Hilton Head Island, SC – March 24, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 19:28-48
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” – Luke 19:33-34 (RSV)
It is doubtful that anyone at any point in history has fully understood who Jesus of Nazareth really was, or what he attempted to do. But almost certainly that was true for all of his contemporaries. Jesus was so rare a personality with so unique a message that he was bound to be misunderstood by virtually everyone with whom he had contact. Only by looking back at Jesus after his crucifixion and resurrection could people begin to get a glimmer of what he truly was all about. But even then, there turned out to be a multitude of different ways of perceiving the nature and purpose of Jesus’ ministry in 1st century Judea.
To some, Jesus was a miracle worker. To others he was a remarkable teacher and preacher. To others he was a prophet. Probably to few, if any, was he the Messiah of God, the Anointed One whom God had sent into the world to redeem His people Israel, even though that claim is occasionally made in the Gospels, especially the Fourth Gospel. But again, they realized that only by looking back. However, it was Easter which apparently caused Jesus’ followers to re-assess who he really was.
Palm Sunday is the beginning of what the Church has always called “Holy Week.” Jesus entered into Jerusalem in a triumphant procession on Palm Sunday, and for the next four days he went about the city, preaching the kingdom of God in a surprising, even startling, manner. Then, on Thursday evening, after what we call “the Last Supper,” he was arrested, and put on trial before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. He was sentenced to death after a shamefully brief trial, immediately he was sent to be crucified, and within six hours he was dead.
Were it not for the proclamation of the resurrection by the earliest followers of Jesus, we never would have heard of him. He would simply have been an obscure Jewish peasant preacher who made a minor splash during his short ministry, and then was crucified, along with thousands of other misfits and criminals through the centuries of Roman rule. No one would ever have known of him after that. The disciples wanted Jesus to use his miraculous powers to escape the cross. They likely also wanted him to establish an armed rebellion against Rome, and to become the Messiah everyone wanted and expected, namely, a warrior. Jesus never had any intention of doing that. According to John’s Gospel, when Jesus was on trial before Pilate, he said, “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight…, but my kingship is not from the world” (18:36).
During his lifetime Jesus was not the kind of Messiah anyone wanted. That’s why no one perceived him to be the Messiah. He was accepted as God’s Messiah only after several decades, as people took the time to think through the ultimate meaning of what Jesus had preached. He wasn’t a warrior, he wasn’t a worrier, and he wasn’t a wanderer. He had confidence in what he preached, and he didn’t keep updating it. His message was consistent from situation to situation and from day to day. He was very unswerving in what he said and did. It was enough to attract a sufficient number of relatively theologically unsophisticated followers, but the life and teachings by themselves never would have established him as the Messiah in anyone’s mind, particularly because he ended up on a cross. It is what happened two days after the crucifixion, and what people deduced was the hidden meaning of the crucifixion, that caused Christianity to come into being. In a short phrase, it was “Good News from a Graveyard” that gave birth to belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and not only a Messiah for the Jews, but for all humanity through all time.
Palm Sunday was the greatest day in the life of Jesus, in terms of widespread recognition by a fairly large crowd of people. All four Gospels declare that when Jesus entered into the holy city on that long-ago spring day, many people hailed his entrance into Jerusalem. However, Jesus very deliberately made a low-key, almost a comical, entry. He came riding in on a donkey.
Why on earth would he do that? Kings rode on the largest warhorses available. They wanted to look regal, and a large, powerful horse enhanced the image.
Do you think somebody riding a jackass would look regal; do you? Of course not! But there was symbolism being played out here, just as symbolically, the new Pope spoke Italian to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, not Latin; and he personally paid his bill at the place where he had been staying for a couple of weeks prior to the papal conclave, indirectly urging his fellow cardinals to do the same; and he waded into the crowd to shake hands with people, giving some of them a hug. Symbols are important for leaders. Symbolically, Jesus was proclaiming that he came to Jerusalem in peace by riding a donkey or a young horse. It was very calculated; of that there can be no doubt. He wanted the Jews to know he had no intention of leading an army, but he especially wanted the Romans to know that. He was consciously trying to make friends and influence people, even though in the end it didn’t succeed.
We can deduce that Jesus knew who owned the donkey, because he had sent word ahead to them that he would be needing their donkey for a few hours. They were not about to part with their beast unless they were assured it was for Jesus. “Why are you untying the colt?” they asked when the disciples came to their house. “The Lord has need of it,” the disciples said. So the parade was ready to commence. As they went through the Valley of Kidron and up through the gate of the city into Jerusalem, people began to cry out, “Blessed be the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Hearing this, some of the Pharisees shouted to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” In response, Jesus said one of the most triumphant statements about himself he ever uttered; “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out!” The great stones of the city wall, the stones framing the entrance gate, the stones of the temple walls: they all would proclaim that this day was the day of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of God!
This past week I heard an amazing story, and I read a very dismaying story. First the amazing story. A young man happened to tell me he had been a volunteer in Israel for three and a half years, feeding hungry people on the streets of West Jerusalem. He got there through an astonishing sequence of events. We shall call this man John Smith. Several times he had visited a center in North Carolina for recovering drug and alcohol addicts. A few years ago he felt moved to go there yet again. When he got there the director of the facility was overcome to see him. A man from Victoria, British Columbia was also there at the time, and he had told the director God instructed him to meet a man in that place named John Smith. The man was a retired police officer. John Smith said he had been an outlaw, and here he was being led by God to a police officer. The policeman had a wealthy friend who gave the two men a large sum of money to go to feed the poor of Jerusalem. So off they went, a self-confessed outlaw and a retired policeman. It was in the holy city where both men met their future wives, John’s from the Philippines and the other man’s wife from Australia.
Many people would dismiss that story out of hand. God doesn’t instruct people to go meet anyone named John Smith in the mountains of North Carolina, they would insist. I believe it was just as John Smith reported. Things like that happen. Almost certainly they would not happen to someone like me, and perhaps you as well, because we might be too skeptical to allow it to happen, but things like this do occur, our skepticism notwithstanding.
The people in the crowd on Palm Sunday were mainly folks like John Smith, I suspect, not like me, and maybe not like you. But they and their faith made it happen, even if the Messiah they wanted Jesus to be was by no means the Messiah Jesus was - - - or is.
And now for the dismaying story. I read about a female soldier who was raped by a fellow soldier while on active duty in Afghanistan. A chaplain in the hospital where she was being treated came to visit her. She told him her tragic story. And what was the response to her by this purported man of God? She said, “He told me the rape was God’s will, and by means of it God was trying to get my attention so that I would go back to church.”
Can you imagine it? What kind of a clergyman would ever say such a thing in those circumstances, even to his worst enemy? And with friends like that, who needs enemies?
People with all kinds of faith and all kinds of theological slants come to Jesus, and they want Jesus to reflect what they choose to believe about him and about God. Jesus didn’t manifest himself on the basis of what we want him to be. He operated on the basis of what God wanted him to be. He did what he did because of what he perceived was God’s will, and he understood God’s will more clearly than any of us ever shall comprehend.
On Palm Sunday, Jesus came riding into Jerusalem like a clown-king, not a crowned king. Some of the people cheered him anyway. “I love a parade!” they probably sang to themselves. “Hosanna in the highest!” they sang. “Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord!” It doesn’t take a lot to pervert God’s kingdom. A little misplaced zeal is all that is required. But Jesus came in peace, and he could not have made it any plainer. Years later, looking back at it, Jesus’ followers may have interpreted differently what happened, but on the day itself, on the first Palm Sunday, the followers of Jesus sang his praises. Jesus clearly suspected what lay only a few days ahead, but none of them saw it. Their cheers meant one thing to them, and quite another to Jesus.
In an interview, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, quoted her mother-in-law, whom she both admired and loved. At some point early in Justice Ginsburg’s marriage to her beloved husband Marty, Mrs. Ginsburg told her daughter-in-law, “In every good marriage, it pays sometimes to be a little deaf.” Then, to the interviewer, the shrewd and brilliant jurist said, “It works on the Supreme Court too.”
Jesus heard the hosannas and hallelujahs on Palm Sunday. No doubt it pleased his heart, but it also saddened him. He thought to himself, “They just don’t get it.” But on Palm Sunday, how could they? Even on Easter, how could they? Over the course of years, or decades, or centuries, or your lifetime or mine, maybe we can grasp some of the essence of what it is all about, but one triumphant processional does not a proper commitment make.
I have been reading a book called Dogs of God, written by James Reston, Jr. It is about Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs of Spain, the Spanish Inquisition, the commissioning of Columbus to sail west across the Atlantic in 1492, and the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain in that same year. One of the most pivotal, grand, and awful years in history is 1492.
Isabella and Ferdinand were convinced God wanted them to do everything they did, including killing and torturing countless Jews, Jews who had converted to Christianity but not to the satisfaction of the Spanish rulers, and many Moors, whose forebears had been living peacefully in Iberia for over seven centuries. Queen Isabella especially was unrelenting in her conviction that she was doing all the right things on behalf of God.
So were the Jewish leaders and Pontius Pilate certain they were doing the right thing, as were the Palm Sunday crowd sure that Jesus was about to lead an armed insurrection against Rome. T.S. Eliot wrote, “’Tis the highest of treason/ to do the right thing but for the wrong reason.”
It is a sad indictment on us all that we all do that that from time to time. Acting with what we believe are the best of intentions, we subvert God’s intentions. Thus, after the Last Supper in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the Roman soldiers came to arrest Jesus, Peter cut of the ear of one of the soldiers, thinking he was protecting Jesus by doing so. What he in fact was doing was to negate everything Jesus stood for. The answer to perverting God’s kingdom is to pay much closer attention to what Jesus said in order to comprehend best exactly what that kingdom means. Violence and warfare inhibit the kingdom, but peace and kindness exhibit it.
The outstanding contemporary theological novelist Frederick Buechner addresses this theme as it plays itself out through the crucifixion. He wrote, “You can hardly blame Pilate for washing his hands of Jesus. He asks so bloody much, this Jesus. Bloody is the word for it…. What he calls us to is the terrifying game of letting him enormously move us as the story of him lives and breathes and converges on us beyond all our ideas of him; as it bids us, moves us, to do and to be only God knows what, which can be a very bloody business indeed if we do it right. When we put up our crosses in Protestant churches, we take the body off first as if once the resurrection happens, we somehow no longer have to worry about crucifixion anymore.” I would add that we conveniently forget that Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me.”
On Palm Sunday it is well to remember that a crucifixion is coming. For some Christians, that is the essence of the story, because they believe by that cross are all our sins are forever forgiven. But by no means is that the whole story. Easter is coming after Good Friday, and it completes the whole story, even if, with the best of intentions, we may seek to subvert Easter as well. But God is God, and Jesus is Jesus, and it shall all play itself out once again in 2013. All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King!