Palm Sunday - Reconstructing Triumph

Matthew 21:1-11

“When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, ² saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. ³ If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” ⁴ This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,

⁵ “Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
    humble, and mounted on a donkey,
        and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

⁶ The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; ⁷ they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. ⁸ A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹ The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

¹⁰ When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” ¹¹ The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Sermon:

          This past week I went onto Amazon and ordered a DVD miniseries from the late 1970’s called, The Winds of War. It was a short TV series created as an adaptation of a two-volume novel by the same name. I saw the series for the first time a number of years ago with my parents, but it had been on my mind a lot lately so I decided to order it. When I tried to explain to my roommates why I had made such an unusual purchase, I tried to sum it up by saying that the series could basically be described as a “Jane Austin novel written by a dude who likes war stories.” One of my roommates looked at me, blinked, and then said, “So, basically nothing like Jane Austin.”

          The point I would like to get to though is a scene from the first volume of the series. Early on in the movie, one of the protagonists, a Navy Commander who everyone calls “Pug” sets sail on a German ship with his wife to head to a new posting as the Naval Attaché in Nazi Germany. While on board, Pug becomes friendly with a German General who ensures that they are able to dine at a better table. When it comes time to toast Hitler, a British diplomat immediately sits down in a rather dramatic display. This is soon followed by a discussion between the German General, the British diplomat, and the U.S. Commander. One of the most fascinating parts of the conversation, however, is a comments the German makes when he states, “You made Hitler, you know, with your Versailles Treaty. Democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, they’re all variations on the same theme – please the mob!” It’s a catchy line precisely because there’s something to it. It is, obviously, far too simplistic and yet most of us would probably agree that every form of government has to please the mob. If you had to read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in High School, it’s a principle you would understand well.

          The event described in today’s scripture touches on this theme. It’s the beginning of a sequence of events that spiral into Christ’s trial, execution, and resurrection. There is a paradox, an intrinsic contradiction, in the event that we celebrate today. We, the heirs of this story and this tradition, are privileged because we already know the course of events and what their significance is. The crowd in this story, however, is not aware of the paradox that they are enacting. We know that they were celebrating the entry of someone they believed to be the new King of the Jews – the Messiah who would liberate them from the clutches of Roman imperial control. They understood the significance of the symbolism inherent to this kind of entry – the donkey, the cloaks, the palm branches. For nearly a hundred years they had been yearning for a leader who could lead a military revolt, like the Maccabees, but many had tried and failed. Even some of Jesus’ own disciples believed that this was the “Kingdom of Heaven” that Jesus so often referred to.

          So, when we read about this scene where people line the streets and celebrate the entrance of their Messiah, we are seeing something that is incredibly ironic. They are celebrating the entrance of a man who they will crucify at the end of the week. They are not, in fact, celebrating the coming Kingdom of God, but the kingdom that they themselves hope to build. They are celebrating a nationalistic, militaristic, ethnocentric, political vision of their own salvation. This is the paradox. The crowd is, in fact, celebrating something that they don’t understand. In all likelihood, they are celebrating something that they would likely abhor. And yet, they do so because it fulfilled the words of the prophets who their ancestors killed and whose fate Jesus is tied to at the end of today’s scripture when Matthew writes, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.” This is why Jesus calls attention to the people’s hypocrisy only two chapters after today’s passage when he states that:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, ³⁰ and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ ³¹ Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. ³² Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. ³³ You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell? ³⁴ Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, ³⁵ so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. ³⁶ Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation.” (Matt. 23:29-36)

Jesus takes a moment here to teach us that children often repeat “the crimes of their fathers precisely because they [believe that they] are morally superior to them.”[1] When community’s gather around a scapegoat to kill it, they are enacting a form of violence that stands at the center of human origins. That is why Jesus refers to the murder of Abel. Abel’s murder results in the first law and ritual that prohibits murder. Most of us know this, but the part that we often forget is that Abel’s murder also creates the first nation – a people set apart by a mark and a crime.

          When the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote the Leviathan soon after the English Civil War he was not far off from the Biblical account when he suggested that the origins of civilization rest in “the war of all against all.” The crime of Cain is the crime of humanity. If we look to the Ten Commandments, we will notice that the second half are directed at one’s relationship to one’s neighbor.

          You shall not kill.

          You shall not commit adultery.

          You shall not steal.

          You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet the house of your neighbor. You shall not covet the wife of your neighbor, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything that belongs to him. (Exod. 20:17)

There’s a reason why this last commandment is the longest and most explicit. It’s the most important, precisely because it is our desires that generate all of those other sins. We are shaped by the people around us. Their desires affect our desires and their possessions retain a quality that we too often wish to possess. Rivalry exists at the heart of human relations. This is even evident when we look at our own mythologies of “keeping up with the Jones’” or the “American Dream.” There is something fundamental to this and it feeds into the ways that crowds behave.

          But this is also where the Biblical witness is unique among all world religions. The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of stories where the “turmoil” that we hear about in verse 10 of today’s passage turns into a chaotic scene where the crowds must release their anxiety in a violent assassination of a victim, which the Bible calls a ‘scapegoat.’ Matthew ends today’s passage with a foreshadow of what is to come precisely because it is a repetition of what we can find throughout the stories that precede it. Crowds become frustrated by the inhibition of their own desires and they find targets to kill as a result. John the Baptist was beheaded because the daughter of his wife whipped a crowd up into a frenzy with a dance. The Suffering Servant in Second-Isaiah dies at the hands of a hysterical mob that lynches him. The Bible is, in fact, full of stories about the collective lynching of a prophet and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is essentially the same.

          And this is precisely what makes Christianity unique. Christianity shines a light upon this fundamental human tendency and exposes the crime for what it is. Christianity asserts that the victims are, in fact, innocent. It is the first religion to protect the weak, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. Almost all world religions have a single victim at the source of their theology.

“[In] India: the dismemberment of the primordial victim, Purusha, by a mob offering sacrifices produces the caste system. [And] We find similar myths in Egypt, in China, among the German peoples – everywhere.”[2]

Humanity has universally emerged out of the idea that the body of a victim often germinates to produce new life. But Christianity is unique in its protest. Why all the other world religions, particularly paganism, highlight the efficacy of sacrifice Christianity points out the sin at the heart of all of this. The victim is not demonized and then transformed into something else. The victim, the marginalized person, who is targeted by a community experiencing chaos is always held up as a descendent of Abel.

          Christianity is unique because it says that God Himself, came to earth, to die and suffer at the hands of a race enraptured with this practice of objectification and scapegoating. And in the process God offered us something else in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He offered us a different path – a path of peace and illumination. When we look to a theology of the cross, what we really find is a spotlight. The cross is a spotlight that shines onto each and every one of our personal moments of triumphal entry. When we rise up to celebrate ourselves and our own desires, the cross has the power – through the witness of the Resurrection – to show us a reflection of ourselves. It has the power to make us stare into the painting that killed Dorian Gray.

          The only way to celebrate Palm Sunday properly, is to look forward. We celebrate the coming of a King who represents a Kingdom not our own. We celebrate the coming of a King who offers us the opportunity to transform ourselves into something far more beautiful. We celebrate a Messiah who offers us a salvation far beyond what we could imagine for ourselves. When we wave our palms, and sing our songs we do so from this side of history, a side that sees this moment as the transformational event it really is. This is precisely why the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche hate Christianity. He recognized that is intrinsically associated with democracy and holds an absolute concern for victims. Judaism and Christianity are unique in this regard and this is precisely where their power lies. Christ compels us to follow in His Way, which through the power of the Holy Spirit, leads us towards a path that moves us beyond our own narrow-minded shortcoming, and towards a vision of the world as God sees it.

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[1] Réne Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 20.

[2] Réne Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 82.