Hilton Head Island, SC - March 24, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 11:1-10; John 12:12-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The Pharisees then said to one another, You see that you can do nothing; look, the world has gone after him.” – John 12:19 (RSV)
For Jesus, Palm Sunday may have been personally the most edifying day of his life. It was probably the first time that a large crowd had ever responded to him with loud acclamations. Previously, crowds had listened to him, but they hadn’t collectively shouted praises to him. On Palm Sunday they did, and it must have felt very encouraging to him. But the excitement did not last long. The rest of Holy Week was a steep plummet downhill, as we all know.
The first three Gospels all give detailed accounts which explain that Jesus gave the disciples specific instructions that they were to go to a particular man in a village just outside Jerusalem. He would loan them a donkey, upon which Jesus would ride into the holy city. Jesus wanted a donkey, not a horse, because the smallest of the beasts of burden would clearly symbolize that he came to Jerusalem as a man of peace. Jesus deliberately wanted to be perceived as a peacemaker, not as a warrior, as a prophet, not as a general.
Mark was the first Gospel to be written. In his telling of the Palm Sunday story, he says that people “spread their garments on the road, and others spread leafy branches.” To us these actions may seem peculiar, but to those who did them, it suggested that they thought of Jesus as a king, their king, the king of Israel. In Matthew, Luke, and John, their depictions of Palm Sunday agree with Mark that the people who came into Jerusalem with Jesus all seemed to recognize him as a new king of the Jewish people.
But what kind of king was Jesus, if he truly was a king? There were already three Jewish kings in the Roman province of Judea. Two of them were sons of King Herod, the monarch who reigned over all Judea when Jesus was born, and another man who was unrelated to Herod. None of the three men had much political power, and so the Roman emperor allowed them to remain on their thrones. One kingdom was about the size of Rhode Island, and each of the other two were about the size of two Rhode Islands. Thus they represented no threat whatsoever to Rome. However, because the Jews were such an independent and feisty nation, Rome tried to make whatever accommodations with them the emperor considered necessary to keep them calm.
Some of the Palm Sunday crowd likely saw Jesus as a spiritual monarch, someone who had initiated a reform movement within Judaism, but not a political figure. Others may have hoped that he would become a military leader who would start a revolt against the Roman occupiers. Still others may have believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah who occasionally had been mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.
Christians have always claimed that Jesus was and is and always will be the Messiah. As you will remember, the word “Messiah” (Mesheach in Hebrew) means “The Anointed One.” Christos in Greek carries exactly the same meaning as Mesheach in Hebrew, or “Christ” in English. From biblical times on, most monarchs have been anointed with holy oil in their coronations. In the biblical tradition, however, there would be only one Messiah. He was not just an anointed one; he was The Anointed One. To Christians, Jesus is the Messiah, but many religious Jews believe the Messiah is yet to come, while others have given up hope for a Messiah altogether, perhaps because they realize that most Christians see Jesus not only as the Messiah, but also as the Son of God, God Incarnate, and the Second Person of the Trinity. All of those titles are either misguided or are totally anathema to Jews.
The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, had minimal understanding of Jewish theological issues, and no interest at all in any of these matters with which he may have been vaguely familiar. But, as I said in last week’s sermon, Pilate became instantly alert when some of his underlings told him about the excited crowd who had followed an itinerant rabbi from the region of the Galilee into Jerusalem, acknowledging him to be some sort of a king.
As Pilate had underlings, Pilate himself was an underling of the Roman emperor Tiberius. Tiberius was an autocrat, and Pilate as governor of Judea was a semi-autocrat. Even autocrats or semi-autocrats usually can’t get rid of serious troublemakers overnight. It might provoke a rebellion. It took Vladimir Putin several years before he thought it was safe to have Alexei Navalny executed or for Kim Jong Un to kill his own brother. Jesus was far less well known in his own country than either of those men in theirs, so it took from Palm Sunday evening until Maundy Thursday evening in the Garden of Gethsemane before Pilate believed it would be safe to have Jesus arrested.
There are precious few purported historical factors upon which all four Gospels agree. Nevertheless all four say that the very first thing Pilate asked Jesus in his inquisition as both prosecutor and judge was a question: “Are you the King of the Jews?” The wording is exactly that in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is so unprecedented that it must be historically accurate. Pilate didn’t beat around the bush. He went immediately to the heart of the matter facing him as the chief magistrate of Judea.
Furthermore, it was a very shrewd way for Pilate to begin his inquiry. He thought he had Jesus instantly painted into a corner (if they had paint to paint anybody into a corner back then). If Jesus said Yes, then Pilate would have ordered Jesus to be crucified with no further testimony being necessary, because Jesus would clearly be a threat to the Roman Empire, even if a minor one. All threats to the empire were dealt with by using the most convenient lethal means as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if Jesus said No, Pilate would have said, “Then why do your followers think you are a king? And just what kind of king do they --- or you --- think you are?”
Jesus didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, all four Gospels agree on this, although they don’t all tell it in precisely the same words. When Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”, Jesus himself may have tried to back Pilate into a corner. In other words, “If you open this hearing with a question, Your Honor, it implies either that some people have told you that it is claimed that I am the king of the Jews, or that you wonder if I am.” In still other words, “You say that I am the king of the Jews, Your Honor; I didn’t say that, and I don’t say it. I have never said it, and I never will.”
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Now let us move on from Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and get down to the real homiletic brass tacks. The last part of this sermon is the most important part.
"You say that I am a king," Jesus said to Pilate, and he says the same thing to us. After the Palm Sunday processional, the Pharisees feared everyone saw Jesus as a king. “See, you can do nothing; the whole world has gone after him.” That was not true then and it is not true now. But the Pharisees, as Pilate, worried that Jesus was amassing too much power.
In essence, it really doesn't matter whether or not Jesus claimed himself to be a king, because his claim to kingship would not make him a king. Personally, I strongly doubt that Jesus ever claimed to be any kind of king. Only we can crown Jesus king, you and I. He cannot do it himself. The kingship of Jesus of Nazareth is manifested solely through his followers. If no one proclaims him King, he is not King. If anybody proclaims him King, He shall be King for that person. If everybody proclaims him King, he shall be monarch of all.
But because his kingship is not of this world, as he himself said, it is not established by the transfer of power from a dying or dead monarch to his son, as usually happens, or by the conferring of power on someone elected or anointed as king, as has infrequently happened throughout history. Jesus becomes our king only by our profession of faith that he is our sovereign. Unless we say he is our king, he isn't. Each individual person has both the ability and the authority to declare Jesus the spiritual sovereign of this world, but no one else can declare him king on our behalf. Either we do it ourselves, or it doesn't get done. And that's what I think Jesus was trying to tell Pilate. Pilate didn’t understand that, because the trial was far too short for the Roman governor to grasp such a complicated theological notion.
But forget Pilate. He was he, and we are we, and you are you, and I am I. The question before each of us is the same one which confronts everyone who has ever heard of Jesus and knows enough to comprehend the question. Is Jesus a king? Is he? How do you answer?
If you want to know beyond the shadow of any doubt that Jesus was and is and shall ever be the monarch of this world and of your life, you can never know that. You can only trust that it is true, profess that it is true, have faith that it is true. No one can know that Jesus is king in the same way that we all know that Charles III is the King of Great Britain and what is left of the British Commonwealth, and that William is the Prince of Wales, but we can know with reasonable spiritual certainty and we can decide with considerable Christological determination that Jesus is our king. Such "knowledge," however, is evident exclusively by faith and commitment, and not by the conclusive persuasion of human observation. We can't see that Jesus is king; we can only trust that he is king! We can't know him to be our sovereign; we can only believe him to be our sovereign! Genealogy or inner authority or events do not proclaim Jesus as monarch. We do not believe he is our king because he is the Messiah; we believe he is the Messiah, and therefore he is our king. He is not our king because he is our king; he is our king because we trust him to be our king.
On Palm Sunday Jesus came riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Some people, perhaps even many people, shouted "Hallelujah!" (Praise God) and said "Hosanna!" (Salvation Now). They waved palm branches, and they hailed Jesus as the messianic king.
On that first Palm Sunday morning, did Jesus become the Messiah for everyone because certain people perceived him to be the Messiah? No, he was -- and is -- the Christ only to those who believe him to be the Christ! His kingdom is not of this world. It is a kingdom of the heart and mind. It is a kingdom established by faith, not fact, by prayer, not power, by trust, not treaties. The hullabaloo of the hosannas means nothing until it means something in your heart and mine. We are the creators of Christ's kingdom: you and I. Christians make it happen; it is up to us.
For Jesus to be our king, there must be the possibility that he might not be the king. If we can be sure he is the monarch in the same way that we are sure Charles III is the monarch of the United Kingdom, then Jesus cannot be the king. He becomes our ruler only if we acknowledge him as monarch; Charles is the king, whether or not discontented Scots or Welsh or Northern Irish do him homage. Charles received his crown amidst much impressive pomp and circumstance. Jesus receives his crown surrounded by the hatred and rejection of his opponents, riding on a donkey. Madeleine L'Engle, that very perceptive, very bright lady, wrote, "The problem of pain, of war and the horror of war, of poverty and disease is always confronting us. But a God who allows no pain, no grief, also allows no choice. There is little unfairness in a colony of ants, but there is also little freedom. We human beings have been given the terrible gift of free will, and this ability to make choices, to help write our own story, is what makes us human, even when we make the wrong choices, abusing our freedom and the freedom of others."
If you treat someone like a king, he becomes a king. In their own fumbling but passionate manner, a small group of outcast disciples treated a Nazarene carpenter like a king, and he became a king to them. A Roman governor was unable to see anything regal in that same man, and therefore, he reluctantly acquiesced in a sentence of death for an oddly regal man.
So the question remains; no, the question persists: it demands an answer. --- Is he a king?