What can we say March 29? Palm/Passion Sunday

    For years in worship planning, my musicians and clergy ask, annually, “Are we doing Palm Sunday? Or Passion Sunday?” I get it – but is there really a choice? There’s a tragic dimension to the Palms entry, no matter how cute or fun we try to make it. Jesus comes surrounded by great joy but into the teeth of mortal danger; he comes to tackle the powers, and to be killed by them. And there’s a joyful dimension, paradoxically enough, to the Passion. Gruesome, horrific, unjust suffering, transformed by the miraculous way of God into immense life, light, joy.

   Psalm 118 could be preached upon; but even if you don't, its cadences are well worth mentioning, or even deploying as a call to worship. It’s about a royal victory in ancient times. “This is the day the Lord has made” doesn’t mean Oh, God made a pretty day for me to enjoy, but “This is the day the Lord has acted,” brought deliverance, re-established his people once peril was eluded. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Did Jesus or any of his friends ponder this as he rode right by the huge ashlars of Herod’s temple mount?

   And Philippians 2:5-11 fits the day marvelously as well. I love the little translation quandary that needn’t be resolved but simply pondered: is it “although he was in the form of God, he humbled himself to death on a cross”? or should it be “because he was in the form of God, he…” I lean “because.” Jesus wasn’t pretending to be what he wasn’t, or what God isn’t. Precisely in his humility, in his shattered heart and body do we see the truth about God.

   Matthew 21:1-11. A king on a little donkey, not a war stallion like Bucephalus (Alexander the Great’s mount) – and a  borrowed donkey at that. Or two. Not just as fulfillment of prophecy (Zechariah!), this has a lovely, family feel. Mother and child, father and child, donkey and colt. Martin Luther noticed Jesus road on “an animal of peace fit only for burden and labor. He indicates by this that he comes not to frighten anyone, nor to drive or crush anyone, but to help him and carry his burdens.” Notice "the Lord has need of them." Being needed by our Lord; that's enough, isn't it? Some special donkey. Despite all the clamor, he never gets skittish; he doesn’t bolt or freeze.

Those following weren’t armed or rich or influential. Dreamers, every one. Wouldn’t the recently healed Bartimaeus have been in the crowd? And the recently raised Lazarus? 

   Jesus is so full of courage – that rarest of virtues in our day. The preacher is wise to portray vividly the sights and sounds: Pilate had just marched his legions from Caesarea on the coast to Jerusalem to intimidate, to secure the city overcrowded at Passover. His stomping regiments, with arms clattering and banners waving high, heading east into the city could not have found a greater contrast that Jesus, donkey hooves clomping on the stone, children holding leafy branches in the air, heading west into the city. The perpetual clash of good and evil coming to its climax.

   Stanley Hauerwas is right: "Jesus's triumphant entry into Jerusalem is an unmistakable political act." The crowd does not yet know, and may never understand, that "this king triumphs not through violent revolt, but by being for Israel the one able to show it that its worship of God is its freedom." His action is "a refusal to let Rome determine what counts and doesn't count as politics." Well-said, daunting to explicate in a sermon though, with hearers mired on old-timey Americanish notions about what politics is and what religion (to them, very different) is.

   Hard to beat the wisdom inside Jesus Christ Superstar’s “Hosanna Heysanna...” with the crowd’s escalating appeals to Jesus: “Won’t you smile for me?” “Won’t you fight for me?” “Won’t you die for me?” I lucked into a podcast (my “Maybe I'm Amazed”) conversation with Tim Rice, who wrote these and all the words for that splendid musical! Lots of insight in there for Holy Week! For Palm Sunday, we feel the jubilation, and yet the painful ironies, the dawning realization on them, and us, of impending doom and what’s at stake.

   The shout “Hosanna!” isn’t cheering in church, but a prayer, a cry for help meaning “Save us now!” That’s precisely why he came, although the enthusiastic crowd melted away by Good Friday. Not the saving they had in mind.

   World leaders, including our own, look frightening, and expose themselves as frightened. Jesus wasn’t scared, and he didn’t scare anybody – except the armed and powerful who probably couldn’t admit to themselves that his stark alternative posed a paradoxical threat to their business. Jesus had so much courage! And yet an utter calm, the ultimate non-anxious presence.

   Others have imitated Jesus by striding peacefully into the jaws of danger. Francis of Assisi, having joined the bloodthirsty Crusaders in the battle of Damietta in 1219, walked across No Man’s Land between the heavily armed Christians and the saber-rattling Muslims – unarmed, barefooted. He was so pitiful that, instead of butchering him, the soldiers hauled him to the sultan, Malik al-Kamil. Francis spent three days with him, befriending him, and bought peace in that region. Well, for a brief time.

   What is the homiletical takeaway? Go thou and so likewise? Hardly. We simply find ourselves in the crowd, excited yet with the hunch that a week of agony for this holy one is beginning. Just before Lent we observed the Transfiguration. No takeaway there. The disciples fell on their faces in awe. I dream of the sermon that has no moral, no lesson, but simply causes all of us to say Wow, Jesus is amazing, so courageous, so humble, so loving, so bold, so holy, so divine. That’s really enough, isn’t it?

   I also like to think each year about Howard Thurman's lovely thought (whether it winds up in my sermon or not) - all the more interesting in light of Peter Eisenstadt's new, great biography, Against the Hounds of Hell (also the topic of one of my “Maybe I’m Amazed” podcasts!): “I wonder what was at work in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey. Perhaps his mind was far away to the scenes of his childhood, feeling the sawdust between his toes in his father’s shop. He may have been remembering the high holy days in the synagogue with his whole body quickened by the echo of the ram’s horn. Or perhaps he was thinking of his mother, how deeply he loved her and how he wished that there had not been laid upon him this Great Necessity that sent him out on to the open road to proclaim the Truth, leaving her side forever. It may be that he lived all over again that high moment on the Sabbath when he was handed the scroll and he unrolled it to the great passage from Isaiah, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor.’ I wonder what was moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey.”