Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 28, 2010

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.

There’s something about Christianity that puzzles and troubles me. It really is all the fault of the Roman emperor Constantine back in the fourth century CE. What puzzles and troubles me is how Christianity has domesticated Jesus. How we have domesticated Jesus is Constantine’s fault because he made Christianity the official religion of the empire all those centuries ago. Before Constantine Christianity was first a Jewish sect that the empire more or less tolerated, then an illegal religion that the empire more or less persecuted. The Christian tradition has long since lost sight of the fact that it was easier for Christianity to be true to Jesus Christ before it became the established religion of the Roman Empire that it was after Constantine legalized it and then established it as the official imperial faith. After Constantine Christianity became an institution that functioned as much as anything else to support and legitimize the imperial government and its policies. The interests of the church were seen as the same as or even subordinate to the interests of empire. And that’s a really puzzling development when you put aside the picture of Jesus that you probably have had all your life and look at who Jesus really was and how he really related to the institutions of the state and the church. He related to the institutions of the state and the church of his time in a way that is the opposite of establishment. With regard to the church and the state of his day, Jesus was nothing less than subversive.

We just heard two stories from the Bible that show how dangerous and subversive he was—and is, and you probably didn’t even hear the subversion in those stories, so used have we become to a tame, domesticated Jesus and to a church that functions as much as anything else to maintain the social status quo. So let me explain.

The first story we heard was about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey with crowds of people acclaiming him as king. And maybe you don’t get it that what he’s doing here is claiming to be a king, but that is exactly what he’s doing. He’s enacting a verse from Hebrew scripture, specifically Zechariah 9:9. It says “your king comes to you, humble and riding on a donkey.” And that’s what Jesus is doing. He’s riding on a donkey in a triumphal procession with the people proclaiming him king! But what kind of king is this? Kings don’t ride on donkeys! In Jesus’ day they rode in magnificent war chariots drawn by noble steeds prancing and snorting. They wore purple and crowns of laurel. They were surrounded by military force, centurions leading hundreds of armed men putting on a display of power and might. They made it clear to people that they had better get out and shout greetings to them if they didn’t want to get into big trouble. They didn’t ride on donkeys with crowds throwing down their coats before them.

And that’s what society thinks it needs, isn’t it? It needs authority backed up by armed force. Every kingdom that there ever was understood that. So do our modern “kingdoms,” even if they have some kind of democratic form to them. The President is, after all, the Commander in Chief. He’s escorted by military people, serenaded by the Marine band, and flown around in Air Force One. Did you ever see a President riding on a donkey? A fine horse, perhaps, but certainly not a lowly donkey. And Jesus thinks being a king looks like a nobody riding on a donkey! Worse than that he taught people love, compassion, justice, and nonviolence. What kind of king is that? A subversive one, that’s what. If people get the idea that a king can be like that, our whole political structure, our whole way of life, will be subverted. Jesus really, truly is being subversive here.

And don’t think that Jesus subverts only political institutions. He subverts the church too. I can tell that you’re asking: How can Jesus subvert a church? Isn’t a church all about proclaiming Jesus? Well, he can. We heard him doing it. Not a Christian church to be sure. There were no Christian churches in his day. But he was doing it to the central religious institution of his day, the temple in Jerusalem. He went in and disrupted the legitimate functioning of the temple. The temple was the place of animal sacrifice and paying the temple tax, which were the obligations of all of the Jewish people. To do that people needed ritually clean animals and special temple coins. That’s why those people in the temple were selling animals and changing money. They weren’t debasing the temple. They were helping it do what it was there to do. And Jesus comes in and symbolically overturns the whole thing!

And that temple was one of the primary institutions for maintaining social stability and order way back then. It’s leaders collaborated with the civil government, the Romans, to maintain law and order and to prevent disruption of the economy, just as leaders of the Christian church have done ever since the faith was established under Constantine. And here comes Jesus, and by his action he says that the whole thing has to be overthrown! He’d do that same thing today. The church is one of the most conservative institutions we have. It serves to maintain social order just as the temple did two thousand years ago. Oh, you can be sure that Jesus would find a way symbolically to overthrow the churches today just as he did the temple way back then. I tell you, the man is subversive.

And we don’t get it. We don’t get it because we’ve been told for so long that Jesus is all about, and only about, how we get to heaven after we die. We’ve been told for so long that he’s not about how we are to live our lives in this life, except to the extent that maybe how we live our lives in this life has something to do with getting to heaven. We certainly haven’t been told, or haven’t been told often and loudly enough, that Jesus’ message was as much about how humanity should live its collective life together in peace and justice as it was about private, personal morality. We haven’t been told that he rejected religious institutions that served to prop up worldly authority and that themselves oppressed the people with their onerous requirements and inhumane ethics. But that’s who Jesus was. At least, it’s a very big part of who Jesus was. When he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey he was mocking and symbolically overthrowing the governments of the world. When he overturned the tables of the moneychangers he was mocking and symbolically overthrowing established religion that is in cahoots with the governments of the world. Jesus really was subversive. He was subversive then. He is subversive now.

So does that mean that we all have to become revolutionaries and engage in acts of subversion against the state and the church? No. It doesn’t necessarily mean that, although a lot of Christians have concluded over the centuries that that is precisely what it means.. Our government today, fallible and frustrating as it is, is not the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day. The church today, compromised as it is in so many of its manifestations, is not the temple of Jesus’ day. But that doesn’t mean that there is no lesson for us in Jesus’ subversive teachings. The lesson for us in Jesus’ subversive teachings is that we must be constantly vigilant. We must be constantly vigilant to spot and to oppose the ways in which our government acts unjustly and violently, the ways in which it violates Jesus’ teachings of justice and peace. It means that we must be constantly vigilant to spot and oppose the ways that the Christian church—any manifestation of the larger Christian church—is complicit in those ways of injustice and violence. To spot and oppose the ways in which the church is being oppressive and burdensome for its people rather than truly being the messenger of the Good News of Christian freedom in Jesus Christ. That vigilance is what we lose when we become complacent with government as it is and the church as it is. That vigilance is what we lose when we tame Jesus and make him be all about, and only about, how we get to heaven when we die.

So let us embrace our subversive Jesus. Let us answer his call to vigilance in the cause of peace and justice. Let us take nothing as given just because it’s what we’ve always been told. Let us well and truly learn from the one we call Lord and Savior, that ruling is about justice not power, that church is about people not dominance. If we will learn to do that from our lessons this Palm Sunday morning, we will have learned well indeed. Amen.