Palm/Passion Sunday   March 24, 2013

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How do you see Jesus as you enter Holy Week?  Is Jesus far away, in which case we might as well treat this week to come like any other?  As our Chancel Players just expressed, we might prefer the “great big powerful capital-K King Jesus coming with splendor and power and might” to right all wrongs so we don’t have to do anything.  But that is not the Christ who came 2000 years ago on Palm Sunday.  The man who appeared in Jerusalem was a humble, prayerful, servant.  Who comes to us this and every Holy Week and asks us to follow him.  Let us pray.  Let us pray.  Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us.  Help us to sense the presence of your love in our midst and in leading us forward.  For Christ’s sake we pray.  Amen. 

Palm Sunday is a wonderful day.   The busyness of the narthex as people come for the last Sunday of Lent.  The anticipation of Holy Week.  The procession of the children and adults waving their palms and sang, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  Yet it is a complex Sunday as Jesus comes to Jerusalem really for one main reason, to go to the cross.  We gather here in remembrance for what Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem and the people cried sang Psalm 118.   That is a Psalm some scholars believe Jesus sung the night of his arrest.  It was Martin Luther’s favorite psalm, the one he referred to as “my own beloved psalm.”  We end our Lenten series on Psalms by reading Psalm 118, the culmination of a section of Psalms called Hallel Psalms. These are Psalms of praise that recalled the exodus as they were sung to open and close Passover .   The word “Halleluiah” comes from the word Hallel.   How we in interpret Psalm 118 says something about our preparation for Holy Week. 

Two common interpretations about the origin and meaning of Psalm 118 are first, that a king in the mold of David leads a national celebration after victory in battle.  The Lord has allowed the people of God to win.  TA second common interpretation is the priests leading the people in celebrating deliverance, either from Egypt at the Jewish holiday of Sukkot or from exile at the dedication of the second temple .  In the first interpretation a military commander leads the celebration.  In the second interpretation a priest represents the people to God.  The first was about the sovereign taking the lead.  The second included the priests making a sacrifice, inviting the people in, for after sacrifices were made to God – the Hebrew priests entered the holy temple altar in procession carrying willow branches and singing as they circled the altar.

Many Christians have seen a foreshadowing of Christ in Psalm 118.  Using that framework, I appreciate the second interpretation of the Psalm.  I see Jesus as a king but a priestly one.  For Palm/Passion Sunday and Holy Week are about Jesus sacrificing himself in humility and including us in the holiness of the sacrifice.  So that we can be empowered to know and show love.

Holy Week is time when God is more present for many of us.  Maybe it’s because we have more services this week.  J  Carol Penner’s poem we heard reminds us that what Jesus did on Palm Sunday was not just a long-past historical event.  It is an annual experience of devotion, prayer, worship and action that bring us to a place where Jesus arrived 2000 years ago, a place where human needs and open hearts met in the sacred humility of love.

As Mark tells it, Jesus and his disciples arrived at the Mount of Olives, on the east end of Jerusalem, during Passover, a time when Jerusalem would be full of pilgrims.  Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem begins with Jesus telling his disciples to get a colt and to bring it to him.   

The common perception in Jesus’ time was that the Messiah to enter Jerusalem was to be a war time king in the likeness of King David, coming with grandeur and great power.  Similar to the scene with songs, harps and palms that greeted Simon Maccabaeus when he entered Jerusalem 150 years earlier after “a great enemy had been crushed” in battle as the ancient text from 1 Maccabees 13 put it.  Yet Jesus brings not a war horse, but simply asks for a donkey, a borrowed one at that, to ride into Jerusalem.  It’s not what the people expected.  John Calvin said of it, “Jesus is riding not on a royal steed but on a little donkey….Those following him must have been a ragtag, miscellaneous group of the poor. It’s hard to imagine anything less like a triumphant royal procession.”  

The people of Jerusalem saw a poor carpenter riding a, small, dirty borrowed burro.  Not that impressive.  And yet there is majesty to it.  The people still came to Jesus.  They lay cloaks and branches onto his path for him to walk on.  They waived in the air, and as he rode by the people cried out “Hosanna!” which means, “Save us, Lord!”

I have a good friend who was in St. Peter’s  Square earlier this week for Pope Francis’ installation service and describes how the Pope left behind his security guards and engaged the crowd with handshakes and hugs.  It apparently had been driving his security detail crazy.  They were trained to protect a great leader, and Francis is more comfortable being a more ordinary priest.  But as Jesus showed, a humble priest can still be a great leader.

There was something about Jesus that told the people that this man could be the one who could save them.  Even though many were looking for a war time king, within their tradition were the seeds of this new kind of leader.  Before David was king he was a seemingly meek boy, forgotten in the shadow of his brothers.  Jesus had a history of doing miraculous deeds with understated power in Galilee.  And Jesus fulfilled the ancient prophecy of Zechariah for how the messiah would arrive.   Zechariah wrote “Lo, your king comes to you: triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey.”  The colt helped identify Jesus as the one who would save the people. 

And so as Jesus walked by, the people sang the words of deliverance from Psalm 118, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  Names were important in Jesus’s times, indeed at times he gave disciples new ones to symbolize their new life.  To have or take or come in someone’s name in that culture meant to represent them. 

Jesus’ coming the way he did reveals something important about God.  It shows us that God’s goal is not to dominate, not to force, not to coerce, but to be vulnerable, to pull, to inspire and to love.   It shows us what it means to be human.  What it means to be a servant leader.  What it means to be holy. 

Martin Luther said, “Jesus sits not upon a proud steed, not an animal of war…but sitting upon an animal of peace fit only for burden and labor and a help to man.  He indicates by this that he comes not to frighten, nor to drive or crush us, but to help us and to carry our burden.”

One of my favorite books is J.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the story of how the smallest person can change the world for good.  One of my favorite scenes from the movie is when the wizard Gandalf tells the elf Galadriel that another wizard believes “it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I have found it is the deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay.”  And to show that humble people can do great things. The way Jesus comes in the name of the Lord on Palm Sunday helps us see that.

In the narthex right before the processional this morning a member of the choir said to me, “I don’t know about this guy on the donkey.  I have real issues and I am not sure the man on a donkey can fix them.”  There are some things only God can do.  We discover that at the cross.  Jesus humbly dies in our place for our sins.  But make no mistake, there is power in that humility.  And it empowers us.  For while there are some things only God can do.  There is much that we can do.

It is not through dominance that God chooses to defeat evil but through the sacrificial priestly act of Christ that we know that a humble person can change the world for good.  Then we look around and think about the Malala, 15year old Pakistani girl who recently defied the Taliban to promote education for girls, and for it was shot in the head on the way home from school. She stood alone and faced a powerful opponent.  Malala’s story captured the world and she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for it.   We are proud as a church to be part of the efforts to support education for women in Pakistan with our missionaries there and for girls in Asia with our scholarship program.  We think of the simple street vendor in Tunisia whose act of defiance was the final event that sparked the Arab Spring.  We think of the mother in our community concerned about local gun violence.  The member interested in abolishing the death penalty in our state.  The man in our congregation acting on federal jobs and debt.  The daily acts of selflessness which parents throughout this congregation show and which members of our community demonstrate when they visit each other. 

You see once we stop thinking about what Jesus did on Palm Sunday as history and realize that the work of Palm Sunday is on-going, that Jesus gave of himself slowly, humbly, sacrificially and publicly during Holy Week, we begin to see our own role in following Jesus to the cross.  We begin to notice problems around us that we can help solve.  We start to recognize that sacrificial love is possible in our time, in the city nearest us, through you and through me.

Psalm 118 tells us that “The cornerstone that was rejected is now the chief cornerstone. “  The one who was rejected is now the stone upon which to build.  Christians have read that ancient statement and seen the seeds of a messiah who was rejected in his time and yet through whom faith could be built.  Because no matter what humanity threw at Jesus, he never gave in to hating humanity.  Think about it.  The same crowds who cheered him called on the authorities to crucify him.  Humanity betrayed, tried, abandoned and crucified Jesus and yet Jesus asked God to forgive them for they know not what they do.”  The great chaplain William Sloane Coffin said about Palm Sunday, “Jesus loved people when they were least lovable.”

Each year we enter Holy Week anew.  This is no ordinary week.  Like those in Jerusalem so long ago, our world needs help.  And what it needs we cannot figure out on our own.  Fortunately, the cornerstone of our religion is one whose humble humanity and sacred sacrificial solidarity gives us someone we can follow.  Someone who shares our burden, who loves us when we are not lovable and who came on an ordinary colt to let ordinary people know there is hope for us and our world.

To “come” in the name of the Lord means to “enter” in the name of the Lord.  Jesus entered Jerusalem.  We enter Holy Week.  The question is will we enter this week in the name of the Lord?  Will we prepare for the blessings of Easter by walking the paths of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday?  Will our acts of faith reveal our following a God of sacrificial love?  Will we confess the Palm/Passion message that Jesus entered Jerusalem to offer people a new way and a new hope.  And he still does.  This week.  In the city nearest you.  Our savior’s love.  Hosanna. Amen.