Palm and Passion Sermon Year B 2015

Two Parades, Two by Mary James

Text: Mark 11: 1-11

This Sunday begins for us the most sacred week of the Christian year. Over these days, beginning with and going through , we immerse ourselves in the story of Jesus’ last days, and struggle to make sense of it all. It is a narrative we think we know well, but it turns out that we haven’t really been taught the full story. So misunderstood has this narrative been that many have managed to twist it in all kinds of wrong ways—among the worst perversions is that of those wrong-headed people who have used it as a justification for anti-Jewish attitudes and actions.

If we hold something sacred, we are called to reverence it on its own terms. This is the year of hearing the story through the lens of Mark’s , the way Mark’s community remembered it and interpreted it, forty years after it all happened. It is not only our story as Christians, it is our story as humans, and violence of the sort Jesus experienced continues to be carried out all over the world today. If we can enter Mark’s story more fully on its own terms, perhaps we can understand more fully how God is at work in our own lives, and why it is that we are not completely out of our minds to continue to have a wild and vivid hope in our hearts! Mark’s narrative is always a good way to start, as it is the earliest of the that made it into the Bible.

Most of us have grown up with the experience of Palm Sunday as a festive day, celebrating it as a fleeting but still gratifying moment of recognition for Jesus. This seems to be accurate as far as it goes, but it is not the whole story. As scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have pointed out in their marvelous book The Last Week , it was also a planned and risky act of political theatre on the part of Jesus and his friends.

There were two going on that spring day in the year 30 in the beginning of Passover Week. As Borg and Crossan explain it, “One was a peasant , the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers came from the peasant class….On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’s procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’ crucifixion.” Knowing this, while we can still with integrity give ourselves the jubilation of waving palms and shouting “Hosanna” on Palm Sunday, we must come to terms with the fact that the jubilation should be more like that which comes from doing the right thing at great risk than that sort of jubilation we would bring to a local holiday parade. Think less parade, and picture a whole lot more, say, a peace march that walks toward a line of hostile armed authority figures.

In this act of riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey—not a seasoned warhorse—Jesus manages to throw a pie in the face of the Roman authorities, as it were. He appears to actually be lampooning their parade, and challenging their version of might and right. Who is really in charge? Who is the real deity here? These are the questions his procession was designed to beg. The emperor of Rome, represented by the huge display of Roman power riding into the city (NOT coincidentally during Passover week) to show the people who was really boss, was considered divine in Roman culture. In Rome’s view, the emperor was the Son of God. Rome’s passion and parade were all about the assertion of power.

In his procession, Jesus appropriated the symbol of the Roman procession, and turned it on its head. No armored soldiers, just the everyday people, most of them poor. No spears or golden eagles mounted on poles, just leafy branches they had cut from the fields, and the one and only precious outer cloak that each of his friends likely owned spread out on the road. No beating drums, just the soft hoof prints of his little donkey in the dust, and the footsteps of the assembled crowd. No fearful eyes silently looking on along the way, but cheering friends willing, for that moment anyway, to take the risk of exposing their support for him. No sense of the crowd as outsiders, but that of letting them in on the joke by riding in on a young donkey, just the way the Hebrew prophet Zechariah said that a peace-bringing king would ride into Jerusalem---a king that would, according to the Jewish scriptures, put an end to war and “command peace to the nations.”

On display on that day were two parades, and two different passions. Rome was passionate about empire, about acquiring lands and the toil and riches of those lands; Jesus was passionate about the plight of the poor and the weak. Rome was passionate about displaying its might and had no qualms about the shedding of blood to expand its holdings; Jesus was passionate about everyone having life and dignity in a world at peace. The kingdom of Rome was one controlled by military might and the absolute power of the one who could compel the most fear; the kingdom of God, which came near in Jesus, was one in which there was no need to fear. The clash between these two visions led to Jesus’ torture and death.

But that was not the end of the story, which is why we are here today talking about the extraordinary life of Jesus of Nazareth. We are here today because of the unshakable hope that Jesus’ triumph over death and violence has irrevocably planted in our hearts. And maybe, if we could stay with the Palm Sunday procession of Jesus and all the risk it entails, we could just jump to . But those same friends who cheered him on that day abandoned him a few days later. The story of the clash of wealth, force and might over against the possibility of peace, dignity and care for all people, sadly, is still part of our story today. We need to walk to honestly confront those places in our lives, our practice, and our culture that are still on the side of greed, entitlement, and force—all those ways in which our way of life may just tilt a little too much toward Rome and far too much away from Jesus’ vision.

In March of 2013, about 5,000 journalists gathered for an audience with Pope Francis. He said, “How I would like a church that is poor and for the poor.” Now, we might ask, what good would a poor church be? Jesus, of course, taught that the poor in spirit are blessed— meaning, as one translator wrote, that to be blessed in this teaching meant that the poor in spirit were in the right place. And, of course, to be poor in spirit when living in an occupied country where the ruling power exploits and abuses the people at will is a sign that you have the right reaction to the whole situation. In a way, this means that to be blessed, you’ve always got to choose Jesus’ little parade over the one that clearly looks more impressive, more materially successful, more powerful.

The events we commemorate on this Sunday call us to take this call very seriously. If we are properly poor, we are shorn of things like entitlement, coercion, exclusion, and we are rich in things such as sharing, humility, and justice-seeking. We will make sure we are making every effort to be a community whose presence is relevant and impactful for those in the area and beyond who are struggling with real poverty. In choosing between empire-like trappings and Jesus’ vision, we are called to choose his parade and his passion.

Jesus’s passion for justice-seeking and his steadfast efforts toward it got him into a world of trouble with Roman and religious authorities. In the context of the Roman occupation of his country, tensions were very high around strident justice-seekers. His pure passion led to a different kind of empire-sponsored Passion—that of his terrible suffering and cruel death. Yet we know it did not end there. As we move through this week and lean in toward Easter, we now know that no matter how Jesus’ mortal life were to come to an end, the Resurrection would be his greatest gift to us and his final word that the power of God’s love overcomes every other mighty power that challenges it.

As often as he had told his disciples that he would be raised on the third day after suffering and dying, understandably, they did not get it. We can have more compassion for them in their abandonment of him, perhaps, because of this. But Holy Week presents us with the question: where do we each stand on the potential abandonment scale? None of us know until we face a moment of choice at great risk, and none of us have the right to judge the disciples or one another on this score. But here is the amazing thing: even if we are cheering and waving palms one minute and walking away from Jesus’ and his vision the next, God in Christ still loves us, would still live and die and be raised, and we would still know that no matter how cowardly or nasty or even just passively complicit we are in another’s suffering, God will still claim us as God’s own and love us into wholeness, somehow.

It would just be a whole lot more full of right Spirit, more filled with beauty, fairness and joy, and more absent of suffering if we all would just choose the right parade, and the right passion, and stuck with them when the going gets tough.

Amen.

Notes:

Information about Jesus’ procession and the situation at the time, and the quotation attributed to Borg and Crossan, are from the book The Last Week by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

The quote from Pope Francis is found in an National Catholic Reporter piece dated March 16, 2013, written by Joshua J. McElwee.