Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 13, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Today we are observing this special Sunday not just as Palm Sunday but as Palm/Passion Sunday. That means that in this one service we are moving from the joyous proclamation of Jesus' triumphal entry to Jerusalem to the cross, a Reader's Digest version of Holy Week in one hour-or maybe just a little bit more. Now as you know, especially those of you who participated in it, we've just finished a Lent study series in which we looked at the Passion stories, the stories of Jesus' last week on earth, from his entry into Jerusalem to the crucifixion, in each of the four Gospels. One thing that really caught my attention in those stories-all of them-was the role of the crowd, the ordinary people of Jerusalem. To varying degrees in all four versions, they move from hailing Jesus as Messiah and king on Palm Sunday to demanding his crucifixion on Good Friday. We heard Mark's version of those two scenes this morning. It's the same in the others. In all of them the people change from welcoming and supporting Jesus at the beginning to demanding his crucifixion at the end.

And not one of the Gospels expressly tells us why they do. We are given explanations of why the authorities wanted him dead, but we are not told why the people come to demand the same thing. The stories have a hole in them, a hole that should be filled with an account of why the people turned on Jesus but isn't. That hole invites us to meditate on the meaning of the switch, to consider what it was (and is) about Jesus that caused them (and causes us) to vacillate between accepting Jesus into our hearts and then driving him right back out again. Because, you see, like all good Gospel stories, this story isn't just about them. It is about us. We are they, the people of Jerusalem.

First of all, we must understand why they, the people of Jerusalem then, at first accepted and hailed Jesus. The story of the triumphal entry is full of symbols that tell us what the people thought they were welcoming. The "colt" of Mark's version is a reference to Hebrew Scripture, specifically where it is the ride of a king. The spreading of cloaks and leafy branches on the road is a reference to the royal processions of the ancient kings of Israel. The Mount of Olives, from which Jesus comes, is associated in Hebrew Scripture with God's triumph at the end of time. Taken together, all this symbolism shows that Jesus is being hailed as Israel's Messiah and king. The people see him as the one coming to put an end to all of Israel's troubles, to be their king anointed by God rather than by Caesar, to usher in the blessed Kingdom of God. Many of them may have heard about Jesus before. If so, they would have heard of how he lived out a Gospel of good news to the poor, and they were all poor. They would have heard how he told them that they were the people of God, that no matter how much the world tried to tell them that they were sinners and outcasts cut off from the love of God, it isn't true. Precisely they are God's blessed ones. No wonder they were enthusiastic! Who wouldn't be enthusiastic? What's not to be enthusiastic about? I'd wave palm branches too. I might even throw my coat in the road for Jesus' donkey to walk over. I can replace a coat, but what Jesus was bringing was, and is, beyond value.

That was Sunday. Cut to Friday morning. Now the crowd that had lined the streets shouting Hosanna! on Sunday is outside the Praetorium, Pilate's residence in Jerusalem, the seat of the Roman occupying power. And they are now shouting "Crucify him!" Clearly something has changed the people's minds about Jesus. Mark doesn't say explicitly what it is. The best we can do to try to figure out what it is is look at what Mark does tell us has happened in the meantime. On Monday, Jesus went to the Temple and caused a ruckus. He overturned the tables of the money changers and drove out the sellers of doves. I can just hear the people saying: "What's up with that?" The Temple was the center of their religious life. Temple worship was the way they'd always done it, and the money changers and animal sellers were essential to Temple worship. By his actions, therefore, Jesus was saying: "This isn't what God wants! God wants the devotion of your hearts, not the sacrifice of your animals!" And the people said: "Say what? Worship without animal sacrifice? Worship without the Temple? But doesn't he understand? We've never done it that way before! He wants us to change! He wants us have a change of heart, to start living the way God wants, not the way we always have. He wants us to be transformed! Forget that! Crucify him!"

And not only that. Now the authorities have now turned against Jesus. Mark tells us that the scribes and the chief priests, that is, the Jewish religious authorities of the day, had been looking for a way and an excuse to kill him for quite some time. Now, they've got him. They've convicted him of blasphemy for claiming to be the Messiah. And they're trying to get the Romans to crucify him for treason as well because of the claim they say he made to be the King of the Jews. Can't you just imagine the people thinking: "Whoa! This is getting dangerous! Our leaders say he's a criminal. They want the political rulers to execute him. We know how these guys do things. If they execute him, they're going to go after the people who followed him too. If we don't go along they may well come after us next. What he said sounded good, but we sure don't want to get ourselves killed over it! Crucify him!" So why did the people turn on Jesus? I think it's because his teaching made radical demands on them combined with the fact that the powers of the world rejected him and his Gospel. Following Jesus, they discovered, is hard and dangerous. So: Crucify him!

And it's the same with us, isn't it? Oh, it's not exactly the same. Identifying oneself as a Christian is socially acceptable today, at least in our country. No one is going to be executed here today for claiming to follow Jesus. And yet I still think we are a lot like the crowd in the Passion story, with this difference. They started by accepting Jesus and then, later, rejected him. We do both at the same time, or at least I know I do. We take what we like and leave the rest. We take the easy parts and leave the hard parts. We joyfully accept the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ, as we should. We accept him as the one that is going to end all of our troubles, if not in this life then in the life to come after we die. That's the Hosanna! part, the Palm Sunday part.

The problem is that there's more to it than that. If we take Jesus seriously, he starts messing things up. Just as he messed up the business of the Temple, that is, symbolically called the people to a way of living their relationship with God that was radically different from what they were used to, so he messes up our business as usual too. If we take him even a little bit seriously, we know that he makes demands on us, demands that say we can no longer just go along as we have before ignoring the poor, resorting to violence to solve problems, justifying our positions of privilege, excluding and dehumanizing people not like us, and going through the motions of worship while refusing to open our hearts to the truly transforming power of God's grace.

We know it, but we don't like it. We feel threatened by it, just as the people of Jerusalem felt threatened by Jesus' attack on their customary ways of doing religion, and for exactly the same reasons. We'd have to give up something. We'd have to change. And so we say: "Doesn't he understand? We've never done it that way before! He wants us to change! He wants us have a change of heart, to start living the way God wants, not the way we always have. He wants us to be transformed! Forget that! Crucify him!"

Oh, I know. We don't literally say "crucify him." We don't have to. Someone else did it for us two thousand years ago. But we crucify him nonetheless. We crucify him when we accept his grace and refuse his challenge to us to be transformed in our hearts, and I know that I do that every day.

And, like the crowd in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, we get scared off. The powers of the world don't like his message today any more than they did then. Oh, today they may pay lip service to Jesus and to the Gospel. They may call themselves Christians. The authorities in all of what we call the West, including our own country, call themselves Christians. But they don't like people who truly follow the Gospel any more than the authorities in Jerusalem way back then liked Jesus. He threatened their positions of power and privilege, and his truest followers threaten the positions of power and privilege of their successors today. And so today as in Jesus' time the defenders of the status quo attack the truest witnesses to the Gospel. The best example today is the way the advocates of Jesus' way of nonviolent resistance to evil are called unpatriotic. Or how the truest advocates of the poor were in recent times called Communists and today are dismissed as idealistic dreamers. Or how the scientific, humanistic culture of our time dismisses faith as superstition and people of faith as unrealistic fools. The social and political pressure to compromise the Gospel today is, for most of us, and for me, irresistible. And so we join the "crucify him" crowd because doing so is so much easier than sticking with him come what may.

We are still in Lent today, that time of introspection, confession, and discernment that we've talked about so much recently. So today I urge you, and myself, to consider the stories of Christ's passion and especially the movement of the crowd from "Hosanna!" to "Crucify him!" It isn't just a story about them and then. It is story about us and now.