March 24, 2013 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:30 a.m. | Palm Sunday

A Tale of Two Cities

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 118:19−29
Luke 19:28–40

“He went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.”

Luke 19:28 (NRSV)

I remember a teenaged boy, an acolyte in my former church, standing with the cross at the head of the palm procession. He turned to me and said, “I don’t understand what I am supposed to be feeling.” He well captured the ambivalence of the day.

Fleming Rutledge
The Undoing of Death

You’ve got to love Palm Sunday: lots of people in church, which is always a nice thing. Thank you all for being here this morning. A church, a chancel chock-full of children waving their branches and palms and singing hosanna. It’s amazing at the back as they get their palms how quickly some of the younger boys can turn palm fronds into swords and start attacking each other and sword fighting. Not just the youngest of kids, though; John Vest has a penchant for doing that to me before we process down the aisle. And it’s a chance for Edwin Estevez and John Sherer to ham it up. You’ve got to love Palm Sunday and the celebration of the triumphal entry of Jesus into the city.

I just finished reading a book about cities. About two cities, actually. It’s a book by Scottish poet and academic Robert Crawford, and it is a literary meditation on the relationship between the two largest cities in Scotland: Glasgow and Edinburgh. The book is called On Glasgow and Edinburgh, and as you can imagine, I was very interested to read this meditation on my home city of Glasgow and its near geographic neighbor, Edinburgh. They are two cities that are only forty-five minutes apart by train and yet that exist in very different contexts, in very different worlds. Glasgow, the larger of the two cities, is the largest city in Scotland with its strong and proud history of being the industrial center of the empire, when there was a British Empire. And Edinburgh, the political and financial capital of Scotland.

Robert Crawford reflects on this in his introduction. He writes, “The rivalry between these cities is so long-standing that it has become proverbial.” He sets them alongside other urban centers that have rivalries: Los Angeles and San Francisco, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Rio de Janiero and Sao Paolo, Madrid and Barcelona. Because we’re here in the Second City, I’d add Chicago and New York City.

They are only forty-five minutes apart by train, Glasgow and Edinburgh, but Robert Crawford suggests that in traveling from Glasgow to Edinburgh, in order to prepare properly for that experience, you don’t get on the train at Glasgow and take the forty-five-minute trip east to Edinburgh; rather, he suggests, you should go to the Glasgow airport and get on a plane and fly across the Atlantic to New York City and then go across North America to the Pacific, fly over the Pacific to Asia and then cross Asia and continental Europe and finally land on the east coast of Scotland in Edinburgh!

He reflects in his introduction, perhaps unsurprisingly, that what he is meditating on is “a tale of two cities,” invoking Dickens’ famous novel of the French Revolution set, of course, in London and Paris. I’m sure you all remember the famous opening line, one of the great opening lines in the history of literature: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

Palm Sunday in many ways is a tale of two cities. Palm Sunday might be prefaced by that line “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” It is the tale of the cities of Jersualem and Rome. New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan reflect on this in writing about Palm Sunday. They have this creative suggestion that there was not one triumphal entry into Jerusalem that Palm Sunday; there were two. There was the entry into the city of Jesus riding in on a colt, the foal of a donkey, with the disciples gathering and shouting in joy at the entrance to the city of the hoped-for savior, the messiah, the king, singing their hosannas. “We are saved!” And, giving thanks in the words of the psalm, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” That’s one procession.

Borg and Crossan invite us to imagine that on the other side of Jerusalem there is the second procession that day. That is the triumphal entry into Jerusalem of the occupying power, the empire, Rome. A procession led by the governor, Pontius Pilate, who has been placed there by the emperor, leading the centurions and Roman troops into the city in order to be ready to quell any disturbances that might arise against the occupying power during the nationalist fervor of the Passover celebration.

These two different processions symbolize two different understandings of humanity and the way of the world. Pilate and the Romans symbolize what’s known as the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, which is the peace that exists across the empire due to the absence of war and because of the subjugation of any dissent against the empire by the Roman troops.

The other procession, the humble man riding in on the donkey—that symbolizes the Pax Christi, the peace of Christ. Peace that is rooted and grounded in self-giving love. Peace that promises shalom, the fullness of life lived together in community. Peace which passes all our understanding.

Make no mistake about Palm Sunday: these two different worldviews will clash. In some Christian traditions like the Episcopal church and the Catholic church, Palm Sunday is also marked as Passion Sunday. After the liturgy of the palms with the procession of the children, the congregation hears the story of the passion, the suffering of Jesus through Holy Week up to the crucifixion on Good Friday. There is a tension about Palm Sunday. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. And that clash, Pax Romana and Pax Christi, that clash takes place during Holy Week and is occasioned by these two triumphal processions into the city. Fleming Rutledge, a great Episcopal preacher, in one of her Palm Sunday sermons, talks about this day, Palm Sunday, being “an ambivalent time.” It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

One of the realties we have to recognize around Palm Sunday is that we are entering into a place where the religious, where faith encounters politics. Now don’t be all shaking your head and saying here we go again, religion and politics from the pulpit at Fourth Church. I’m not talking about Democrats and Republicans or Labor and Conservatives, Left and Right. I mean the very act of Jesus entering the city and being proclaimed king is a political act. You remember the word politics has its root in the Greek word polis, city. In entering the city and bringing from the rural areas of Galilee and Nazareth and Capernaum into the city the message of the peace of Christ, Jesus is challenging the status quo of the powers that be of the empire that control the city.

Now we are people of the city. Indeed we, as a community of faith, as a Christian congregation, claim for ourselves the aspiration that we would be a light in the city. A light in the polis. So for us there is a challenge to ask what does that mean for how we live together in community in this place and how do we engage in the wider life of the polis, of the city—how it makes its decisions, cares for the people who live in the differing communities around the city.

Palm Sunday is a day that is deeply engaged in the cities, in the relationship between Jerusalem and Rome. George MacLeod, the founder of Iona community in Scotland, once preached a sermon in Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City in which he said this: “The love of power has ruled the world since the beginning of time. Only one force is sufficient for our day: it is the power of love.” The love of power. The power of love. That is what is meant by those two worldviews, the Roman peace and the peace of Christ. One is rooted in the love of power, the other in the power of love.

But this is not just a tale of two cities from two thousand years ago; this is precisely about how we come together and understand how we order our lives in the context of power. Kathy Galloway, a fine theologian and preacher, in a Palm Sunday sermon said this: “Palm Sunday is always happening, and we are always being confronted by the challenge of that different way of being. The way of peace that does not shrink from conflict, but refuses violence. The way that sees the people who are overlooked and not counted. That is the way of self-offering.”

And so on this “ambivalent” day, this day of joy of hosannas and children singing and laughter in the Sanctuary, this day when we prepare ourselves to take the journey of suffering into Holy Week, it is the best of times and the worst of times. It is an ambivalent time. It is to this that we are called. As the triumphant shouts of hosanna fade into the background and the way of the cross lies ahead, we are called to face the temptation of the love of power and to see it undermined by the self-offering of the one who will be put to death by power on Friday but who will rise on Sunday, establishing for eternity the dominance of the power of love. Thanks be to God. Amen.