Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
March 20, 2005 Palm Sunday
Matthew 21: 1-11
A colleague writes, “I have a friend, a mortician, who claims that I only have three sermons in my bag of tricks, and that I preach these three sermons in endless repetition, with few variations. One sermon is something to the effect that, ‘God is large, mysterious, and there is no way I could explain God to people like you.’ The other sermon is, ‘Life is a mess, and there is no way I can explain life to people like you.’ The third constantly recurring theme of my sermons, he says, is this: ‘Christianity is weird, odd, peculiar, and I can’t believe you people actually want to be Christians.’”
Now understand, the man is a mortician after all, but he has a point. I often wonder just how many original sermons there are out there, or better yet, in here, and I most often wonder that late on a Saturday night. But this Palm Sunday would seem to be a good day to explore idea number three in my colleague’s list of sermon ideas - the peculiarity of this day and of being a Christian.
Palm Sunday – Jesus rides into Jerusalem, the heart of Jewish worship and the seat of Roman authority, from the Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives had both religious and political significance. It had long been associated in the minds of the Jewish people with messianic hopes. According to Zechariah 14 in the Old Testament, this was the place from which God would fight the nations and restore Jerusalem to glory. In the second century, B.C., Simon Maccabaeus, the great liberator of Jerusalem, had triumphantly entered the city from the Mount of Olives. And this now is how Jesus chooses to make his entrance. He had to know the symbolism, what it would mean to the people.
And they don’t miss a beat. According to Matthew: “A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.” This is red-carpet treatment for the king’s parade. And listen to what they shout: “Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna – save us – save us now!” Jesus is hailed as the one who will restore the kingdom of David – an affirmation which the Romans might have found interesting. I once read this commentary on the Palm Sunday parade, the palms and the celebration: “What do the palms say? They say: We are tired of being kicked around, we are hungry to be Number One again, ready to strut our stuff once more. Here’s our agenda and you, Jesus, look like just the man we need. Welcome, warrior king! Hail, conquering hero!” And again, who can blame them? Why else would Jesus choose to enter town in such a fashion? It certainly looked like he was ready to take on Rome and anyone else who might get in his way. Do you recall the Palm Sunday words of Simon the Zealot in Jesus Christ Superstar?
Keep them yelling their devotion
But add a touch of hate at Rome
You will rise to a greater power
We will win ourselves a home.
And yet, it’s right here, right when Jesus seems at the height of his power and popularity, that things begin to get just a bit peculiar. In the words of one New Testament professor, “The palm wavers rightly see triumph in Jesus, but they don’t understand it. Jesus has come to conquer not Rome, but the world. He comes to the Holy City not to deal death or to sidestep death, but to meet death head-on. He will conquer the world and death itself by dying.” This is a king? Yes indeed. But not exactly the king people were expecting. I mean, this is a king who is entering Jerusalem to be betrayed, arrested, tried, and executed as a criminal by the power of the state. Rather peculiar, don’t you think? Considering how dramatically the crowd’s mood changes by Good Friday, it’s a pretty safe bet that this is not the king they were looking for. And how about us?
The peculiar Palm Sunday parade reminds me of words sung by some of my favorite theologians, The Rolling Stones:
You can’t always get what you want,
You can’t always get what you want,
You can’t always get what you want,
But if you try sometime, you just might find,
You get what you need.
Mick Jagger and Palm Sunday – they just kind of go together, don’t you think?
Could it be that this is precisely what Palm Sunday is all about? United Methodist bishop, William Willimon says it like this: “The crowd did not get what it wanted, but it did receive what it needed, indeed what all of us need. To their dismay, Jesus was no local revolutionary, no national freedom fighter. He did not arrive flashing a sword and swaggering in might, but lowly and riding on a donkey. He did not come in the name of the nation but, and here is the irony, he really did come in the name of the Lord. When Jesus came to Jerusalem, the crowd did not get a conquering hero; it got a suffering servant. It did not get a politician or a general; it got a savior…. But the words which they uttered actually turned out to signify the truth after all, the truth they desperately needed, the truth that God was indeed in their midst.”
A Fred Craddock story: “A man down the road from us when I was a boy was named Cook. I never knew his first name; he was Mr. Cook. Mr. Cook was a hateful man, and one day he killed our dog. Our dog was named Dempsey after the prizefighter, Jack Dempsey. He was just a dog, but he was our dog, and he went with us everywhere. And Mr. Cook killed him.
“When our father came in that evening before dinner, I said to him, ‘Mr. Cook killed Dempsey.’ My father didn’t even stay in the house for supper. He went down the road, and the five of us kids were saying, ‘Go get him Dad, go get him.’ My mother was in the kitchen, crying and praying. Father was gone a long time, and my mother was very worried. When he finally came back, he had blood on his shirt. We wanted to know what had happened. He said, ‘I never knew Mr. Cook was an epileptic.’
“’What? He’s an epileptic?’
“’I went down there to let him have it, and he was on the porch in a seizure – chewing his tongue, and his mouth was bleeding. I got my hand in his mouth, got him free of chewing his tongue, and took him in the house. I cared for him until he was able to get up and sit in a chair. That’s where I got the blood.’
“I said, ‘Well now that he’s feeling better, you’re going to go down there and beat him up…right?’
“And my father said, ‘No.’ That seemed strange to me; I mean, he killed Dempsey.”
Jesus used all the symbols of kingly power when he entered Jerusalem. Again, the people recognized them right away. But what they didn’t recognize was that this was a new and different kingdom, a kingdom coming into their midst led by a king who used weapons of love, forgiveness, compassion, acceptance, sacrifice – a king who would give his life that others might have life. Here was a passionate concern for life not linked with any political agenda. Imagine that!
As theologian Rebecca Chopp has said: “On Palm Sunday a window opens, quickly, and we see old orders of oppression and destruction replaced with new orders of flourishing and fulfillment. We see something higher, better and more beautiful than the troubled ways of this world. A window opens through which we see God as one who rides with us into a new city where there is neither suffering nor despair. The Palm Sunday story names something about our journey of faith: it says that amid struggle, anguish, denial and forgetfulness we have a wild and soaring anticipation, a vision of a new way, a glimpse of a new world.”
Each day we are bombarded with the cultural message that the purpose of life is to succeed, to win, to get all the rewards possible; to keep the rest of the world scared or guessing while satisfying our seemingly endless desires for security and material gain. And then we come to this day, stand there in the crowd with all our worldly expectations, and we meet this king who confronts us with the profoundly counter cultural notion that love’s most awesome and enduring power just might be revealed in weakness, vulnerability, and a willingness to sacrifice. A person would have to be crazy, or at least rather peculiar, to follow such a king. But imagine confronting the powers of the world today with disarming, unafraid, unyielding love. That’s what rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And, by God’s grace it will ride into our hearts today. It may not be want we want, but I am convinced that it is precisely what we need.