Based on Isaiah 50:4-9a, Philippians 2:5-11, Matthew 21:1-9
We find ourselves today at Palm/Passion Sunday – the beginning of the triumphant and tragic last week of Jesus’ earthly life. This day and week are full of paradox – the central paradox being the powerful Messiah of Israel, the “Son of the Living God” who is obedient to the point of giving up his life for God’s salvation plan to be fulfilled. There is a tension inherent in this day – loud cries of “Hosanna” which means “God save us” and God’s salvation being delivered through the self-sacrifice of an innocent person as a consequence of a great act of injustice. A final act of salvation that no one, possibly including Jesus, expected. The people on that Palm Sunday were celebrating the end of the Roman Empire’s occupation because their “warrior King” had entered into Jerusalem. Yet, that “warrior” had entered Jerusalem on the back of a borrowed donkey, followed by a couple handfuls of students and followers – a ragtag group that would never be confused with a large conquering army.
Holy Week asks us to hold the tension of the celebration of Sunday with the betrayal of Thursday, the violence, emptiness and loss of Friday; the grief, fear and whispered wonderings of Saturday. Many want to jump from the celebration of today straight to the celebration of Easter morning – they don’t want to deal with the last part of the Lenten journey and with the mysterious and uncontrollable reality of death. Yet we who follow the Christ are bold enough to imagine a God whose unconditional and Almighty love brought dust to life and really will bring life to death and forgive our sins for all time. That is the imagining we are doing this morning, imagining that God’s love can carry us through all the shouts of “Hosanna!” and “Crucify Him!” that are part and parcel of this week.
We’ve been imagining a lot about God and God’s actions in our lives all through Lent. On Ash Wednesday we imagined a God who breathed life into dust and created humans. We went on to imagine a God who forgave the sins of the first Adam by giving us the second Adam, Jesus. We then imagined following and trusting God, imagined a God of life-giving hope, living our lives in God’s wisdom and in God’s Spirit.
Today, our scriptures, prayers and our songs put our imaginations squarely in the middle of the Palms and Passion of Holy Week. Our reading from Isaiah is one of the seven “Servant Songs” contained in that book. The servant of the “Sovereign LORD” is dutifully and stoically receiving punishment from tormentors. The servant trusts in the LORD and so can be obedient even in the face of persecution. Twice the servant states, “It is the Sovereign LORD who helps me.”
The Gospel reading is the traditional one for Palm Sunday. Jesus had turned his face toward Jerusalem and the confrontation with the Temple leaders. He rides into town on the back of a donkey, fulfilling the prophesy of Zechariah about the promised Messiah – coming in gently rather than aggressively. A large crowd celebrated his entry and cried out for the Son of David to save them through God. They also recognized him as one who comes to them in the name of the Lord. Can you imagine how Jesus might have been feeling? Proud, anxious, annoyed, questioning, centered…some mix of all of the above?
The reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians is a chapter that speaks to that group of believers living in a humble way that imitates the life of Jesus. In the opening verses of the second chapter, Paul is asking them to imagine living in a like-minded way, doing nothing out of ambition or conceit and putting the interest of others before their own. Our reading pointedly states that the goal of all followers of the Christ is to imagine emptying ourselves so that we can be filled with the love of God. Once we are filled with that power, we can become perfectly obedient to God and so fulfill God’s will for our lives – just as the suffering servant of Isaiah and Jesus did.
It is a great challenge to imagine our way into Jesus’ sandals as he enters Jerusalem to cries for him to save his people. A reminder that his Hebrew name “Yeshuah” means “One Who Saves”. Yet, the way of God’s salvation will cost Jesus his earthly life – how can we hold that tension of needing to give up our earthly attachments to fully follow Jesus through the Cross?
Pastor Donna Schaper teaches us about the necessity of holding the paradox of Jesus’ triumph and pain in order to deepen our faith in God. She writes, “…The great ceremony of the donkey and the palms and the arrival all signal that an important decision has been made. The servant has set himself on the road to kingship by way of the difficult ground transportation of servanthood. The boy from Bethlehem is on his way to Jerusalem. Jesus is not going to settle for being human; divinity is his destination.
He marks that divinity by a paradox in triplets. One is the humble king: to be great and godlike, he says, we must become small and humble. The second is the ironic nature of praise: all those cloaks and field branches go on the ground - the people want to worship Jesus, but he is not impressed by their praise. A third is the connection of life to death: to have a great life, we must be prepared for death. We can have anything we can let go of - and that includes our heartbeats.
The psalm (118) prepares us for paradox: the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. What we think is going to be true is not going to be true. Watch out for your assumptions about both God and salvation: God and salvation may show up riding on an ass. They will not be interested in kings or praise. They will choose a kind of death on behalf of a kind of new life.
Isaiah talks about the servant setting his face ‘like flint’ against his enemies and going out from them. The gospel, however, is about a different sort of journey. While the first servant sets his back against those who struck him, the second travels to where they live. It looks like a big fancy parade, but most of the motion is actually internal. Jesus goes inside himself and makes a decision for Jerusalem and then for the temple. From his heart to the heart of the city to the heart of his teaching [religion];…”
Imagining the triumph and pain of Jesus on this final week is challenging. We read in the Bible that Jesus’ own people were expecting when the Messiah appeared he would operate like their ancestor King David – warring and uniting all of Israel once again. Jesus knew that God’s plan was far from what his people understood, and he had spent three years trying to get that counter-cultural message across. The vast majority of the Jews of Jesus’ time could not imagine that YHWH, the mighty God of old, would be humble and self-sacrificing rather than vengeful and militaristic – thus they did not recognize him when he came, or they so misunderstood what he was teaching that they called for his torture and death.
Imagining our way through Lent and Holy Week may allow us to get in touch with uncertainty, loss and fear in our lives. When we imagine ourselves in Jesus’ place, we allow ourselves to feel all of the emotions (anger, frustration, joy, sorrow, fear, determination, etc) that he probably felt. Imagining our way through Holy Week also teaches us that no matter what we are going through in our lives and world, God is always with us – whether we can feel or hear God or not. We can cry out “God, why have you forsaken us” like Jesus and all the while trust that like in the case of Jesus, God will make a way. That God through the example of Jesus will show us the way from false worldly adoration to true triumph, from betrayal to forgiveness, from self-focus to a focus on what the world really needs from us, and ultimately - the way from death into life that never ends.
Imagining a life of obedient servanthood as modeled by Jesus will lead us to be misunderstood, possibly reviled, often marginalized, and needing to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. As Paul puts it in the 13th verse of Philippians 2: “…for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill God’s [his] good purpose….” Imagining the triumph and pain of Jesus will allow God’s good purpose for us to be realized here on earth. Amen and amen!