Palm Sunday and Holy Week

Palm Sunday began Holy Week. Holy Week invites us to contemplate our relationship to Jesus as he prepares to go to the cross.

Rowan Williams puts it this way: "We begin with identifying ourselves with the people who welcomed Jesus on Palm Sunday. We bless palms and palm crosses, we wave them around, we shout Hosanna, and for that moment we are the people on the first Palm Sunday who were glad to see Jesus and welcomed him in. And then during the week we have to come to terms with the fact that when Jesus actually does arrive in Jerusalem he turns out not to be so welcome after all and we have to ask ourselves, 'What about us?' When Jesus arrives in our world, in our lives, are we actually glad to see him and if Holy Week is going well we really begin to understand why it is that Jesus can seem threatening and dangerous to our safety; and why we, just like the people in Jerusalem in the first Holy Week, don't want him around."

As we have often noted in our teaching at Grace, many 1st Century Jews wanted a revolutionary leader in Jesus who would organize a band of brigands and put it to the Romans. These folks wanted a display of power and might, retributive justice against Rome. There were, of course, others in leadership who did not want any sort of revolutionary leader in Jesus. Some of the religious hierarchy had already made their comfortable deals with Caesar and were fat and happy because of it. Despots often allowed corruption to fatten a certain number of their mid-management types in client-states like Israel in order to shore up their hold on power (in the case of Jerusalem much of the priestly class was guilty of this and, of course, Herod). So, Jesus disappointed many of the masses by not seeking to overthrow Rome while simultaneously alarming the Jewish ruling class and their Roman masters. By the Friday we call good, the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday had given way to Jesus' murder.

"Archbishop William Temple once remarked that some sorts of modern theology gave you the impression that Jesus went to Jerusalem to deliver a course of lectures on the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man (motherhood and apple pie, as it were), and met with an unfortunate miscarriage of justice, quite incomprehensible to us. Who could possibly disagree with his message of love and reconciliation? In fact, the answer is, 'plenty of people' - in his day and ours. Given the explosive political and religious atmosphere in which Jesus worked, the claim to speak on behalf of God so as to create a new people or nation, to establish a new government, and to change the way they thought of their relation to God, was very far from motherhood and apple pie." - Rowan Williams

The kind of theology that Temple had in mind was probably a kind of bland liberalism that mainly emphasized Jesus' moral teaching at the expense of his death on the cross. Most who read or hear this homily are likely not guilty of that sort of theological error but we believe things that bring about the same result because we imagine that we are better than those who yelled 'crucify him'. Surely we Bible-believing Christians are of the sort of moral stuff that would have kept us right there by Jesus' side and on the same page with him throughout Holy Week. Sometimes I think this is partly because Christians in the United States cannot imagine being on the wrong side of history since there has always been so much in American folk-religion to suggest that our 'city set on a hill' must always be on the right side of history. In this way of thinking the cross is a good idea because of the triumph of the resurrection and Jesus is seen as a winner from the start. But the truth is that Jesus was seen as a loser according to our way of thinking about winners and losers and the resurrection is the astonishing insight that against the wisdom of the world the way of the cross was the way of salvation. It is often quite disingenuous to want to separate ourselves from the ugly and likely reality that we too would have shouted crucify him - disingenuous in the same way it is disingenuous to like the scruffy guy at a party only after you find out he is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and just likes to wear wrinkled and well worn clothes.

There is another kind of preaching that has often led to anti-Semitic assertions - what I am thinking of here are the Christians who sometimes make it seem as if the Jews killed Jesus without any help from the Romans and they killed him because they hated, in advance, the Christians who would follow him.

The reason it is important for us to be careful in how we imagine our response to Jesus during Holy Week, had we been there, is that each of needs to be reminded that the theological and devotional center to this week - indeed to the whole of our faith - is the great revelation that resurrection, victory, or what some of the Greek philosophers called the summum bonum, cannot be had without the cross. This is what Christian theologians mean when they say that Christian theology - to be Christian - must be cruciform.

N.T. Wright has some wonderful devotional insights into what we might learn from what many of Jesus' contemporaries wanted instead of the cross. Like them we want patience from God when it comes to us but swift retributive justice when it comes to our adversaries. Many in Israel wanted to be rid of Rome in a bloody but successful revolution. Jesus wanted them to be rid of that sort of systemic evil oppression too - just as he wants that for all of humanity. But his way of dealing with systemic evil is by dealing with it on the cross as he made atonement for our sins. By letting evil do its worse to him, the son of God, broke it so that it is living now on borrowed time. And so, Jesus' death on the cross uncovers our deeper desires; just as the oppressed wanted victory over their oppressors but also received the answer that they had plenty that needed to be forgiven too, the cross confronts each of us as persons in need of as much forgiveness as the next and teaches us that it is our relationship as individual people to Jesus and his cross that is to be where we start from when it comes to our relationship with anyone. Here are some of Wright's thoughts in this regard:


"Uncovering our deeper desires... you may ask God to fix your loneliness problem and his answer is to go to work on you at a very deep level and make you wrestle with deep seated fears, frustrations, a lack of love for other lonely people, who knows what all....

You may pray for your annoying friend, spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend to change, --- you may be praying to God for him to fix this or that about them and God's first answer to the prayer is to begin prompting you to repent of your pride in relationship to that person... your inability to sympathize with the weaknesses they have being tied directly to your smug satisfaction with yourself....

Then there is the meaning that is tied closes to the context at hand.... Israel will not receive a victory over Rome... Jesus will offer a victory over the evil that it as at the core of Israel's oppression... the evil that it is always present in the hearts of human beings and builds structures of evil in families, organizations, and nations.... "

Questions for discussion:
1. Can you think of an occasion in your life when you wanted one thing but learned through that wanting that there was a deeper desire which God wanted you to deal with? If not, can you imagine an example (since you know yourself) which might be true at some point?

2.Does it help you to know that many who welcomed Jesus and celebrated his entry to Jerusalem also deserted or betrayed him? If so, how? What is the first word that comes to mind if you are reminded that Jesus' death on the cross was also intended for the eventual forgiveness of those who put him there?

3.Because God has revealed himself through the foolishness of the cross should we be careful about how much confidence we put in our own ability to solve our problems, etc.? If so, then is it also tempting to reduce complicated problems to simplistic Christians-speak and solutions that are so unrealistic as to be of no help? Here is a case study to apply this question to: one of your friends is a self-described liberal Democrat who argues that the best way to help poor people is by making government programs better funded and more efficient. Another of your friends self-describes as a Ronald Reagan Republican who thinks the best way to help poor people is through the private sector. Each is a Christian person including you. How might you encourage each of the people and yourself to check these thoughts in light of how God speaks to us through the cross?