Knees
Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 19:28-40
March 28, 2010
It always starts so small, just two by two. So small on this Palm Sunday without any palms that the Gospel does not bother mentioning the names of the Two. The animals went two by two into Noah’s Ark and we don’t know which ones went in first or last. Now a pair of human animals go to fetch, sort of snitch actually, a single animal to carry the New Person into a city overflowing with a dreaded passion. A young colt had become a different sort of Ark.
Today begins that week of the incomprehensible Passion underlined in its cruelty and violence by Mel Gibson’s unbalanced movie a few years back, which we call Holy Week. Palm Sunday is the odd day out, however, because it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the week. It appears to be a triumphal march of the new King into his conquered city, and we most certainly sing it that way, a kind of warm up for next Sunday morning. Yet when you read carefully all the way through the account, there is less triumph and more irony.
There is the feeling of something staged, a public relations stunt of Biblical proportions. The next to last prophet in the Old Testament, Zechariah, has a verse about the coming of the king of Jerusalem, apparently a new king, entering the city riding on a donkey, a relatively un-kingly mode of transportation back then.
Was the intention of Jesus to recreate these Biblical images in order to validate his Messiah-hood with his disciples or with Jerusalem at large? A touch of satire tinges the edge of this procession, mocking the impressive military May Day parades we still witness around the world. Luke’s version does not have any palms - only John’s account mentions palms. We could legitimately call this Coat Sunday because that’s what his disciples were throwing on the road in front of the parade, a motley equivalent of the red carpet treatment. And at least from Luke’s account, if we take quite literally everything he wrote, the only people jumping up and down yelling and screaming for Jesus was his sizeable entourage of disciples. No children, no standers-by, except for the few suspicious Pharisees watching every move. It’s required to always have some who disapprove present at any religious event.
The disciples were, however, very loud, no Hosannas either, at least Luke didn’t hear one, but they shouted just about everything else. The worst part of it all, according to the Pharisees, who knew how to be properly religious, is that they weren’t dignified. “Restrain your disciples, get them under control.” Jesus keeps up the satire, “If they were silent, these stones would shout.” But it’s more than giving the Pharisees some lip, for Jesus is trying to say that when something as big as this is happening, the joy is going to come out somewhere, somehow, no matter how dignified or proper or suppressed and silent people may be. This may be a parade meant to mock and satirize, but it is still Big.
The off-handed tone of this procession fits the circumstances well back then, but just as much today. This passionate week will encounter every emotion - humiliation, joy, sadness, betrayal, violence, political scheming, hypocrisy, despair, death, depression and defeat, utter meaninglessness, and then something beyond imagination. Is this any different than the world we encounter and the one we see on the nightly news and read about in the newspaper? In the midst of this Passion, we march in singing victory songs, and believe me, there are many who think we are not only crazy, but ethically inappropriate. There are Pharisees galore who will tell you that in the midst of a world where earthquakes destroy the poorest of countries, where suicide bombers destroy lives and poison everyone’s religious faith, where wars rage for the control of peoples’ lives and oil, where crime and drugs and racial oppression run the economy, where the environment is run down so that some of us can run up more income - that it is obscene to be cheering for a nice, positive, comfortable saviour.
All right, they are right. And so dead wrong.
Without a doubt, the factual evidence is on the negative side of the ledger. Whatever someone may define as good news in the papers or on TV tonight can be readily gloomed over by all the outrageous, terrible and obscene reportings of this world’s crises. It is all too easy to be a prophet of doom and sound self-righteous at the same time because no one can argue with you over the cold hard facts. We have been chosen to be part of the species for whom error and sin is in abundant and continual supply, nevertheless, it is bewildering how so many sincerely faithful people like you and me get sucked into this morass. We seem to have forgotten that we are operating out of a religious perspective of life that declares a very different reality. We seem to have forgotten that there is a Palm Sunday.
When Jesus rode that donkey into Jerusalem, there was very little in the world that was cause for optimism or generosity - a foreign power ruling the country, a religious leadership more interested in preserving their social and political position than preserving the faith, and the eternal problems of poverty, starvation, disease and natural disaster. It was - isn’t it still? - a world run by power, and for the most part, you and I don’t have it. You don’t win finally in a world like this one, you only make other people lose.
So into a world no better than ours, no less compromised, no less violent or disillusioning, Jesus rode as a different kind of king, a real king, who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. With death’s dark cloud looming around him, Jesus and his company laughed and shouted with so much joy that it made the power people wince. Their joy was so out of place that it created an entirely new place. They were shouting, and probably the stones were shouting too, that we are marching in the light of God, that no matter how much sin and death oppress us and attempt to reduce us to less than human, we are never reduced to mere vessels of sin and death. Jesus rode into a city of clenched fists to demonstrate how to bow our knees. At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow.
Yes, today we catch a whiff of the aroma of the eighth day from now, filling our heads and hearts with the smell of a humility that cannot be reduced or compromised, even surrounded by the undeniable stench of this world’s troubles and cares. We are marching, we are dancing, we are shouting in the light of God, two by two.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan