Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
(Mary Oliver)
Today is Palm/Passion Sunday when the church recalls the entry of Jesus into the city of Jerusalem riding on a donkey. It is a day of great irony and pathos. We are told that people lined the streets to greet him. And those who went before and those who followed cried out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the Name of God.” The rough translation is “Hail Chief” and “Save us!”
The people cry out like it is a parade. They seem to be saying, at last favor, success. The king is coming to set things right. We’ll be on top again.
Five days later he was betrayed, forsaken, denied by his friends; mocked and tortured by enemies, railed at by criminals and passersby and executed on a cross, crying out “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach-tha' ni.”
My God, my God, Why hast though forsaken me?
This is a different coronation than was expected on Palm Sunday. His crown would be of thorns, and his way a cross. And let us not be deceived, “The cross is not a tragic episode attached to the end of an otherwise glorious life; it is the culmination of the movement of God toward humankind which is the whole history of Jesus.”
God acted, yet not according to human expectation or design. This is the scandal or folly of faith. Infinite mercy comes to us in a crucified messiah. A magnificent defeat accompanies the triumph of God’s grace.
To unpack the deeper meaning of Palm Sunday let us ask what blocked the people on that day from seeing what made for their true peace? And what false expectations or categories hinder our openness to the Christ’s entrance into our lives?
I would speak of three central things which keep us from encountering the grace of the living God.
First the crowd. They were not a community but a crowd. There is a tremendous difference between the two. In a crowd we can hide our true selves, staying hidden to those around us. Like at a parade, we can show off the external signs of grace while remaining untouched within. Mass religiosity is often like this, a parade of external signs and coding without internal transformation.
There is no real encounter or accountability in a crowd. One can simply fake it. As Paul Simon sang, “I'm just fakin it, not really makin it...”
But lies have a cost. We remain lonely and empty, estranged from our true self and neighbor—a “unit” in society subject to the whims and fads of group psychology, power, and prejudice. We see that in the United States today.
Jesus entered Jerusulam on Palm Sunday so that we could be freed from having to fake the external signs of grace while remaining untouched within; freed to risk being a character—yourself—unique, unprecedented, irrepeatable; risk encountering the other as they are, with tears and anguish, hopes and fears—and be challenged and changed by liberating encounter with God, the source and end of life.
Second, what kind of Christ or messiah do we look for? The messianic role the crowd expected of Jesus was that of a Davidic conquerer. One who would bring victory to the righteous over the unrighteous, who would ascend to Kingship and judge over Israel’s enemies establishing their power as a nation state. They were looking for a quick fix messiah, to bless them with success and self-righteousness.
Yet this was not the Christ sent by God. Jesus chose instead the role of suffering servant suggested by the prophecies in the writings of Isaiah. He lived among the poor and identified with the outcast. He drove the greedy and corrupt out of the temple. He predicted his own death and insisted that he had come not to be served, but to serve and give his life for many.
This was a Christ who would descend rather than ascend— as Paul makes clear in Phillipians. “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”
Jesus came not bring the triumph of good people over bad people but to radically liberate and reconcile all people to the reign of God. The folly of Christ is wiser than the wisdom of humans. God’s purposes are larger than our own.
Christ came to bring all people, especially the poor—the good, bad, and ugly—home to God. Jesus died for all, so that all might live.
We have crowd and christ as categories in need of transformation.
The third is cross. There is a mystery at the heart of the cross which we reduce at our peril. On one level the cross is about self-centered sin, the persistence of hubris, the impulse to run the show. As one person said, the center of the universe is a very crowded place. There is in the human heart a hard, even violent resistance to letting God be God.
This arrogance at times seems invincible, even impossible.
Impossible but not hopeless.
Kierkegaard wrote, “Whether a person has been helped by a miracle depends first on the intellectual passion employed to discover help was impossible, and next upon how honest they are to the power which helped them nevertheless.”
Help is impossible because part of us doesn’t want it. But the true meaning of the cross is God helps us in spite of ourselves.
The good news is God’s love and mercy are greater than sin and death.
God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
God swallows up evil into God’s self, nevertheless.
Faith is radical trust, surrender, participation with our whole being in this unrelenting grace, forgiveness, liberation, new life.
It takes courage to hear and live the good news amidst the bad.
May we not get lost in the parade of external noise and religiosity, in whatever form it takes today. But as individuals in community radically, truthfully encounter the other—our true self, our real neighbor, God with us.
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”
Nevertheless.
Well said.