Palm/Passion Sunday, March 20, 2016 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:30 a.m.

Carefully Made Plans

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 118:1–2, 19–29
Luke 19:28–40

Palm Sunday reminds us that our world can turn on a dime, that sudden changes in our circumstances can take us straight from praise to lament. But in exercising our God-given imagination, we might also allow God to help us turn our most painful lament into praise.

Kathleen Norris

I have been underestimating the crowd, those who heard that Jesus was on his way into their city and who lined up to celebrate. Throughout my ministry, I have always assumed they did not know what was really going on as Jesus rode by them into Jerusalem. I’ve imagined that as they—women, men, children—stood beside the road, they threw their cloaks along the way more out of confusion than purpose.

I’ve assumed those who made up that Palm Sunday crowd just happened to be in that particular location on that day. Maybe the weather was nice. Perhaps their March Madness brackets had already fallen apart or the kids needed to get off of the Xbox and out into the fresh air. Whatever the reasons, my working assumption has always been that those in the crowd just happened to be in the right place at the right time when Jesus and his disciples finally made their long-awaited arrival in Jerusalem. Lucky them!

But this week, I’ve decided I was wrong. I think those in the crowd were there because they purposefully chose to participate in that particular parade. There was nothing accidental or coincidental to their presence. They were lined up along that road, waiting for Jesus, because they intentionally chose to support Jesus’ parade rather than unintentionally support the other one.

We spoke about the other parade last year, but let us remind ourselves of it again. Historians and theologians claim that even though a second parade is not recorded in scripture, there were two parades going on in Jerusalem that year at the time of Passover. Now, unlike Jesus’ parade which only took place that one time, the other parade, the imperial parade, happened regularly in the first century. It was the standard practice of the Roman governors of Judea to come to the city of Jerusalem for all the major Jewish festivals. Yet the governors came not to observe the festivals, but so they could observe the participants.

The governors wanted to make sure to be in the city in case of trouble, for often there was some trouble, a few revolutionaries stirring up the crowd. This was especially true at the festival of Passover—the festival that celebrated the Jewish people’s liberation from their earlier oppressors in Egypt. The Roman governor did not want anyone to get the ill-informed idea that it was time for them to be liberated again, this time from the empire of Rome. Thus Pilate and his troops always arrived in town with the mission to reinforce the Roman garrison that overlooked the Jewish temple and its courts (Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week). Just in case.

They would ride into town on high, stately horses, dressed in the armor of power, carrying the weapons of war, proclaiming with every step and in every shout that Caesar was king. That meant that all of those gathered in that city, regardless of what religious festival they were celebrating, were merely the human property of Caesar. The parade’s purpose was to remind them of their subjugated reality. So every part of the imperial parade was always carefully planned and fastidiously implemented. Those in power desired to blatantly demonstrate the power, the glory, and the violence of the Roman Empire, lest anyone dare forget. And the people would line up on the west side of the city, doing their duty, careful not to show even a hint of disruption or protest.

But on that day, the day we call Palm Sunday, some others in Jerusalem decided to make a disruptive choice, a protest choice. So they went to the east side of the city and waited for Jesus.

Bear in mind that all of them knew about the imperial parade happening at the same time across town. They had been subjected to its power and its tyranny year after year. Everyone in that crowd, child to adult alike, was fully cognizant that their lives could be taken at a whim; their land and their resources could be taxed beyond anything reasonable; and that not even their holy spaces were off-limits to Roman desecration and threat.

And the more we remember what those peasants experienced on a regular basis as an oppressed and violated people, the more certain we become that they all knew exactly what they were doing when they went to Jesus’ parade. They were staging a nonviolent counter-protest, a movement intent on standing up to and staring down the imperial power of Rome. When they threw their cloaks out on the road, they were embodying submission to Jesus, not Caesar. And when they called Jesus “Blessed” and “King,” they were making the political and theological statement that Jesus—not Caesar, not Pilate, not Herod—was the real king, the actual ruler of their lives. Their loyalty was to God’s kingdom, God’s reign, not Rome’s.

And we, in our own time, know that kind of bold, intentional protest rarely just “happens.” It takes planning. It takes commitment. It takes a choice. All of those gathered that day on that east side of town, waiting for Jesus to come, chose Jesus’ parade instead of Rome’s parade. And their choice was dangerous, risky, and bold.

Frankly, the intentionality behind their action reminds us of Rosa Parks and her protest on the bus in Montgomery. Unlike some of the storybooks I read as a child, the truth is that Ms. Parks did not just decide on the spur of the moment that she was going take on something as big and powerful as white supremacy and structural racism. Rather, Rosa Parks, along with other civil rights leaders, had been a student at the Highlander School in Tennessee. The Highlander Folk School, established in 1932, was led by Myles Horton, a former student of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. By the early 1950s the school had shifted its focus to race relations. It was one of the only places where integrated leadership training meetings took place for civil rights activists.

And indeed, Rosa Parks attended a workshop at the Highlander just four months before she kept her seat on the bus (kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu: http://stanford.io/1MjDAFh). Because of that training and others, she had thought through what would occur if she did not get up when asked. So when that happened, she made the intentional choice to stay seated. Later, when she was asked if she had just kept sitting because she was tired, Ms. Parks responded, ‘‘I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in” (Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story, p. 116).

So was the crowd who waited for Jesus. They, too, were tired of giving in. They were tired of giving into systems and laws purposefully structured to keep them down or locked up. They were tired of the violence that plagued their neighborhoods because jobs were rare and their sons could no longer imagine living past eighteen. They were tired of their children having to worry about the route they would take to school in order to stay safe and not cross any territory lines. They were tired of always feeling like they were being watched and judged, no matter what they did or said. They were tired of the apathy, tired of the cynicism, tired of all the daily loss, shame, and struggle that go hand in hand with poverty. They were tired of nobody in Roman power seeming to care, not even enough to pass a state budget. They were tired of being tired.

And they knew from the stories they heard about Jesus that his rule, his kingdom, was drastically different than Roman rule, Rome’s kingdom. They knew Jesus saw them not as subjects to use and oppress but as real human beings, created in God’s image out of stardust and brought to life with divine breath. They knew Jesus saw them as men and women, children, who deserved safe neighborhoods, good schools, and work that offered both sustenance and dignity. They knew Jesus saw them not primarily as troublemakers but primarily as people worthy of healing and restoration. They knew Jesus saw them as God’s children, who had as much promise and potential as anyone else. They knew Jesus saw them.

Jesus knew they were tired of being tired. He knew it because so was he. It is exhausting to always have to be on guard, to constantly need to watch your back. It is exhausting to know your words about God’s great reversal; your blessings for the poor, the hungry, and the weeping ones; your call on people to love their enemies and to not judge others; your insistence on justice and equality—it is tiring to know those words and actions anger people, often the people who have the power to make you suffer and die. Yes, by this point of his ministry, undoubtedly Jesus was tired of being tired, too.

Yet just as those protestors knew what they were doing when they showed up on the east side of town to wait for Jesus, Jesus knew what he was doing when he planned his parade. His parade was intentionally designed to stir things up. His parade was carefully planned and fastidiously implemented with the sole purpose of proclaiming God’s alternative kingdom, a kingdom that begins with the underdogs and the outcast; a kingdom that proclaims peace; a kingdom where words of preemptive forgiveness are uttered, where the first become last and the last become first, and because of that switch, all are made whole. That message was what Jesus’ parade, Jesus’ entire messianic ministry as God’s Love Made Flesh, was all about: proclaiming the good news of the reign of God.

Jesus intentionally chose to have his rival parade come into the city of Jerusalem on that first day of the week, when Pilate’s parade always took place. Jesus knew that his parade marching towards the imperial parade would demonstrate the central conflict that would get him killed. He knew that. Imperial power and violence do not let go willingly. Jesus made an intentional choice, a choice that did indeed lead to his own suffering and death at the hand of the empire. That particular outcome is probably the one thing I am not sure the crowd understood when they chose his parade on that day. They knew it was risky for them, but I doubt they realized how risky it was for him.

So what about us? Whose parade will we choose? Will we choose the parade of the king who did not enter the holy city on a warhorse but on a colt; a king who did not want the beating of drums to precede him but who preferred the laughter of children running beside him? Will we choose the parade of a king who resisted the love of power but embodied the power of love? Will we choose the parade of a king who knew exactly what it is like to be tired of being tired but who also actively, consistently chose justice and mercy for all people anyway, no matter the cost? Is that the parade for which we will intentionally prepare and choose?

Or will we either intentionally or unwittingly choose the parade that celebrates the way things already are in our world? Will we show up for the parade that dismisses the power of love as naïve and foolish and prizes the love of power as the only real way to make it? Will we attend the parade where anger gets a microphone, insults are the primary language, and violence is encouraged? Will we choose to attend the parade where warhorses are plentiful and the drums are loud and the ones who “have” get more and the ones who “have not” are thrown out? Is that the parade we will choose, intentionally or not?

Which parade will we choose? That is the question for us today, but not just for today, every day. Every day we face the intentional choice of whose parade to follow: Jesus’ or Rome’s. It might seem like an easy question, especially sitting here in church. Yet if you are anything like me, no matter how much we want to join Jesus’ parade, we know that, in truth, we probably spend a lot of our time in the week quietly walking behind Pilate—silently treading the road where cynicism and apathy choke any voice of our soul’s protest, where fear and anger and the need to always come out on top tend to hold a firmer grip on our imaginations for our future than do the promise of God’s new heaven and new earth.

We want to be like those brave counter-protesters in Jerusalem, to join Jesus’ parade and sing “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” but we know that by the end of the week we will probably find ourselves in the other crowd—either shouting “Crucify!” or simply too scared or too numbed to say anything else. The reality of our brokenness, our sin, lead me to wonder, What if one reason all of those early counter-protestors had the courage to choose Jesus’ parade that day was because they also had each other? What if they borrowed courage and hope from each other on the days when that was needed? What if the power of the community made the difference in which parade they chose?

If that is the case, then maybe, if we choose to walk together, we too will find the strength to turn our backs on the lure of the imperial parade and to turn to the parade of our King—the strange one on the colt, proclaiming peace. Perhaps we too can borrow hope and courage from each other when needed. I do think that might be one reason we are all here in church today, don’t you? So we might help each other remember whose parade will save us even if, sometimes, the other one gets all our attention. Amen.