When I was a child growing up in the church I knew of three religious holidays. They were
Christmas, Easter, and believe it or not Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday was the time that we sang the song which went:
"Hosanna, loud hosanna the little children sang, through pillared court and temple the lovely anthem rang."
Our Sunday School teachers took their cue from that song's description of the children singing along the path leading
down from the Mount of Olives, and in Sunday School we would make palm branches from green construction paper and
march all around the education building singing and shouting "Hosanna, hosanna" as if we were in that
crowd on that first Palm Sunday. They wanted all of us to see the pillared courts just as they were pictured in
our Sunday School books, and for each of us to imagine, "waving the branch of a palm tree high in my hand,"
as we blessed "the King who comes in the name of the Lord."
This one fact is a true Christian education success story. You see, we knew about Christmas because of Santa Clause.
We knew about Easter because of the Easter Bunny. But we knew about Palm Sunday because of Jesus!
As adults our understanding of that day should be filled with far more than childlike joy about the day people
finally recognized Jesus for who he really was, or at least for who they seemed to almost unanimously want him
to be. This is as much about a day when things started to go terribly wrong as it is about a triumphal entry into
the Holy City of God.
Why does the word multitude sound so positive while the word mob sounds just like the kind of threat the Romans
and Temple officials saw it to be? If we think of the tragic events in Falusia this past week we have a better
sense of how quickly the demonic can spring from what seems to be unbridled enthusiasm. The multitude feels sounds
so democratic…while the mob surges sounds terror-filled and threatening.
That tension should be a major part of the mood we are meant to feel today, for we are once again being confronted
with the issue of things "out of our control," which does seem to be the bottom line with faith. After
all, faith is a belief in things unseen and unmanageable by our own resources-and hence beyond our ability to control,---but
a closer look at our other lection readings also reveals a deeper truth and a far more grounded position that faith
is a strong confidence in God even in the face of terror.
Our passage from Isaiah ( 50:4-9a) is the third of the so-called "servant songs"- those poems about the
character of a true servant of God whose willing suffering will become so deeply redemptive. It is a brief glimpse
of a noble person whose back is bared for a flogging, and whose beard is being ripped out by the handful who is
found saying: "I did not hide my face from shame and spitting." While seen in the Old Testament as God's
description of a true prophet, New Testament readers usually see a vision of Jesus.
In Psalm 31:9-16 there is a similar mood of impending suffering, although without Isaiah's remarkable concept of
redemption. We hear the grim assessment of the psalmist's impending fate: "For I have heard the whispering
of the mob. Fears are all around me. They put their heads together against me, they conspire to take my life."
As well as the personal conviction which exists despite it: "But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, "You
are my God."
Both are followed by the Epistle, one of Paul's letters from prison to the Philippians (2: 5-11), which is most
likely a section from a very early Christian hymn sung in honor of Christ. It celebrates a Jesus who does not make
a grab for power, but bends low just like Isaiah's suffering servant, accepting mutilation and a cruel death, counting
humility as a crowning accomplishment.
You may think this is all very gloomy stuff, but that is not how it reads in the Scriptures! There is no despair
here. Here hope rules supreme! For we are being taken close to the very pulsing, passionate center of existence,
---to the very life-giving heart of God. It is there, and there alone we find redemption at work through willing
self-sacrifice. It is a thing of unsurpassed beauty never seen before, that such a sublime love should give itself
for the healing of a diseased world.
This is about far more than the activities along the pathway into the Holy City---this is about the pathway to
the only genuine new age; to the only sustainable new heaven and new earth. This is true love, not that we loved
God but that God loved us, and gave Jesus to be the remedy for our sins.
Having said that we need to notice that there is an important difference between Luke's take on the events surrounding
the triumphal Palm Sunday entrance and the accounts found in the other gospels---and it is one that is sometimes
overlooked. Remember that Luke is the only one writing as a foreigner, writing after the fall of Jerusalem, and
writing primarily as a disciple of Paul whose own teachings were presently converting the known world.
In Luke's account there are no nameless crowds celebrating Jesus' arrival, no growing throng as the procession
approaches. Here the parade is made up entirely of his own disciples, those people who had already witnessed his
power and come to believe in his authority. Their own faith, weak and faltering as it may be has already been formed
in the three years of his public witness. Everything about this group is charged with a sense of divine destiny,
which explains why they are so trusting regarding their willingness to go into the town ahead and find a pre-arranged
donkey.
It is all part of a belief system in something foreordained. Fred Craddock and others point out that animals that
had never been ridden, never been used before-were pure animals-the only kind that could be used in the sacred
sacrificial rituals of the Jewish people. An unused donkey could signify not only that this is an event of peace,
but also one prepared for sacred sacrifice. It is the one thing that the "Lord has need of" - willing
compliance to the plans of God. This is not just saying "Whatever happens happens…but that this is in God's
hands and it will be all right."
The truth of their affirmations whether they even realize it or not is about the fulfillment of very ancient prophecies
and it is to silence that TRUTH, not his disciples-and certainly not some mob--- that the Temple authorities are
pleading with Jesus.
His response of course is to say that if TRUTH were silent the very stones themselves would cry out. And they always
have!
The Bible is filled with stories of stones that speak- that shout if need be,--stones that serve as cornerstones
for buildings--literally and metaphorically, as weapons when raised to stone a woman caught in adultery, and as
large obstacles to be moved away to reveal the ultimate victory of life over death. These are the foundational
stones of faith, small smooth stones found in the hands of young David coming face to face with Goliath, unhewn
stones used by Elijah to build the altar which will consume the priests of Baal, elaborately carved stones overlaid
with gold used by Solomon to build his Temple, and great stone jars standing empty so that they can be filled with
water to be turned into the finest wine that anyone had ever tasted. There is the story of the wise man who built
his house upon the rock, and the great mountain of Arararat where the first ark came to rest.
In the ancient world it was the stones that would endure long after the city had crumbled, and even today the Holy
Land is dotted with mounds of stones that were once filled with the noise of family life. So many tells waiting
to be excavated to reveal their stories.
In Luke's day the stones of Jerusalem's temple and courtyards would have been stained with the marks of the bloody
catastrophe which proceeded the burning of the city in 70 CE. Sometimes the stones are all that is left to cry
out. In some sense the stone remnants of that great temple which we see today as the western or wailing wall in
old Jerusalem are still a place for crying out.
The TRUTH being expressed in this triumphal entry, contrary to all the hype about who killed Jesus in Mel Gibson's
"The Passion" is about the importance of knowing your true goal and not being sidetracked. Many a person
has brought a great deal of unnecessary suffering to their life because they could not keep their determined goal
in place. For Jesus the "goal" was Jerusalem…He had set his face toward it on the Mountain of the Transfiguration,
had been undeterred in his quest to get there, and knew in advance that it was the place where he would willingly
give up his life.
What happened to Jesus was not fate, it was not chance. Not the Jews and not the Romans. No one killed Jesus…he
laid down his life for his friends. It was a conscious choice-and whether we agree with it or not, think it foolish
or even ill-conceived-it was his choice and he did not waver from it!
More than one person has said regarding the various faith traditions of our world, "You know, we are all going
to the same place!" And of course, it is true that the Creator has set before us all the one ultimate destination--the
question is - how far are we from it? Is the distance getting less or greater?
Have we reached a point where, not by our own hope-but by God's road-markers, we know we have made it? Do we know
and come to God by the One who said, "I am the way and the truth and the life." For if that is what we
claim---than there is no other way to come except by the same faithful commitment that he himself first evidenced.
The existence of factions within the church was the main influence prompting Paul's letter to the Phillipians.
He urged mutual love and the abandonment of arrogant self-interests to avoid a split in their commitment to far
more serious concerns. "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ…for hate lurks like a demon looking
for a ride - and has a wonderful time when Christians in dispute start to fight and hate instead of listening to
each other and taking each other seriously.
It is a different form of being faithful, but it is no less important. Paul keeps bringing us back to the center
and to what matters most.
Deliverance as seen in the life of Jesus was not achieved by ceasing to be human, or by obtaining higher and higher
levels of spirituality, or by trumping the achievements of others in order to always be seen as being right or
appropriate---it was seen by descending to a very human level and humbling exalted glory to accept whatever limitations
were required to make others feel worthy.
While we usually associate death with resurrection, it was equally common among the first Christians to speak not
of resurrection but of exaltation. The point was never when or how often Jesus appeared as risen from the dead
with a new form of being but that through resurrection God had vindicated and rewarded Jesus for his act.
And that is exactly what we find here! The concise description in the hymn is a scene in which a person is rewarded
by being given a new name, a symbolic act through which the most honorable person gives the person to be honored
his own name and in so doing appoints that person as their deputy or representative. Whoever wrote the hymn pictured
God giving the Creator's own name to Jesus.
So Jesus receives the name which is above every name; the name to which every knee should bow, making Jesus equal
to God! But he got there by a very different way.
In the complex history of thought about Jesus and God which followed in the succeeding centuries people came to
affirm that Jesus and God really were equal, but they could only do so by insisting that Jesus was not a separate
or second God. The Trinity then came into being, attempting to hold together those tensions in a way that sought
to do justice to all the key values without ever neatly resolving them.
Like so many of life's most difficult decisions and complex problems we are not asked to understand them,---simply
to embrace the mystery and trust God to do the rest. So what does it mean to hate the sin but love the sinner,---to
struggle with issues that seem to us unacceptable and yet at the same time unavoidable-to feel so certain that
we are right which means of necessity someone else must be wrong? It means to first and foremost "Have that
same mind in you that was in Jesus." For that's what it means to be faithful!
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