Soul Force

Palms and Crosses

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

April 5, 2009

Earlier this year, I told the story of the Good Samaritan from Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch version of the Gospel. You may recall that he explains the need for this version this way: “We need to have the good news come to us not only in our own tongue but in our own time…. So the ‘cotton patch’ version is an attempt to translate not only the words but the events. [1]

Here’s the Cotton Patch version of the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, which was presented in a more conventional form as the first of our readings:

[Matthew 21:1] As he neared Atlanta he came to Peach Orchard Hill, outside Hampton. There he sent two students ahead, with these instructions: "Go into the next town, and as soon as you enter it you will find a donkey tied up and a mule with her. Untie them and bring them to me. And if anybody questions you, just say, ‘Their owner needs them,’ and he’ll let you have them right away." (This happened to give meaning to the words of the prophet:

"Spread the word in the capital:

Look, your king is entering you,

An humble man riding a donkey,

Riding a mule, a lowly work animal.")

6. So the students left, and did exactly as Jesus had told them. They brought the donkey and the mule, put their own coats on them, and Jesus jumped on. Many in the crowd made a carpet of their coats while other plaited twigs cut from trees and lined the road with them. Huge crowds of people, some going in front of him and some following him, were cheering loudly:

"Hurrah for our Leader!

Long Live the Lord’s Man!

Hurrah for God Almighty!"

When he entered Atlanta, the whole city was all shook up. "Who is this guy?" they asked. And the crowd replied, "He is a man of God – Jesus, from Valdosta, Georgia."[2]

In churches which follow the liturgy of the Christian year, this Sunday includes both a liturgy of the Palms – hence our reading from Mark 11 – and a liturgy of the Passion – hence the reading from Mark 15. While we do not strictly follow the Christian liturgical year, there are certain seasons when we pay special attention to the tradition from which Unitarianism Universalism emerged, and this is certainly one of them. I suspect that the overload of Palms and Passion on this Sunday arises in part from the fact that fewer people attend Good Friday services than in the past, which means that this is the only Sunday on which the trial and execution of Jesus – the Passion – can be celebrated. By throwing the highest public point in Jesus’ life into the same service with the lowest point, we almost risk an experience of vertigo as the tables turn so swiftly.

There’s a little craft project some of you may have done in your youth which encapsulates the road from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. You take a palm frond and weave it into a very simple cross. The cross is then used to decorate the home during Holy week. From Triumph to Tragedy in five days, all in a simply celebratory plant.

To begin with the triumph, though. On a spring day the week of Passover somewhere around the year 30 A.D., two processions entered Jerusalem. The one we’re most familiar with came from the east, down the Mount of Olives, featuring Jesus riding on a mule. To the untrained eye, it would have appeared completely innocuous; in fact, it was a carefully arranged political demonstration. The entrance from the Mount of Olives as well as the choice of a donkey both replicated the arrival of the great King David when he was anointed king over the nation of Israel. As Jesus put it frequently about having ears to hear his teachings, one needed eyes familiar with the hopes and wishes of the people of an oppressed nation to see the real meaning of this procession – a proclamation of the entry of the true ruler of the nation. From the other side of the city, a very different procession was also coming into Jerusalem; this was the contingent of occupying Roman Empire, soldiers accompanying Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, who always came to Jerusalem on Passover, the celebration of the people of Israel from enslavement in Egypt. Their job was to ensure that no one got any bright ideas about freeing the nation from the oppression of Rome, which did not enslave them, strictly speaking, but which did grow rich while its colonies grew poor, all in the name of the Pax Romana. It was precisely to control the sort of enthusiastic crowd which could shout slogans like “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David” that these Roman troops as well as the troops permanently quartered in Jerusalem were posted there.

Of course, Jesus didn’t call it quits with the victory parade coming into Jerusalem on the understated mule. He marched right into the center of the ruling establishment – the money changers in the temple or, in the Cotton Patch version, the finance committee at First Church – and proceeded to disrupt the way business was usually done there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and scattered the merchants, reminding everyone that “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.” [Matt. 21:13] He healed the blind and the lame who came to him in the temple and, not surprisingly, upset the powers that be for whom the temple was a means of maintaining control over the people.

When he returned the next day, he got into debates with the leaders of the land, directly challenging their religious authority. This was when, for example, he cleverly turned aside the question of whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not. It was presented as an innocent religious question, something on the order of “Is it OK to have an American flag in the sanctuary of a church?” Of course, it wasn’t so innocent (and neither is the comparable question I just suggested). The question of paying tribute to Caesar was a flash-point in an occupied country, and the questioner figured he had Jesus stuck on a dilemma: if he said it was OK to pay the tribute, all of the people who were praising him as the new embodiment of King David would turn against him as a Quisling and his little Palm Sunday triumph would be nothing but a bad memory; on the other hand, if he said it wasn’t OK to pay, the Romans would be quick to pounce because he would in fact be a rebel against their authority. Either way, he would be disposed of and life could go on as it always had without this annoying challenge to their authority. Jesus’ response was disarmingly simple; he just asked them if they happened to have a sample of the coinage in which the tax had to be paid. They did, not surprisingly, being the sort who always seemed to have a little extra money in their pockets, but here they were in the temple dedicated to their God showing off the image of Caesar – Caesar, ruler of the known world, himself said to be divine and the Son of God, his own father. Anyone who was really righteous got the message immediately: these supposed religious leaders were in fact hypocrites, pretending to worship the God of their ancestors in the temple in Jerusalem, but actually paying tribute – and carrying around good luck charms in the form of money – to a different supreme ruler altogether. It was then perfectly easy for Jesus to finish the lesson by saying “Render onto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and onto God the things that are God’s.” Another trap sprung in reverse, exposing the collaborators for what they really were. This was not exactly the best way to win friends and influence people among those who wielded power in Jerusalem. In fact, of course, it was precisely the way to stir up the most powerful enemies in Jerusalem.

As the week wore on, the authorities managed to penetrate Jesus’ inner circle, and Judas, a disciple who seemed to be acutely conscious of the danger his master was in and who probably wanted to end up on the right side of history – that is, on the side of the wealthy and powerful – agreed to betray Jesus. The plot unfolded in the Garden of Gethsemane on Thursday night, and Jesus was arrested and hustled off to a council of the leaders of the community who were running things on behalf of the occupying power. They tried to hold a legitimate trial, but one of the requirements of any real trial was that two witnesses had to agree on what they had seen or heard, and no two witnesses could be found to give the same account. Faced with the classic dilemma of any police drama with no reliable witnesses and no physical evidence to link the suspect to the crime, they went for a confession. They accused Jesus of blasphemy, got an ambiguous answer to the question “Are you the Messiah?” – two gospels report that Jesus responded “You say that I am,” one reports that he said, “I am” – and proceeded to take him to Pilate, their master and the only one in the land with the authority to actually order the death of Jesus.

Now, we have to be very careful when we come to this part of the story, because the only accounts we have of the events of Holy Week were written down at least forty years after the events they report; by that time, Christians were increasingly differentiating themselves from Jews who were not followers of Jesus. As a result, the Gospel writers tend to speak of “The Jews” generically as if every single Jew in the land had turned against Jesus, as if the crowd who demanded his crucifixion on Maundy Thursday included the same people who had shouted his praises on Palm Sunday. It is of course true that mobs turn in their frenzy and such an interpretation is not impossible, but it is highly unlikely. The crowds of Palm Sunday were supporters and admirers and, if the disciples provide a clue, those supporters had fled and the mob which called for crucifixion was selected by the leaders of the Jewish people –the ones who were most afraid of any threat to their own power – precisely to give the impression to Pilate that “everyone” wanted Jesus dead. Hence we have that deadly blood libel against the Jews reported in the Gospel of Matthew, [27:25] “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” This one line from the New Testament has probably been responsible for more anti-Semitism than any other, and to this day can lead even young children to declare of any Jew that they are Christ-killers. This is clearly dangerous ground we’re treading on this week.

It’s also dangerous ground for us theologically as Unitarian Universalists. The orthodox theology of the cross is one of the key points at which both Unitarians and Universalists found themselves at odds with other Christians. It took about a thousand years after the death of Jesus before the customary orthodox view of what happened as a result of the crucifixion was fully formulated by Anselm. This somewhat legalistic theory of Substitutionary Atonement holds that all of us have sinned against God (there’s the doctrine of Original Sin) and that our sin is in fact infinite; God, as a God of justice, requires a countervailing sacrifice; we, being finite, are incapable of offering an infinite sacrifice; only God is infinite, so only God can provide such a sacrifice: hence, God’s own son Jesus must die to atone for the sins of all humankind. Now, this does satisfy a kind of legalistic, formulaic notion of what God is about, but it doesn’t really answer the question “Why did Jesus have to die?” very well. Universalists have tended to question the notion that God could possibly cause Jesus to die in that way – if God is Love, as Jesus taught, what is God doing acting instead out of Justice in this instance? The most sustained attack on Anselm’s theory was undertaken by Hosea Ballou, one of the great early leaders of Universalism, whose 1805 Treatise on the Atonement concluded that the problem was not that God needed to be reconciled to humankind but that humankind needed to be reconciled to God – shown that Love, not Justice or revenge, is supreme in God’s universe. So Jesus died to show us what’s worth dying for. Unitarians, on the other hand, had difficulty with the notion that Jesus was exactly equal to God but could still be human – the notion seems a little too close to pagan ideas about deified humans, close in fact to the Roman notion that their emperors were divine.

Today, in this place, we covenant to gather and to walk our lives “in the spirit of Jesus.” We are less concerned to understand the mechanics of redemption and salvation, the cross and resurrection, than we are to figure out how best to lead our lives, how to walk day by day in the path laid out for us by the teachings of Jesus. It is certainly true that we would not know of Jesus but for the fact of his dramatic death, but it is his life we care most about, his teachings we wish to be guided by. There’s a temptation to want Jesus to be some sort of Superhero, someone like we spoke to the kids about earlier; someone who can rescue us from whatever ails us, fix our personal problems and the problems of our communities, our nation, and our world. I’d love to have someone like that, sort of a personal Superman I could give direction to, work my will on. Of course, life doesn’t work like that. We don’t actually get to call on magic and superheroes to get through our days.

I think a better message from the cross is to consider how Jesus’ life led him there, and more specifically how the path from Palm Sunday to Good Friday led him there. Jesus cared passionately about the coming Kingdom of God, the same Kingdom we refer to in the prayer he taught his disciples, which we pray here each week. That Kingdom, that Beloved Community, was not only worth living for, it was worth dying for. In his dying, Jesus ensured that his message would live. As we look back, it is in fact mysterious how it came about, but in each of our lives there are moments just like the moments Jesus suffered, and in this way it is possible for us to identify with Jesus, not as a superhero or a god completely unlike us, but fully human, tempted just as we are to settle for less than we ought, to take short cuts when we ought to go the long way, to become angry when patience would be better, to be patient when anger would be better. Remembering the story of this week reminds us of how precious all of our lives are, how important it is to look at our own lives as means toward the fulfillment that Jesus had in his mind so much more clearly and constantly than most of us can manage. In short, we care most about the way of living Jesus shows us, a way of living which is prepared to face dying knowing that we have fulfilled the tasks set before us, that we, like Jesus, have led lives which at their end are worth dying for. It is in that spirit we gather. It is in that spirit that we go forth.

Amen.