March 28, 1999 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Triumph of the Meek

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Philippians 2:5–11
Matthew 21:1–7

“Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling . . . The blind and the lame came to him . . . and he cured them.”

Matthew 21:12,14

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Dear God, is it a parade or a prelude to tragedy that you invite us to today? Are we to be happy for Jesus, or sad about what happened to him later? Help us, O God, in this time together, to enter the ambiguity, so like the life we live everyday. And speak the word you have for us this day: comfort those of us who need comfort, welcome those who feel excluded, challenge those who are comfortable, and move each of us this day, hearing about his bravery and commitment, to risk a little more, to love a little more passionately, to live more intentionally as his disciples. Amen.

When I was a youngster I envied my Roman Catholic and Lutheran friends who got palm branches to wave on Palm Sunday and then take home and stick behind a picture in the living room. Pennsylvania Presbyterians were pretty modest liturgically in those days. In fact, we were liturgically challenged. Nothing so dramatic as real palm branches to wave, not to mention dancers cavorting in the aisles. We thought it was pretty daring, almost Romish, when the minister put a candelabra in the chancel on Christmas Eve.

I thought Palm Sunday was like the preliminary game, a kind of warm up for the really big show which comes seven days later.

Peter Gomes, preacher to the University at Harvard refers to the “festive frenzy” of Palm Sunday, the “organized chaos” of processionals of palm waving children. Is there anything better than the children parading down the center aisle, filling the chancel to overflowing? It doesn’t get any better than that, particularly when one’s own grandchildren are among them.

But there is also a sense of profound ambiguity about this day. The week it begins is holy because of what happens on Thursday and Friday. The festive shouts of “Hosanna” will be drowned out and forgotten in five days by shouts of another crowd, “crucify him.” The jubilant crowd in the narrow streets of Jerusalem will be replaced, or perhaps worse yet, simply evolve into a different crowd, this one full of bitterness and hatred, demanding a public execution.

We resolve the ambiguity, Peter Gomes suggests, by eliminating the passion to which Palm Sunday is prelude, “by saving the suffering for the faithful few who will come on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. . .” Gomes was brought up on the “let’s have a parade theory of Palm Sunday,” as were most of us: “that discreet form of Protestantism that could not bear the embarrassment and indignity of the cross” (Sermons, p. 69).

That death on the cross on Friday afternoon comes a little too close for comfort, frankly. That crowd of basically good common folk, welcoming him one day and demanding his death a few days later, is a little too familiar. We know enough history to understand deeply and personally how human beings who seem otherwise balanced, basically moral, can do unspeakable things to one another. We can recall the virulent racism of educated, socially proper and solid people. We can recall antisemitism run rampant in the lives of decent people who listened to Bach, read Goethe and Schiller, went to church on Sunday and sang Lutheran hymns and reported to work on Monday morning at Auschwitz. That crowd is just familiar enough to be troubling.

Besides, we prefer a religion that is positive and uplifting. On measure we prefer resurrection to crucifixion. Easter will out-draw Good Friday by a ratio of ten to one, which led William Willimon to suggest, only half in jest, that churches should post a sign at the front door on the Saturday before Easter that reads “No one gets in who wasn’t here Friday.”

Protestants particularly seem to want a Christianity without a cross. Or more accurately, a Christianity with a cross with no one on it. The rationale for there being no crucifixes in Protestantism, of course, is that the Easter event is really the central event and affirmation of our faith. But sometimes, I think, we move a little too quickly past the crucifixion in our haste to get to resurrection. Sometimes I think the absence of the crucifix in our churches represents a faith that simply doesn’t want to think about crucifixion.

The artists, who so frequently understand our religion more profoundly than the theologians even, certainly don’t avoid it. The Italian renaissance artists were obsessed with it, and painted it with power and strength and unblinking honesty. I sat for a while last week in front of Tintoretto’s masterpiece, The Crucifixion. We walked a long way in Venice to find it. It is a massive painting, covering an entire wall. I marveled, and was deeply moved by the way the artist painted the whole world into the scene. There are hundreds of people milling about, in addition to the familiar cast of characters, soldiers and frightened disciples. There are merchants, people shopping, men on horseback riding by, dogs and children. The whole world was there, the artist is saying. This was not an isolated event, a solitary man in artful pose. This happened in public. This was God’s son, caught in the middle of humankind in a brutal but all too familiar moment. And there, in the center of the picture he is, on the cross, dying. Tintoretto didn’t know it, of course, but his masterpiece is a magnificent illustration of the old spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Tintoretto said yes, we were there—each and every one of us was there.

There is something about us that does not want to look at that. Or, if we must look at it, to clean it up a bit: get the body off the cross, for instance, make it beautiful, architecturally appropriate, aesthetically pleasing.

Well, Holy Week is holy to us precisely because on Friday Jesus died, and that death, we believe, was somehow the final expression of God’s holy love. And if you don’t somehow hear that, and see it and live with it, then what we all come back to church next Sunday to celebrate loses something, to say the least, or becomes a flower festival or a rite of spring.

This is the day that set in motion the events which led to Friday. The decision to come to Jerusalem was fateful. He didn’t have to, you know. He could have stayed in the relative safety of rural Galilee. The city was full of pilgrims who came to celebrate their nation’s liberation from Egypt centuries earlier. It was an occasion of high patriotism and high danger. The revolutionaries were there too, the Zealots, hoping to stir things up and make trouble for the Romans. Additional troops were sent down from Caesarea and the governor himself moved his headquarters and residence to Jerusalem for Passover.

It’s a long walk from Galilee to Jerusalem, but at Bethany, a few miles outside the city walls, he did a peculiar and provocative thing He ordered his disciples to procure a donkey and then, even more unlikely, he rode it the rest of the way into the city. He knew and they knew what people would think when they saw it. At Passover everyone remembered the beloved prophecy of Zechariah: “Behold, your king comes to you, humble and lowly, riding on an ass.” It was a precious vision, a beautiful dream, Israel’s Messiah and true king coming to the city of David to claim his throne and begin his reign.

That is how people responded: ecstatically, throwing garments in his path, singing, shouting, “Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright says it was a deliberately prophetic act, intentional and highly provocative, because there already was a king, a Jewish king by the name of Herod and he was allowed to continue to reign by the Romans insofar as he kept the peace and prevented this sort of public and potentially violent demonstration from happening. And the Romans also allowed the religious establishment to function: scribes, Pharisees and chief priests, and their temple activities. It was in their interest as well to keep the peace and not to accommodate would-be Messiahs and their rabble rousing followers from Galilee.

When the noisy entourage reached the Temple, he entered the gates to the outer courtyard, the Court of the Gentiles, where all were welcome. What he saw there made him angry and again he did something so provocative that New Testament scholars say it is what sealed his fate. What he saw was a corrupt religious and political system. The pilgrims who had traveled to Jerusalem for Passover wanted to make a sacrifice at the Temple. It was a once in a lifetime experience and so they planned for it and saved money for it and some even brought along an animal to sacrifice. The animals had to be inspected to assure that there were no blemishes. The inspectors charged a fee. If you wished to purchase an animal to sacrifice , there were merchants with stalls selling goats and lambs and doves. To make a purchase, or to have your animal inspected, however, you needed to change your Roman money for shekels, the old Jewish coinage which was the only money allowed in the Temple. So here is lively commerce and profiteering, and the inevitable bargaining, and, of course, the general chaos of sheep and goats and birds. It was a corrupt system, highly profitable, and the Jews themselves didn’t much like it, or the priests who administered it and profited from it.

So when, in his anger, Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers and drove out the salesmen, it was a highly provocative act—one the scholars tell us made his arrest and execution only a matter of time.

And then, when they quieted down, he did what may have been the most provocative thing of all. He sat down, and poor people, sick people, little people, powerless, marginalized people, people who were not ordinarily welcome in the Temple, came to him and he received them and made them well. That’s my favorite Palm Sunday picture. After the parade, after the palm waving and shouting, and after the brief violence, Jesus, son of God, sits down, and the lame and blind come to him.

I noticed this year for the first time the role of the children. They were the ones, apparently, who continued to cry “Hosanna” when the entourage left the street and entered the temple. They didn’t know you weren’t supposed to sing and shout and laugh inside the temple. They were nobodies—non persons in that culture, the weakest of the weak. And it was their presence with him at the temple that truly enraged the scribes and chief priests. . . . “when the chief priests and Pharisees saw . . . and heard the children in the Temple, they became angry.” Here they were, the scribes and priests, the mature religious professionals, trying to be dignified and proper, trying desperately to hold on to the status quo and preserve their place and privilege and profit and here he comes, bringing with him the weak and sick and old and marginalized, and for God’s sake, literally, the children.

The temptation for him, and for us, is to stay in Galilee and not go to the city with its danger and noise and moral ambiguity. Christianity’s greatest temptation has always been to withdraw from the world and become an otherworldly sanctuary from life. The church’s great and perennial temptation has always been to turn inward and focus on its own needs instead of the world’s.

Perhaps you read recently that Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Moral Majority is calling on Christians to drop out of American culture. The fact that the Senate did not impeach the President with the apparent approval of the American people, and that Congress continues to refuse to adopt the agenda of the Christian Right, specifically its opposition to reproductive rights, is evidence, in Weyrich’s eyes, that we are morally lost, and that our culture is an “ever widening sewer.” It does not occur to Weyrich and other spokespersons for the right that people of faith come to opposite conclusions because of their theological and religious commitment, not because they have sold out to the culture or are morally flawed. It does not occur to Weyrich that many, perhaps most of us, deplore the President’s behavior and deception, but conclude that impeachment is not appropriate or warranted. The call to pull back and away is bad advice for Christians, any stripe of Christian, right or left, conservative or liberal. This is the day to remember—not that we are called to rule, to take control of one party or the other, not to demand that our ideology be expressed in a partisan political agenda, but that we be there and stay there and express our faith there, in the middle of the world, and take criticism and persecution if necessary, but that we come to the city and act like his people, because on this day that is what he did.

It is not possible to observe the day without hearing his call to his church to follow, to be in life, profoundly and intentionally, to live in the world, with its doors and windows, its arms and heart open. It is not possible to ponder what he did in the Temple without knowing that we are called to be his body, his hands and feet and heart, with and for those our culture marginalizes and excludes and persecutes. It is not possible to observe Palm Sunday without knowing that our task, in our time, in this place, is to live intentionally in the world and to show mercy and kindness and do justice.

It does not mean having the answers to every difficult dilemma in the world. What both the Christian Left 25 years ago and the Christian Right a month ago learned is that it is a precarious and ultimately mistaken business to claim to know God’s will and political agenda and party affiliation. God is not a Republican or a Democrat. God is not a Capitalist or a Socialist. What Palm Sunday means is that God wants us to be involved, to be engaged in the world God loves.

The decision of our President and NATO leaders to initiate air strikes against Serbian forces was a difficult one, couched in ambiguity. I’m not sure it submits to generalization, political or theological. But I do know that Christians who follow the Lord are called to involvement in, not withdrawal from the world, the world of first-century Jerusalem and twentieth-century Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Albania, Washington, London, Paris, Moscow.

I love what the late George MacLeod, founder and leader of the Iona Community said once. I like to get it out and read it every Holy Week. He said:

“I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as the steeple of the church . . . Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his name in Hebrew and Latin and Greek . . . at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died and that is what he died about, and that is where church people ought to be and what church people ought to be about.”

Jesus entered the city like a king, come to claim his throne. And for a moment, with the people shouting and waving palm branches and little children singing and the forces of economic exploitation and political expediency retreating before his strong anger, for a wonderful moment it seems like he might do it, might seize power, ascend the throne and reign over his kingdom. But at the last moment he declines. Instead of claiming a throne, he sits down and receives the sick and marginalized. Instead of a court of powerful generals and politicians, he chooses the singing of little children.

His triumph is a triumph of the meek.

Instead of power, he chose love. Instead of the accoutrements of worldly authority, he chose the authority of compassion. He declined a throne and instead chose to reign in the hearts of men and women and children who will accept him and follow him and live like him in the world.

It was the triumph of the meek.

The Olympic Games are about winning, competing, beating your opponent, dominating the opposition. At the Special Olympics in Seattle a few years ago, nine mentally handicapped children lined up at the starting line for the 100 yard dash. At the gun they all came out sprinting as fast as they could. One little boy, in the middle of the pack, stumbled and fell down, and began to cry in shame and disappointment and embarrassment. The other eight heard his cries and slowed down and stopped and turned around and walked back to him. A little girl with Down Syndrome bent down to help him up and kissed him and said “this will make it better.” And then all nine held hands and walked to the finish line. The crowd, at first silent, cheered for a long time. People who saw it are still telling the story.

It’s a Palm Sunday story. It means that what we call winning and succeeding ultimately doesn’t mean very much. Palm Sunday means that the ultimate realities in this world are compassion and kindness and love and extending heart and hand to the least of these our brothers and sisters, and, in his name, the name of Jesus Christ, to extend his love and compassion and justice to the city, the world, to our spouses, children, parents, our lovers, friends and colleagues.

“All Glory Laud and Honor
to Thee Redeemer King
To whom the lips of children
Made Sweet Hosannas Ring”

A triumph of the meek.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church