Palm Sunday, March 29, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

The Politics of Praise

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 118:1–2, 19–29
Mark 11:1–11
Philippians 2:5–11

Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
. . . Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

Mark 11:9 (NRSV)

Men, it has been well said, think in herds.

Charles Mackay

Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is “one of the most politically explosive acts of Jesus’ ministry” (Charles Campbell, Feasting on the Word, p. 153). This is how Professor of Homiletics Charles Campbell characterizes the procession by which every year we mark Palm Sunday. This stands in contrast to the way we usually imagine Palm Sunday as perhaps a child-friendly day, with more children in worship than on any other Sunday of the year. But, of course, we know better. After all, choosing to go to Jerusalem, the center of power in first-century Palestine, especially at this time of year when the annual Passover festival was taking place—a festival that celebrated liberation from the unjust and cruel domination that had enslaved them in Egypt—Jesus certainly knew where he was headed. Like everyone else in the region, Jesus would have known that at this particular time of year the Roman governor would be arriving for the sole purpose of controlling the crowds and keeping the peace. Furthermore, up to now in the Gospel of Mark, Jerusalem has been depicted as the home of some of Jesus’ greatest opponents, the scribes and Pharisees. Deciding to go to Jerusalem in the first place was already a political move.

And he didn’t enter quietly. As the first seven verses of the eleventh chapter of Mark tell us, Jesus carefully orchestrated his entrance into the city in such a way that he would not only enact, but also make a parody out of, the military processions by which Roman kings and governors processed. Jesus did everything that a king would do, and the crowds did everything that a subject people would do, shouting “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” The whole time, however, Jesus mocked symbols of power: rather than riding on a powerful horse, he rode into the city on a donkey, and instead of displaying military might, he rode in without weapons in hand. Jesus planned a political demonstration as different as it could possibly be from that of the Roman governor Pilate.

Any kind of demonstration begs the question, “What was the point?” Surely people in the crowd and the Jewish and Roman authorities were asking this. By mocking the political powers of his day, did Jesus intend to supplant them? Did he himself want political power? Of course, unlike his opponents, we know that Jesus did not seek to claim power for himself.

That Jesus did not seek political power, however, does not mean that Jesus was apolitical. Given his carefully laid plans for an anti-triumphant demonstration, it seems pretty clear that Jesus understood his mission to have an inherent political dimension.

In his book Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, written almost thirty years ago, biblical scholar Richard Horsley argued a point about which the church needed to be reminded at the time. At the time when he wrote this book, Christians tended to apoliticize Jesus, partly because they tended to treat politics, sociology, economics, and religion all as separate, independent spheres—just as they are treated in different university departments—and as a result, they abstracted Jesus from the social and political context in which he lived. Professor Horsley’s argument was that Jesus himself did not make these separations. Neither Jesus nor anyone else in the ancient world would have parsed out the religious from the political from the economic from the social. Professor Horsley argued, therefore, that if we want to understand Jesus’ mission as Jesus understood it, we would need to interpret it as the thoroughly social and political movement that it was.

Today there is still a tendency to treat religion and politics as though they are separate entities. These days no one can miss a prominent, though not the only popular, narrative that has been shaping our public understanding of extremist Islamic groups. The narrative goes like this: extremist ideological groups use religion to accomplish political ends. In other words, these groups are politically, not religiously, motivated, and they wield religion for their political ends.

This past week, I attended a Muslim-Christian dialogue in New York City that was hosted by the National Council of Churches. At this gathering, we discussed, among other things, this narrative, and in the course of the dialogue, there was opportunity to challenge it with the view that I have been hearing more recently: that extremist Islamic groups, while undoubtedly politically motivated, are also religious. This isn’t hard to find plausible, since we can imagine that within Islam there is as much, if not more, variety of views as there is in Christianity. It was clear that the Christian clergy could all relate to the complex relationship between religion and politics because of the church’s own history in which crusaders, colonizers, and different extremists in more recent history have committed terrible violence in the name of Christianity.

The point that needs to be made, I think, to Muslims, Christians, and all religious people is that religion is not apolitical. It is false to think that it ever was or is or will be separate or separable from politics. No matter how pure we want our religion to be or how personally or individually oriented we want our religious teachings to be, we would be fooling ourselves to think that we can avoid being political when we are being religious. The naiveté is not harmless. It has consequences: on the one hand, if we don’t recognize the politics at work in our religion, we may be blind to injustices that our well-intentioned religious communities condone; on the other hand, if we don’t recognize the political vision toward which our religions call us to aspire, our society may be impoverished.

Given that being religious does entail some kind of politics, the question for conscientious religious people is, what are the politics at work in our religion? As one of the most politically charged Sundays of the church year, Palm Sunday begs the question of what political vision is at work in Jesus’ mission as he rides into Jerusalem.

Ever since the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 587 B.C.E., the Jewish people had been subject to one imperial regime after another: the Babylonians, then the Persians, then Alexander the Great and the Macedonians, and then the Romans and their Jewish collaborators. It was in this social climate and context that Christianity was born. It was in this context that Jesus came preaching about the kingdom of God, and the early church got the message.

In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, when he draws upon a hymn that the early church likely sung, we can grasp what the first Christians understood about Christ, who he was. Christ was understood in lordship language. As the hymn states, “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” The political vision conveyed in this hymn is one of the kingdom of God in which Jesus Christ is Lord over all. What Jesus knew was that you cannot be king over all unless you care about everyone. Every tongue will not confess and every knee will not bend until everyone is cared for. Until society is such that even those who are in the lowest positions are valued and exalted, there will be no kingdom of God This is not hard to grasp. It’s easy to understand.

At the same gathering that I attended last week—the National Council of Churches’ Muslim-Christian Dialogue—Mr. Mazen Mokhtar made the point that our society needs us to be people of principle. If we are going to fight bigotry, for example, we need to fight it, as a matter of principle, across the board. To Muslims, he would say that Muslims need to be concerned about bigotry not only when Muslims experience it, but when anyone experiences it. What is at stake, he said, is not just the dignity of Muslims, but of humanity.

What Mr. Mokhtar said made sense, and as much effort and courage as it may take to speak out and stand up against bigotry anywhere and everywhere, I daresay that I think this is an attainable goal. Every day I see society making progress on this front.

Much harder, I think, is what Paul calls us to do when he says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself.” In Christ, God is humbled so that humanity can be exalted. For people to choose to humble themselves, to willingly give up some of their status and self-interest, their power and privilege, for the sake of others’ interests and empowerment—that is a hard command to follow. That is hard discipleship. And yet, this is what is required for building the kingdom of God.

I was so sad when recently I read a eulogy that former Senator Danforth of Missouri delivered for his colleague and friend Tom Schweich. Tom Schweich, he wrote, “was the model for what a public servant should be. He was exceptionally bright, energetic, and well organized. He was highly ethical, and like the indignant prophets of biblical times, he was passionate about his responsibility for righting wrongs.” In conversations together, Danforth and Schweich often spoke about the calling to public service: that “the objective should be always to take the high ground and never give it up.”

Days before Tom Schweich committed suicide, he and Senator Danforth spoke for a long time on the phone. Tom was indignant; he was upset about two things: a radio commercial that made fun of his physical appearance and “a whispering campaign that he was Jewish.” Tom said the he needed to stand up and speak out against the anti-Semitism, the religious bigotry, of this whispering campaign. Tom told him about his Jewish grandfather who taught him that any time Tom saw anti-Semitism he had to confront it. Attempting to give his friend wise counsel, Senator Danforth advised him against publicly combating the anti-Semitism he was experiencing because it could adversely affect his friend’s campaign to become governor.

Senator Danforth expressed his regret: “He may have thought that I had abandoned him and left him on the high ground, all alone to fight the battle that had to be fought.” Senator Danforth went on to say that it is now the responsibility of everyone to reform politics so that decent people—even sensitive people—will want to seek, not be driven away from, public office. “I believe deep in my heart,” he wrote, “that it’s now our duty, yours and mine, to turn politics into something much better than its now-so-miserable state.”

To turn politics into something that can actually support and make possible the kind of society envisioned by people of principle, it will take more than care for others across the spectrum of humanity, even extending to people who are different from oneself. More than that, it will require people who are willing to give up something of their own position and power so that others can gain higher ground. This is the hard kind of discipleship that we will have to undertake, if we truly want to work for the kingdom of God in which every tongue will confess and every knee will bend in praise of our Lord Jesus Christ.