Anticipation
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham
April 1, 2007
Some of the early rounds of the campaign for the presidency are being hyped as a charisma contest—who has what it takes to rally enough followers with enough enthusiasm to win the primaries in each party and then the general election. Barack Obama has surged toward the front of the pack in the Democratic ranks largely on the strength of that almost indefinable quality of charisma. He certainly isn’t the first candidate to have that magical quality, and indeed we remember certain of our presidents for their magnetism, the power of their presence: John F. Kennedy seemed to represent a magical moment; he and Jackie together created Camelot, a mythical kingdom which charmed and delighted much of the nation and the world. Like Obama, he spoke of passing the torch to a new generation. Ronald Reagan is remembered fondly by many for his image of standing tall in the world. Part of the critique of George H.W. Bush was that he lacked the “vision thing.” And Bill Clinton—well, he practically oozed charisma, though he lacked discretion in his use of it. The notion that someone will rescue us from what ails us has a powerful appeal today as it has throughout recorded history.
On this day our religious tradition holds up two great charismatic leaders—Moses in the Passover celebration and Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover on Palm Sunday. These two celebrations are deeply intertwined. The first Seder of Passover falls tomorrow night and the 8th day of Passover falls the day after Easter. Jesus and all of his followers were, of course, Jews, and so they and all their co-religionists were going up to Jerusalem to celebrate a festival instituted over a thousand years before their time, a festival which recalled the literal creation of the People of Israel as a nation in the course of their liberation from slavery in Egypt. Year after year, generation after generation, parents were to tell their children the story of their movement from slavery to freedom. Moses instructed the people that they should tell the story this way:
[Deut. 6:]20 When your children ask you in time to come,
"What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances
that the LORD our God has commanded you?" 21 then you shall say to your
children, "We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, but the LORD brought us out
of Egypt with a mighty hand. 22 The LORD displayed before our eyes great and
awesome signs and wonders against Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his household.
23 He brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land
that he promised on oath to our ancestors."
By now this story has been told year after year for over 3,000 years, and it has served to inspire many other struggles for freedom, notably the battle in our own country against African American slavery. Our first hymn recalled the cry of Moses to Pharoah: “Let my people go.” The Time for All Ages recalled another old spiritual, “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Mourn,” all about how Pharaoh’s army got drowned as the Children of Israel escaped to freedom. Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad, was known as the Moses of her people because she got so many of them out of slavery and into freedom. Passover brings up powerful memories, and it was to celebrate Passover that Jesus entered Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago.
The thousand-plus years from Moses to Jesus had brought triumph and tragedy to the Children of Israel. After wandering in the wilderness for 40 years from Egypt to the Promised Land, they finally entered the land and conquered it. They had to battle the Philistines and their leader Goliath, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Amalekites (later embodied in Haman from the story of Esther which we heard a few weeks ago) and many other opponents to win control of the land. Their best memories were of the reigns of the great warrior King David and his son Solomon, remembered as the wisest and one of the wealthiest kings of the time. The people were conquered and taken into exile by the Assyrians and by the Babylonians, who destroyed Solomon’s great temple in Jerusalem. The Persians allowed them to return from exile and build the temple again. A few hundred years later the Greek ruler attempted to wipe out the observance of the Jewish religion altogether, only to be defeated by a determined band of faithful believers who then cleansed the temple and restored worship—an occasion celebrated by the festival of Chanukah. And then, after a few brief years of freedom, the Romans conquered the land of Palestine and proceeded to help themselves to the surplus produced by the peasant farmers. The Romans were different from their predecessors as rulers of the land in that they realized, as John Dominic Crossan notes, that
You could make much more money not just by taking the
surplus of the peasantry, but by taking their lands. You did not, of course
steal them or take them by brute force. All you needed was enough surplus
money to offer money and then to foreclose on those small family farms offered
as collateral when, almost inevitably, loans could not be paid. It was all
just business. When you think, therefore, of the “booming” economy of the Pax
Romana, do not think so much of tax as of debt.[1]
This taking of land from individual families ran completely counter to the Laws of Moses, which specified that land could not be sold permanently. The law recognized that inevitably some individuals and families would prosper, while others would fall behind. Hence forgiveness and redistribution were built into the legal system itself. Every seven years, all debts were to be forgiven and individuals and families who had fallen into debt-servitude were to be set free; and after forty-nine years, a Jubilee year was to be declared, in which all property that had been “sold” temporarily to cover indebtedness was to be returned to its original owner. Usury, or charging of excessive interest, was also forbidden by the law. In this context, the debt-servitude being imposed by the Romans was the exact opposite of the intent laid down in the laws of Moses. If God’s will on earth was represented by the laws, then the behavior of the Romans in stealing the land via a debt regime was the very opposite of God’s will.
When Jesus started his ministry, he spoke these words from Isaiah:
[Luke 4:]18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to
proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the
oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor…." 21
Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in
your hearing."
This was a very bold claim in the context, because it amounted to a declaration that the Jubilee Year was starting, and that therefore those who served should be set free, all debts should be forgiven, and the land should be returned to its rightful owners. This is part of what we mean when we pray the words Jesus taught those who followed him: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Debt slavery certainly wasn’t God’s will in heaven, and therefore it was not God’s will on earth either. Part of the teaching of Jesus goes directly to the loss of land, homes, and freedom so pervasive around him: The last shall be first and the first shall be last; give to anyone who begs from you; if someone gives you his cloak as security for a debt, give it back at night so he will have a blanket to sleep under.
Given the economic regime, it’s hardly surprising that revolutionary fervor was in the air among the people. During occupations of Palestine by the Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Syrians there had been only one revolt in almost 500 years, whereas “Under the Romans there were three great revolts in less than 70 years.”[2] Hence the anticipation of the time, the hope for someone or something that could rescue the nation of Israel from the misery to which it was subjected in the Roman Empire.
The concept of a messiah who would rescue the nation from its misery had started to develop several hundred years before Jesus appeared, during the period of Greek tyranny when Judaism almost disappeared as a religion. The idea grew that God would send a new king or leader of another sort who, like King David, would be a mighty warrior on behalf of God and the nation and who would throw off the shackles of foreign domination. In Hebrew, “messiah” means literally “anointed one”—that is, someone anointed by one of the priests to carry out God’s will for the nation. The word “Christos” in Greek—“Christ” in English—is simply the translation of the Hebrew “messiah,” though it has come to have much more specific connotations in the context of Christianity. In that sense, each of the kings of Israel in their turn had been messiahs or anointed ones; even, if you will, “christs.” At the time of Jesus, though, it appeared that the strength of oppression was so great that more than an ordinary king would be required. We don’t read about them all in the Bible, but there were a number of popular leaders of various kinds who led insurrections against the Romans, some claiming the mantle of messiah. Unlike Herod and his sons, who ruled the land on behalf of the Romans, this king must be a descendant of King David of old; hence the Gospel of Matthew has the followers of Jesus proclaim [Matt 21:9] “Hosanna to the Son of David.” The messiah will also need to have some special abilities, perhaps a special relationship with God so that God will intervene directly as God did at the Red Sea when the Children of Israel escaped from their bondage in Egypt at the first Passover and “Pharaoh’s army got drownded,” as the spiritual has it. Many false messiahs arose during this time; one led his followers to the river Jordan, intending to re-enter the land by crossing the river in emulation of Joshua’s first conquest of the land of Israel over 1200 years before; they were massacred by the soldiers before they were able to carry out their symbolic mission. Others were simply insurgents who practiced assassination against the occupiers and their collaborators or even criminals who led gangs in defiance of the authorities; one of them, Barabbas, figures in the story of Jesus just before the crucifixion.
When John the Baptist appeared, he was asked anxiously whether he was the Messiah, but he deferred to Jesus instead. Jesus himself doesn’t directly claim the title, but he doesn’t object when his followers or the people speculate that he might be the expected messiah, the one who will rescue them from misery and degradation and lead them to victory. Hence the arrangements made to fulfill an earlier prophecy which we read from Matthew for our reading today: [Matt 21:]5 "Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey." Matthew was so anxious to make sure that the prophecy was just right that he actually got the details wrong; the Hebrew original called for the colt of a donkey, but the Greek translation Matthew used seemed to imply that there was to be a donkey AND the colt of a donkey, so Matthew faithfully has Jesus riding on two animals, not one. This entry into Jerusalem amounted to a proclamation that the messiah was, indeed, making his appearance.
But what an odd messiah! Jesus doesn’t behave like a king at all! He doesn’t try to raise an army, he doesn’t arm himself, he doesn’t call for revolutionary action. What he does is to cleanse the temple from the money changers, teach the people, heal the sick, and argue with the religious and political leaders of the Jews. He doesn’t rescue them all by himself. He doesn’t invoke some magic to make their condition better or pull off a grand Red Sea moment. He continues doing what he’s been doing all along, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is at hand for those who will grasp it and refusing to be trapped in any political or religious categories that those around him want to fit him into. He’s the messiah nobody expected—condemned as a common criminal rather than exalted on a throne.
We all need a little rescuing once in a while, and there are times in our national life when a charismatic messiah would be most welcome. We also know that any leader needs a lot of watching to make sure their actions are consistent with our values as a nation and as individuals. But Jesus didn’t claim to be able to rescue everyone else, nor did he propose to be the leader of the nation, the long-awaited messiah of the sword and the throne; he called each of them into the Kingdom of God on their own. He taught his followers to pray, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That prayer is also a commitment to being part of the kindom—the brotherhood and sisterhood who make up the beloved community Jesus described.
The week that is to come on the Christian calendar—Holy Week—is both a time of great sorrow and a time of great joy in the memory of the followers of Jesus. This week we recall the crucifixion and then, next Sunday, the Resurrection, the continuing presence of the spirit of Jesus even after the degradation and humiliation of his death as a common criminal. This is also a week which has included enormous upsurges in anti-Semitism in the course of Christian history. Too often mobs have remembered those terrible words in Matthew, “His blood be upon us and upon our children,” and too often this story has been told as though “the Jews”—all Jews—were somehow to blame for the death of Jesus, generation after generation after generation. Jesus was a Jew and all of his followers were Jews. This hatred is the very opposite of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Dorothee Soelle, formerly a professor at Union Theological Seminary, tells this story:
A few years ago I had a meeting in a church congregation near Hamburg in which we recalled Kristallnacht, the night when Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were vandalized [on September 11,] 1938, prefiguring and inaugurating the full terror of the Holocaust. A woman turned up and introduced herself as an outsider. She told how she had struggled for years with the Jewish-Christian problem because she wanted to know how it came to the point of Shoah, the extermination of European Jews. She ended her contribution with the words, "When I had understood Auschwitz, I joined the peace movement." In this statement I found a different God from the omnipotent Lord of heaven and earth who is completely independent of us. This woman had understood that in the Nazi period in Germany God was small and weak. God was in fact powerless because God had no friends, male or female. God's spirit had no place to live; God's sun, the sun of righteousness, did not shine. The God who needs people in order to come into being was a nobody.
This woman did not look up to heaven in order to be comforted by an Almighty Father. She looked within and around herself. She found "that of God," as the Quakers often say, in herself, the strength for resistance, the courage for a clear no in a world that is drunk on the blood of the innocent…
"When I had understood Auschwitz, I joined the peace movement." That is to say: I did not rid myself of God like many who had handed over responsibility to God alone; rather I grasped that God needs us in order to realize what was intended in creation. God dreams us, and we should not let God dream alone.
In the words of a Latin American song:
One day the earth will belong to all people and the people will be free
as you, God, have willed it from the very beginning.
This song speaks to God, not about God. It liberates us from the idol of fate in whose power everything happens simply as it happens. It binds us together with a God who is not the all-powerful conqueror but stands instead on the side of the poor and disadvantaged — a God who is always hidden in the world and wants to become visible.[3]
That’s why I call myself a follower of Jesus: The kingdom is still beckoning to us, and Jesus is one of those who shows the way.
So Palm Sunday is a great day for celebration, for cheering our team on, for admiring charisma, but in the end it’s up to us; it’s not enough just to cheer or to assume that the work is done once and for all. We, too, have work to do as we live out our lives, as we live out the meaning of “Thy will be done.”
Amen