Palm Sunday 28 March 2010
Isaiah 50.4-9a Luke 19. 28-48
Much of the compelling drama of the gospels is in the tension between the enthusiastic reception which Jesus receives from those who benefit from his teachings and healings and those who are opposed to him. In most episodes where the power of the kingdom breaks in and salvation seems to be present there is so often also a lurking opposition. As Jesus has been making his way to Jerusalem through the countryside and villages the encounters with opponents and controversies that arise are often with Pharisees; the teachers and interpreters of the law. As Jesus approaches the city, in Luke riding on a colt, it is the Pharisees who call to him to quieten his rowdy disciples. Is it that they are opposed to him or is that they are fearful for him? Because teacher they call him – they seem to respect him and this rabble of followers with him. If they didn’t respect him I doubt somehow that they would call him teacher.
In this procession into Jerusalem, down from the mount of olives into the Kidron Valley and then up into the walled city Luke describes a great host of irrepressible disciples; grown from a few fishermen by the lake to a great crowd all pressing into the bustling city along with pilgrims gathering for Passover. We call today Palm Sunday but Luke tells us that this crowd of disciples actually strip off to their loin-cloths laying down their outer garments in the path of this controversial young prophet on the young horse arriving to claim the city.
But as Jesus enters it the nature of the opposition to him and his teaching changes. It is now the turn of the chief priests and the scribes and the leaders of the people (as Luke calls them) – the politically powerful. These are the ones who have the power of life and death and it against these and their power that Jesus will fall. It is in the grip of their authority that the nation is held and which this audacious entrance to the city challenges. Jesus shows them up for what they are and they do not like it. And so the unjust and grizzly events of Holy Week unfold.
The crucifixion of Jesus has so often been interpreted through history as the murder of Jesus by the Jews. It’s not difficult to come to this conclusion because the gospels are bristling with tension and conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders. And the language in John’s gospel, especially, is brimming over with what appears to be anti-Semitic language. The fact is that the gospels and the writings of Paul were each to varying degrees framed and written at a time when there was great tension between the followers of Jesus – still members of the Synagogue – and the authorities in those synagogues. So whether this tension is overt or simply between the lines it comes through to us in the new testament writings.
The very crucible of the church’s formation is a tension between the followers of Jesus’ way and the synagogue and our scriptures are tainted, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, by this tension. There’s a battle going on for hearts and minds behind much of the New Testament writings. And the synagogue doesn’t come off well, the church portrayed as embattled but ultimately triumphant . It’s the way that history so often gets written; from the point of view of the victors. Much New Testament language is couched in the context of a great apocalyptic battle for hearts and minds. No wonder the church has had such a turbulent and driven history. Followers of the Prince of Peace engaged in a battle in which we have become very conflicted about our inspiration from time to time.
This battle going on between the lines of scripture between the early church and the synagogue has created a very vexed relationship between Christianity and Judaism through history. It has made it easy for the way we have read the events of the passion to be permission for the most atrocious anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish pogroms through history. The Shoah of WWII was really the culmination of the church’s inability or unwillingness to read the passion more deeply than just at surface level. And so the crucifixion of Jesus has been interpreted by many as the Jewish murder of Jesus – for which Jews should rightly continue to be punished. But this has stemmed from a failure to see what is happening in the passion; a failure to see what happened then and what continues to happen wherever true faith encounters religious legalism in cahoots with worldly power.
I have been shocked over the past weeks by the increasing number of revelations of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. In Ireland, then Germany and France and now further disclosures in the USA. What in some sense is almost more horrifying than the abuse are the repeated actions by those in authority to cover it up and relocate the perpetrators of this abuse, protecting the institution and the abusers from judgment, either from within the church or by state law. The cover-ups seem to run from the bottom to the very top. And the scandal of it runs utterly counter to everything that we understand about what it means to be the people of God. But vested interests, whether they are financial or about the holding of power, seem to be of greater concern than truth and justice in this debacle. And so we are rightly appalled by the tragedy of this all.
It strikes me that these events in our own time are the same expression of a deeply misguided religious power which Jesus confronts as he enters Jerusalem. It is not that Jesus opponents are Jewish but that they in their time, like elements of the church in our own time, neglect the call to love God and neighbour alike; to act justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God. As those in , so called, authority have sought to silence the scandal of sexual abuse, so the religious leaders of Jesus’ time to sought to silence this voice of true authority in him as he preaches in the temple.
I have always pictured the overturning of the money-changer’s tables and the freeing of the animals for sacrifice in the temple forecourt as Jesus upsetting some sort of Sunday market. You know the picture: an array of trestle tables; people trying to make a bit of cash on the side; a sort of alternative economy; stall-holders with tats in trakky dacks. On reflection, though, I’m not sure that what went on the temple forecourt was anything like this. You see what went on here was probably core to the temple’s power. To get a picture of the wealth involved in the life of the temple we need to realise that just one generation before Jesus birth the rebuilding of temple was completed by Herod the Great. It was an immense building comparable to the pyramids in terms of its immensity and the ambitiousness of its construction. But it was also a beautiful building, the whole of it being clad in imported white marble – so that its appearance was absolutely dazzling. It was symbol of the power of the state and religion in concert – elaborate temple paid for by the state each adding legitimacy to the other. But this building needed to be paid for and maintained and so these money changers were not some bungling amateurs but part of the very fabric of temple business. No wonder Jesus erupted in a fury of righteous anger. And no wonder that the temple elite responded with the power they could by virtue of them being in bed with the state.
I said last week that, by the grace of God, we would not see a return of Christendom because at heart it was a joint state/church venture where each lent the other either divine legitimacy or worldly power. It’s a relationship that the church should have no truck with. The way of Jesus always calls us to be a prophetic voice in the face of injustice and corruption.
The church is called to embody Jesus in whatever time and place we find ourselves. This means that we may not be altogether popular. We have heard one of the three servant songs from the latter part of the book of the Prophet Isaiah. It reminds us that the one, whether they be an individual or group, who seeks to speak against the forces of oppression may turn out to be on the receiving end of that same injustice; it is the path which Jesus knew he was set upon.
Some of us are rightly bewildered by where we find ourselves in the church. There is a lot of hand-wringing in various ways; plaintive cries of why; how did we get to this place when in our memory we had Sunday Schools brimming over with kiddies. The fact is the church of the fifties and sixties was a church which was in concert with the state and the status quo. The new preamble to the Constitution of the Uniting Church reminds us that our relationship with the state compromised the truth of the gospel. The preamble reminds us that the churches which came together to form the Uniting Church were at times hand in glove with the colonising project of the British Empire as it occupied Australia for its own imperial purposes, disinheriting the indigenous peoples of Australia. There was a mutuality about this relationship which has, as the preamble says, diminished the integrity of the gospel.
As Jesus sets off for Jerusalem he makes no bones about this journey being a costly one; both for himself but for anyone who will follow him. It is an uncompromising call but a call to find life through his way. One in which we are called to live with integrity toward god and the way, through Jesus, we are called to live.
As we descend into the grizzly events of Holy Week we are invited again to ponder the death of this innocent one who proclaims good news of peace and goodwill as he is sacrificed on the altar of power and corruption. And we are invited to ponder how we will respond – what sort of people we will be, what sort of world we will endeavour to make in his name.