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Maybe if
today hadn’t happened, if Palm Sunday wasn’t on our calendar, Jesus of
Nazareth could have been celebrated as a prophet; a revered teacher whose
wise sayings and loving ways so entranced and transformed those who heard
Him. He could be remembered for healing so many, for His insistence that to
obey God we need to live a just and kindly life. But that ride on the donkey
was the tipping point, now we are really moving into somewhere much scarier
than the Bates Motel!
This ride into Jerusalem, and Jesus’ refusal to defend himself with
violence, Jesus’ obedience even unto death on a cross, is why we still
remember Jesus today. One theologian, Herbert McCabe, described Jesus’
Passion in the following way: “Jesus accepted the
cross in love and obedience. Jesus obeyed the command to be human. Jesus, not
Adam, was the first human being in whom humanity came to fulfillment; the
first human being for whom to live was simply to love.
this is what human
beings are for.”
The second half of the Gospel of Mark is the account of Jesus’ progression
from the question posed to the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” to
the question Jesus asked of Himself,
“Who do I say that I am?” At every step
of the way, at every point of self-discovery, Jesus works out the answer to
His question by abandoning Himself to others. The closer Jesus moved to
Jerusalem the clearer He saw that what God needed Him to do was to give
Himself completely and unconditionally in love, without any false hope that
such love would pre-empt the evil in the world or avoid the cross and its
pain. This is why we pause to consider today’s Palm Sunday parade.
It is said, “The whole world loves a parade.” Janice, Jennifer and Jim love
to tease me over how much I love a parade. Alpharetta’s Old Soldiers Day
Parade on the first Saturday in August, July 4th, The Highland Games at Stone
Mountain... I’m there! I love a parade.
On July 4, 1993,
we drove to downtown
Atlanta saw the Parade; people were shocked.
And then next day we drove to
Douglasville for another parade. Like many of you, we took our children, when
they were young, to Disney World. Every evening a different Theme Park...
a
different parade; different music and fireworks and fun. Surrounded by so
much make-believe, we could be tempted to imagine how wonderful it would be
if we lived in a magic kingdom, a world of dreams come true.
A world that
goes to sleep each night with a spectacular parade of your favorite
characters from childhood. Alas, magic kingdoms don’t exist in the real
world!
The whole point of Disney and their parades are to be diversions from the
ragged pains and ambiguities of life. The Magic Kingdom is a world where
there is no dirt, no sin, no death, nothing evil or bad happens there.
People don’t get cancer in the Magic Kingdom, there are no real hurts there.
It is all sweetness and light and candy floss. In such a pretend world we
can ask, “Where are Mickey and Goofy?” and there is no need for Holy Week,
or Good Friday, or Easter Sunday. There is no need for redemption, for
everything is already right with the world.
But in the real world, in our world, Palm Sunday’s Parade with its feel of a
mini-celebration, with a charm all of its own, is a false climax. Maybe for
some of us it would be far easier to believe in the Lord of Palm Sunday if
Jesus’ procession stopped right there and didn’t continue into Holy Week,
with all that talk of cross and resurrection! But we have to acknowledge
that the Jesus story does not stop here, the full nature of the Lordship of
Jesus will involve more than the events of Palm Sunday.
Jesus’ desire to embrace the world in grace and love, the full work for our
salvation, is still to be accomplished. Since we don’t live in a magic
kingdom, since our lives are not all sweetness and light, since we live in a
world mired in sin, suffering, and death, since brokenness is all around us,
Palm Sunday was not enough then and is not enough now to deal with our sin.
On Palm Sunday death still has the last word. The fulfillment of Jesus’
incarnation, God’s all-embracing act must be played out on the cross which
will reveal at one and the same time our hellishness and God’s holiness.
My friends, we cannot short-circuit Holy Week by turning today into Easter.
Oh it is just so tempting, because just maybe our sins are not so bad after
all. Maybe God is not such a fearsome judge as people long ago used to
think. Maybe we don’t need all this blood-of-the-lamb theology.
Maybe we are
religious people come of age. So maybe we can celebrate Jesus as our leader,
our guide and our friend whose spirit and influence we can welcome today,
just as the people of Jerusalem welcomed him 2000 years ago and maybe then
we don’t need Jesus to drag us all through Holy Week.
Maybe,
but no! Palm Sunday without Holy Week is
"Disney Theology", theology
for a people who never sin and for whom death is not a reality. The journey
of Jesus beginning today and lasting the week ahead is a journey from
illusion into reality. This journey which Jesus embraces exposes as a lie
the claims that everything is really quite fine just as it is, that our sin
is not really so bad, that death is no cause for fear, and that we can
relate to God without the need of a Savior.
The same Jesus welcomed by Hosannas today will soon be greeted with
“Crucify, Crucify him!” Those who placed their robes on the road toda, will
call for His head in just a few days. Jesus’ presence rooted out the
pretence of false religion and revealed our need of a Savior. In Jesus
Christ, God was reconciling the world to God. In the real world, in the real
Jesus, God was at work reconciling the world to God;
it needed the Jesus of
Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday to end our
estrangement from God.
We do know don’t we that our world is no fantasy world! We know that we live
in a world stalked by the horrific and unfathomable violence of war, a world
menaced by genocide still, a world in which the staggering and unjust gap
between those like us who are rich and those whose lives are desolate grows
inexorably, a world in which ordinary people, people we know, get cancer.
A world in which human sin is seen in our behavior.
A world in which death
remains the final enemy. As we sing “Hosanna” we must turn our eyes to the
Via Delarosa, for the One who walks there along that avenue of sorrows is
moving towards the most staggering event in all history:
the resurrection of
the crucified Lord.
My friends, we cannot get to Easter from here... we can’t get to Easter from
Palm Sunday. The only way to get there is to leave Palm Sunday behind us and
walk into the darkness of betrayal and crucifixion that is Holy Week.
And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of another parade, mentioned
almost casually in
Mark 15:21,
“They compelled a passer-by, who was coming
in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father
of Alexander and Rufus”. The way Mark notes the names of Alexander and Rufus
makes me think that they were members of the original church community which
received Mark’s gospel. Their names are offered as a sort of
almost-eye-witness testimony from their father to the fact that Jesus had an
appointment with a real cross on a real day.
Cyrene, an Egyptian hamlet, contained a sizeable population of
Jews whose ancestors had fled Palestine years before. Simon, when he got
home, told of his unexpected appearance in the parade.
Utterly drained by
the physical and emotional torment, and by the raw hatred of the crowd, he
related the sights and sounds to his two children. Alexander and Rufus were
all ears; they wanted to hear about their father’s trip to Jerusalem for the
Passover. Instead of, and as well as that, they heard for the first of many
times of how in the flow of events, quite beyond the control of their
father, he had gotten caught up in the crucifixion of Jesus. That story and
its retelling eventually transformed Simon and his two boys. Yes, all he had
been was a passerby; a man with no connection with the tragedy that was
unfolding in Jerusalem. It had started out as any other day, but it became
for him and his sons the day of days, the day which forever changed his
life.
Isn’t it time for us to change our lives all over again? Isn’t this the
season in which we need to re-focus our lives on our faith? Isn’t this the
most pressing business before us this week?
To walk the way our Savior walked, and find our
salvation! Amen. |
