Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
So Many Dimensions
Scriptures: Mark 11:1-11 John 12:12-16
One of my earliest introductions to Biblical Criticism had to do with Palm Sunday: someone sneering at the Biblical record for inaccuracies because we talk and sing about waving palm branches and palms don’t grow around Jerusalem.
I was young and this was really challenging at the time. Since then I’ve learned a lot more and that there are things to discover in the inconsistencies and disagreements we find in scripture.
Our readings are the oldest and the newest Biblical accounts of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem:
Mark’s is the oldest gospel and doesn’t talk about palm branches at all – non-specific tree branches and coats were laid down for Jesus like a red carpet;
Matthew and Luke’s gospels were written next, and they both copied Mark’s version except that one adds the donkey’s colt for good measure to better match the Old Testament prophesy that Jesus was acting out. It’s all very impressive and we get a sense of something quite big that the authorities couldn’t fail to notice;
Then we find our second reading – John’s gospel, written decades after the others. John’s gospel differs in so many ways from the others that it’s an open debate within the scholarly community as to whether the early Christian community that produced it had ever seen any of the three existing gospels when this one was written.
The emphasis was profoundly different – highly spiritual and mystical with a completely different narrative. For Mark and the others, this is the first entry of Jesus into Jerusalem outside of his childhood. For John, he’d come and gone many times before this event; for John, the Triumphal Entry is a really short passage. In addition to adding the troublesome detail about Palm branches (which suggests the author didn’t know the area very well) he treats it like an almost irrelevant detail: something the followers of Jesus forgot and only remembered and understood later after the resurrection.
To be fair, John says that about a lot of things in Jesus’ ministry. In his presentation, the disciples are a fairly clueless lot until the resurrection opens their eyes and everything suddenly makes sense.
A second struggle with the interpretation of this passage in my life came when someone pointed out that we shouldn’t celebrate this as a “triumph”. They remarked on the misunderstanding of the crowd and the misinterpretation of prophesy: the descendant of King David enters Jerusalem, signaling the overthrow of the pagan armies of Rome and the liberation of God’s people from Pagan idols, when in fact Jesus was planning all along to face the cross and win by losing; live by dying; show his strength by becoming utterly vulnerable.
We always have trouble talking about irony: the conflict between what appears on the surface and what may be understood at deeper levels. Once you start that conversation it’s hard to know where to stop. There can be so many dimensions of interpretation: Which one is true? Could it be that several are true at the same time?
In the days when we believed in something called “Christendom” – that international collection of nations and empires that called themselves Christian in one form or another – it was easy to consider Palm Sunday to be a triumph. After all, we could point to a world where Christ was King, where even the rulers would bow their knee to a higher power, and that power was Jesus.
It seemed like what Jesus had done by riding into Jerusalem was to signal a day when Rome would not only no longer rule the world but where Rome itself would be ruled by Christ and so many farther flung countries would be included.
Of course, there were some convenient lapses of memory. In those days, one violent empire or kingdom regularly succeeded another and it was accepted that Christ’s love could be spread at the point of a sword.
The idea of Jesus triumphing on the cross was certainly present but it was explained away as something unique, not an example for us to consider, let alone follow but a necessary way for God to forgive our sins and save us from Hell.
For the rest of life, the old ways of conquest and traditional strength were seen as Christian virtues, especially when used against non-Christians or people we identified as heretics.
I have recently been re-reading the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis that were such a favourite of mine in childhood and it has been disturbing to see how many of these old values of Christian conquest and military strength were a central part of these books, especially towards the end of the series.
I find it disturbing that in recent decades, as our society has worked hard to shake off the influence of Christianity, it has actually embraced a lot of what Jesus taught every day and acted out as a prophetic drama on Palm Sunday, but has embraced them instead as secular values:
- sharing, cooperation, equality, freedom, respect, listening;
- engaging everybody and not just the elite;
- seeing the strength in vulnerability, instead of disdaining it;
- acknowledging that we gain when we lose, not only when we win;
- really believing that there is ability where many only see disability.
These are all Christian values found throughout Jesus’ teachings. But to many secular people the church had come to represent the opposite: privilege and power; abuse and contempt; the idea that when Jesus rode in on that donkey, he was claiming the world as a conqueror.
How ironic.
I am concerned that we are losing our grip on those values within the Christian faith. We have a root for them – the example of Jesus as to why we should embrace such upside-down teachings. Without the faith base, I’m not so sure why people don’t just go back to the old ideas of violence, force, imperialism and oppression: “Might makes right”.
In fact, I look at the leaders we are seeing making the most headlines on the international stage today. So many are old-school “strong man” types showing off their strength, threatening and actually creating violence in ways we hoped had vanished into history as uncivilized.
What we need is for people to actually look at what we have been taught for 2000 years. On Palm Sunday Jesus set the example for leadership: not boastful or bragging; not threatening; completely unarmed, in fact; challenging the naked power of the greatest empire in the world with vulnerability, with strength of character, with faith.
The cynical response to that is: but look, within a week that same empire had done what it always did to challengers. It humiliated him, tortured him, put him to a public death to terrorize all who witnessed it. That’s the cynical approach these strong leaders embrace.
It’s up to us to look beyond that complicated triumphal entry and to see the deepest dimension of all: the transformation of the world brought about by Jesus’ followers proclaiming his resurrection, demonstrating how the smallest and weakest in the world could turn even the Roman Empire upside-down in the end.
It’s up to us to realize that what Jesus showed and did is there for all of us to embrace and to bring to the world to challenge the strong rulers with weakness, to share our disabilities that mask how able we are, to build a society where these values don’t get lost or buried by a return to brutality.
Jesus lived a life to show that love, the gentlest motivation of all, is also the most powerful force there is.
It’s up to us to keep that teaching alive.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 