April 9, 2006

Luke 19:29-40

       When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” just say this: “The Lord needs it.” ’ So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’ They said, ‘The Lord needs it.’ Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!’ Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’

Luke 19:41-48

       As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.’ Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, ‘It is written, “My house shall be a house of prayer”; but you have made it a den of robbers.’ Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.

Sermon  

The Triumph Before the Battle

     They were so close to getting it right, the crowds of people who greeted Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey that day.  They were so close to getting it right.  They had the right words, "Hosanna" is what you shouted to the king as he arrived triumphantly.   To the Son of David is was the proper greeting for the Messiah that had long been expected and hoped for by the people of God.  They were right about what to say; and they were right about whom to say it to.  You say it to the one who is riding on the back of the donkey; you say it to the one for whom cloaks are spread and for whom palm branches are waved.  All of this was foretold in the prophet Zechariah; and the people knew, when they saw Jesus, who he was.  And they were shouting the proper greeting to him. They were so close to getting it right. And Jesus acknowledged that.   When the Pharisees told him to keep his people quiet, to keep them from saying these disturbing and heretical things.  He said No, if they were quiet, the stones themselves would shout out.  In other words, the people were so right that if they were silent the universe would take up the cry for them because Jesus was the very one who was properly to enter into the city on that day in triumph and bring all of God's will to the world to pass.

     They were so close to being right; so close and yet in this particular instance, being close can still mean that you miss it completely.  That's why, almost the very next thing that Jesus said was a lament over Jerusalem.  He mourned over the city; over how the city would be destroyed; how the faith of the people would be shattered; how everything would lie in ruins at their feet one day.  And the reason was, he said Because you did not recognize the visitation of your Lord.  You did not recognize.  They seem to have recognized and yet they did not recognize.  That was Jesus' early diagnosis; on the very same day that he rode in triumph with the crowd shouting, he was saying They do not recognize.  You do not recognize.  Then, however, events seem to confirm that Jesus was who he seemed to be and who the crowds thought he was because as he did the symbolic act of driving the moneylenders out of the temple, restoring the temple as a pure house of prayer not a house for buying and selling, not "a den of robbers" as Jesus put it.  As he did that there was every indication that the people were still behind him.  This is how a leader ought to act and people were ready to follow.  And those who were the enemies of Jesus, who were looking for a way to undermine him, kept being frustrated by the fact that there were such crowds around Jesus, who were spellbound by his words; that even after Jesus said you do not recognize it is plain tat it still seemed that people were recognizing who he is.  It still seemed as if he were triumphing; as if Palm Sunday was a dramatic success.

     And yet, Jesus knew that with all of their correctness of perception, with all of their saying and doing the right things they were still missing it.  He must have sensed something in the words that he overheard in the crowds.  He must have been drawing upon his experience of being a rabbi, a teacher, among the people of Israel for three years.  He must have been drawing upon the deep wisdom that he had acquired while pondering the work of God in the wilderness before his ministry began.  And while spending long hours in prayer to his Heavenly Father, apart from his disciples, apart from the crowds who gathered to hear him; he must have drawn upon all of that to come up with this diagnosis which proved to be tragically correct.  They do not recognize. He must have realized something about the way in which he was being received and being understood and being talked about.   He must have recognized something there that he knew was going to spell disaster, at least from the human point of view. 

     Palm Sunday was a perfect day that suddenly went wrong.  There was a sun that day when suddenly, a cloud passed over that sun.  That kind of cloud that's so thin that it doesn't exactly block out the sun, but it makes everything look eerie instead of bright and sunshine-y.   Palm Sunday was that kind of day.  A day that set the stage for the events of the coming week, and Jesus was the first to see it.  What was it that people were not quite getting on that day?  We usually say that the people expected Jesus to be an earthly king.  Well, I think that's right; and yet in a sense I also think they expected that Jesus was the king who was ordained by God; and they expected him to reign forever.  They expected him, in other words, to be heavenly, to be eternal, to be sent by God to accomplish a kind of end-of-history event in the life of Israel.  He would bring about Israel's kingdom and end all of the tragedy and the sorrow that Israel had gone through and all of it would end in triumph when the king came. 

     So it wasn't exactly that they wanted an earthly ruler in Jesus; but I wonder if maybe what they wanted was the kind of triumph that would allow them to go on with what they envisioned as the perfect life.   With the king as a part of that life.  Imagine the kind of perfect life that we envision; and I think that we can enter into the feelings of the people of Jerusalem that day.  We tend to want to have peaceful days.  We want to have lives where the conflicts are minimal and the fulfillments are dominant.  We want to have a day where things go our way.  We want also to have a day that we can spend doing the things we like to do.  And as we envision what a perfect life would be like we might find little ways of putting touches of perfection on the cosmos, the outer world around us, but what remains intact is that things go perfectly in our private lives, in our everyday duties in the things that we actually are part of at the same time.  So the Israelites might have wanted to live under their own vine and fig tree in peace and unafraid.  They might have wanted to have the ordinary kind of everyday life that they expected would happen when the king came back.  They wanted that to be the life they had and then the king would be back and that was kind of the icing on the cake.   That was what made it so great; that was a part of their horizon.  But meanwhile they had this image of a peaceful life themselves.

     What I'm saying is that they were focusing on two things: they were focusing on the king; but also focusing on the things that they themselves wished for in life.  And I find the same double focus at work in me; and not all the time, but almost all the time, this is the dominant way in which I perceive my life.  You may think that a minister is someone who is totally committed to serving God wherever that leads them.  And that's the kind of statement we make when we are ordained; that's the kind of thing that we tell ourselves on our good days, or in our good moments.  And that is the kind of thing that a minister ought to do.  And yet, even when a minister gets out of bed in the morning, he's still wishing for a good day rather than a bad one.  A day when there's more time for reflecting upon the beauties and the glories of God than helping people with the torn and broken aspects of their lives that are so upsetting to view.  It's just preferable; it's more fun; it's more enjoyable; it's more relaxing.  Just as you want days off like that in your different vocations that you follow; and retirement, for some of you is a vocation, and you want pleasant days instead of traumatic days; ministers are the same.  

    And sometimes that desire for a pleasant day becomes so dominant in me that I lose that focus.  The focus that the people of Jerusalem never quite got; the focus that is essential to knowing Jesus.   Because he is not just a horizon, he's not just the element that makes our perfect days come about, he is, he is, the only perfect day we will ever know.  The only perfect life we will ever have is Jesus himself; not the blessings that Jesus brings, but Jesus himself.  That is it's own blessing; that is the blessing from which all other blessings flow.  That focus upon the king himself; his kingdom is that which he himself brings was, maybe, what was missing in the crowd's in Jerusalem.  Causing some of them simply to become timid and to disappear and maybe others of them to become disillusioned and to turn against Jesus and to start looking for somebody else, somebody who would meet their expectations.

     What Jesus is prepared to offer us is everything that he has; but in order for us to receive it, it needs to become everything to us.  Jesus, ultimately, is not making the difference in our life that he's here to make unless he is making every difference in our lives; unless he is the focus, the goal, the beloved, the element in our lives from which everything else derives and flows and grows.  I need to hear that regularly.   I need to be drawn back to that focus on Christ.  Jesus Christ is the reward of being a Christian.  You don't have Jesus Christ so you can get other rewards, you have Jesus Christ himself and that is the reward.  Jerusalem hadn't learned that yet.  We have learned it and still fall into that same mistake as Jerusalem.  And mistake spells, perhaps, disaster.  That sounds like what Jesus meant when he wept over the city. 

     We do not recognize unless we fully recognize; you can't be part Christian and part something else, not in a literal sense or not in an ultimate sense.  To be a follower of Jesus is to have him right at the heart, right in the front, right over everything else in our lives.  I need daily, hourly, reminders of this fact in my life.  And Jesus knows that I do, and he knows that you do and he knew that the people of Jerusalem did need daily and hourly reminders.  He knew that they needed more than just for the Messiah to come about outside themselves.  They needed the Messiah to come about inside themselves as well.   That reference to the stones shouting out suggests that when Jesus was arriving in Jerusalem it was more than just the triumph of the nation of Israel, it was a triumphant day for the entire universe.  Even the non-human parts of creation, the rocks and stones, would sing their hosannas in their own way on that day. 

     Because Jesus had come to restore all things to their heavenly perfection.  But for something that cosmic to take place on the level of the molecules that make up our bodies, on the level of the largest objects in outerspace that we've learned about up to this point, on the level of totality, on the level of each minute particle, for Jesus to make that kind of difference something more drastic has to happen - the breaking of the body of God so that after being broken and then restored, that light can come into our lives.  That's what had to unfold in the events of Holy Week.  To see that breaking is a sad, sorrowing tragedy to look upon those events is to find ourselves brought closer to tears and yet this is the only kind of salvation that would really work for what creation needs.  Jesus also knew that; and while he flinched, and while he wished for other outcomes, while as late as Thursday night in the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed that it might come about in some other way, he was resolute in being prepared to bring about that salvation through his own broken body and shed blood.

     So, Palm Sunday, while a day of triumph, a day of joy, a day of happy smiles and celebratory actions, a day the children love, a day when we love to watch children - Palm Sunday is also the first day of this chain of events that led to this deep transformation in the universe.  Palm Sunday was the day of triumph, there was triumph before the battle; the battle was still to be fought.  And each year we relive that battle when we worship between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.  Each year, as we turn our thoughts to Jesus in our own private lives as well as in our worship together, each year we are connecting with the battle so that the triumph beyond the battle becomes the real and final and time-ending but eternal triumph that we all feel in our hearts on the day that we call Easter.  I'm getting ready for that now and Jesus was getting ready for it as he looked at Jerusalem and wept; and we, in one way or another, must also weep between now and then.  Amen.

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