendered obsolete. On Palm Sunday, if Jesus was going to make a grand entrance, he was going to do it properly through the most grand of all the gates.
There is a detail about Palm Sunday which two of the Gospels, Matthew and John, clearly describe. It is that Jesus came riding into the city on a donkey. Neither Mark nor Luke mention that. They simply say that he rode “a colt,” but they don’t specify which kind of colt, whether a young horse or a young donkey.
When Matthew and John insist it was a donkey, they quote Zechariah 9:9, which was part of our responsive reading for today. “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, and on a colt the foal of an ass.” Despite what English speakers over the past century or so might surmise regarding the meaning of that word, an ass is and long has been a synonym for a donkey. When the Bible talks about wild asses, it is talking about untamed donkeys living out in the desert, not unpredictable human ignoramuses who constantly do foolish or thoughtless things.
So what is all this convoluted palaver about? Just this: I personally have no doubt that Jesus came into Jerusalem riding a young donkey, and not a young horse. And why do I believe that? I do because Jesus was a master of the symbolic act, and nothing could be more symbolic to
the witnesses of the triumphal entry than the fact that Jesus rode a donkey. By the very nature of its appearance, a donkey could never be a symbol of warfare. It is too small, too insignificant, even too comical to suggest a Messiah coming to wage war. Jesus came to wage peace, Christian people; he has always come only to wage peace. War was anathema to him, as it should be to us.
He said as much within days or at most a few weeks of the beginning of his public ministry near the lakeside in the northern part of Judea when he delivered the Beatitudes as the opening part of the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus, “for they shall be called the sons of God.” Was he hinting already that he was a son of God, or the Son of God? I don’t think so. He was telling all of us that if we want to be perceived as daughters or sons of God, we must seek to bring peace to the world. The children of God must be peacemakers.
When the Fourth Gospel finished its description of the Palm Sunday processional, it says that Jesus’ enemies were despondent. The verse says, “The Pharisees then said to one another, ‘You see that you can do nothing; look, the whole world has gone after him’” (John 12:19).
Would that it were true, Christian believers! But it is not. Now, as then, Jesus has many detractors. There are many who oppose anyone who stands always and in every situation for peace. Animosity stirs many of us far more than tranquility.
In Hebrew the word for “peace” is shalom. “Shalom aleichem,” Israelis say to one another when they meet; “Peace be with you.” “Salaam alikum,” the Palestinians and other Arabs say to one another. Jerusalem is Yerushalayim: City of Peace.
But precisely what kind of peace are we talking about here? When Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God,” I think he was talking primarily about peace among individuals, not peace among nations. And personal or interpersonal peace is very important. Without it, life can be far too challenging and unproductive.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was 27 years old, he was a young pastor living in Montgomery, Alabama. One evening around midnight, the phone rang. The voice on the other end of the phone line said, “[Blank]” (I won’t say the word,) “we’re tired of you and your mess. If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.” Years later, Dr. King recalled his thoughts following that terrifying conversation to an interviewer. He said he remembered comparing the lovely smile of his newborn daughter with the prospect of someone killing her. He knew he couldn’t call on his parents to extricate him from his dilemma. Somehow he summoned the power that would help him find his way through it. He said, “I had to know God for myself. I bowed my head over that cup of coffee. I will never forget it. I prayed…and I discovered then that peace had to become real to me…. I could hear a voice saying, ‘Stand up for peace. Stand up for truth.’”
We need to do better than we do maintaining peace between ourselves and those with whom we have the greatest distance or estrangement or rancor. You and I have known people like the man who made that menacing phone call. We need to be peacemakers with them and to make peace with our own personal adversaries. We can do it; all of us can. But shall we do it? Jesus lifts up the glowing possibility to all of his followers.
Nevertheless, it may not be an easy undertaking to make peace among individuals. An example may be seen in Louis Auchincloss’s novel The Winthrop Covenant. It is about some of the fictional descendants of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Colony of Massachusetts. It was Winthrop who declared that America was to be a city set on a hill, using terminology of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. In some of these characters, there is a strongly moralistic streak, of which the author does not approve.
Toward the end of the novel, Louis Auchincloss tells about Danny Buck, who was the chaplain and right-hand-man to Titus Larsen, the headmaster of a private New England boys prep school called Farmington. Titus Larsen was something of a stiff-necked Puritan in the mid-20th century, and it was Danny’s unspoken assignment to be the buffer between the faculty and the headmaster. One day, after chapel, the headmaster threw the remainder of the communion wine out the window rather than having the two priests drinking all of it, as custom dictated. The cascading wine happened to fall on the head of one of the leading students of the school, who instantly let fly a string of colorful expletives. This the headmaster could not abide, even though it was he who was initially at fault. It happened that the student’s father had been a major donor to the school. Nonetheless, Titus Larsen decided to expel the linguistic miscreant. Knowing that would be disastrous for everyone, Danny went to the headmaster’s wife, asking her to intervene.
You are wondering how it all turned out. I am not going to tell you. You’ll just have to read the novel for yourself. But the point is this: trying to make peace among squabbling individuals is a hard task. Those who succeed are surely children of God.
Interpersonal peace is what the seventh Beatitude was about, but inter-ethnic or inter-religious or international peace is what Palm Sunday was about. Jesus did not come into Jerusalem intending to pick a fight with anyone. He did intend to proclaim the truth of God as he saw it, and he knew that would probably rub some people the wrong way when he did it. But he certainly did not mean to inflame or enrage anyone, particularly not the Romans, who held every political card in the deck. No Jews could legally attack or execute Jesus, and Jesus knew it. But if the Romans so decided, they could put him on a cross in a Jerusalem minute. And when they feared that things were rapidly getting out of hand, that is exactly what they did.
The events which occurred during what we call Holy Week represented a rising crescendo of opposition from Jesus’ theological enemies. Both he and they believed very strongly in what they believed, but they were at opposite ends of the theological spectrum. And even though the Sadducees, Pharisees, priests, and scribes did not have the political authority to have Jesus nailed to a cross, they did have sufficient influence over the general population when called upon to stir them into near-riotous behavior. And when that happened, they knew the Romans and their governor Pontius Pilate would have to take matters into their own hands. Mob psychology is a very raw and basic phenomenon. It only takes a few clever people to get the masses to spring into action.
By the time of the Last Supper on the first Maundy Thursday, it was evident to Jesus that he had only a few more hours to live. After the Passover meal was finished, Jesus went with the disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. It was while they were there that Jesus was arrested. The three Synoptic Gospels say that in an irrational act of defiance, one of the disciples cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave with a sword. None of them identified the disciple. Only John says it was Peter who raised the sword. Luke, but only Luke, says Jesus immediately restored the severed ear of the slave. All four Gospels have Jesus say these or similar words, “Put back your sword, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
This statement is more than an injunction to live in peace with all the individuals around us. It is an implicit commandment that we must always avoid bloodshed with our political or international enemies. The man who had ridden into Jerusalem in triumph on a donkey only five days earlier was serious about the importance and necessity of peace. God’s people cannot live in harmony if there is a constant tension and rancor between them, either as individuals or as citizens within a country or as citizens of the world. We cannot be true children of God if we do not seek constantly to make peace with one another, so that the kingdom of God may fully come into effect on earth.
Palm Sunday is a glorious prelude to the tragedy and triumph represented by Holy Week. There is always an electric spirit within every congregation in Christendom on this day. It is a joyful beginning to what shall prove to be a triumphant ending, after a mournful and inexpressible penultimate interlude.
This morning Adrian Austin sang The Holy City. Of all the music for Palm Sunday, it is surely the most uplifting. No one who has ever heard this solo shall forget it.
The tour guide for every tour group I have ever led to Israel has been Walter Zanger. Walter is an American-born Reform rabbi who emigrated to Israel in 1966, and has been a tour guide there ever since. He is anything but an orthodox Jew in any sense of that word. Although he strongly identifies himself as a Jew, and strongly identifies with Israel, he is also very familiar with Christianity, having served as guide to many scores of Christian tour groups over the years.
Every time any of these tour groups came into Jerusalem, we did so by arriving from the east, going up the Jericho road. In the old days, prior to a new road being built by the Israelis through Jewish settlements built on the east side of the Mount of Olives, the old road wound its way through the village of Bethany, around the southern shoulder of the Mount of Olives. On these occasions, Walter always began singing, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lift up your gates and sing! Hosanna, in the highest, hosanna to your king!” All of us would join in, singing chorus after chorus. We then would go around the last bend in the road on the side of the mountain, and there before us, spread out in all its glory was the Temple Mount, the Al Aksa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Old City. Down below, in the city wall, was the inaccessible Golden Gate.
We can’t keep him out. Not even the sealed Golden Gate can keep Jesus from entering. But remember, Christian woman and men, he comes in peace, and only in peace. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! And blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God!