{"id":239,"date":"2012-04-09T09:39:58","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T14:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/?p=239"},"modified":"2017-10-26T22:20:33","modified_gmt":"2017-10-27T03:20:33","slug":"meditation-for-palm-sunday-april-1-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/2012\/04\/09\/meditation-for-palm-sunday-april-1-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Meditation for Palm Sunday April 1, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

It all began with a parade, a very modest one that over the years has grown in the imaginations of centuries of believers.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0As Mark tells it, this particular parade must have drawn only a\u00a0 small crowd. If it had\u00a0 been a larger event,\u00a0 the authorities would surely have known the central figure by sight.\u00a0 Later in the week,\u00a0 they had to get someone to identify him in the garden when they went to arrest him.<\/p>\n

Everybody loves a parade and so we love this part of the story:\u00a0 the vision of the handsome young teacher,\u00a0 brimming over with charisma, riding into the city on a little colt\u2014an ancient symbol used by kings about to be crowned and enthroned to symbolize that they had come in peace, and that they were going to be one with us, the common folk.\u00a0\u00a0 A bit different from tanks and humvees roaring into a city waving flags of might.<\/p>\n

This is the pomp\u2014word that in Latin, pompa, means a procession.\u00a0\u00a0 It was, to be sure, an ironic procession meant to be seen as a march toward enthronement of a king, a bit of civic disturbance and street theatre that was meant to be an \u201cin-your-face\u201d confrontation of the Romans and the religious authorities of the time.<\/p>\n

Circumstance, on the other hand, is a condition that determines another action.\u00a0\u00a0 It was Sir Edward Elgar who, in 1901, took the combination of words from a line in Shakespeare\u2019s play, Othello, and gave it as the title for the music for the\u00a0 coronation of King Edward VII of England. \u00a0Now it is used for graduation ceremonies, as if those processions were, in some twisted sense, coronations for entitlement.<\/p>\n

The circumstance here is that Jesus meant to turn expectations of\u00a0 a messianic Davidic king on its head.\u00a0 In the Moosnick lectures this past week, at Transylvania, and at the Temple Saturday morning, Rabbi David Sandmel explained quite clearly that one of the major asymmetries, a mild word for such a major difference, is that Jewish expectations for a messiah were and remain that of a charismatic prophet who will restore the promised lands to its Davidic empire and glory.\u00a0 The work of the Jewish messiah will be that of redeeming the people and the land, in the sense of buying them out of bondage and oppression.<\/p>\n

For Christians, the Christ\u2014the anointed one, the Messiah\u2014was someone altogether different.\u00a0 Christ rode into Jerusalem, and were he to ride into Washington, D.C., or Paris, or Moscow,\u00a0 he would say that the \u201ceye cannot say to the foot \u2018I have no need of you\u2019, he would insist that those who leave out and leave behind their fellow human beings diminish their own humanity.\u00a0 Christ rides into Jerusalem, and today into Lexington and Louisville, and Nairobi and Harare to proclaim that life and relationship are synonymous, that goodness cannot occur in isolation, that now, as always, we need to affirm a community of mutual need and love.\u00a0 Christ rides into the city to side with those who are left out and left behind.<\/p>\n

How could it be otherwise?\u00a0 If the son of God sided with tyrants, God would be tyrannical.\u00a0 If the son of God sided with no one, God would be indifferent.\u00a0 Only by a clear understanding that God sides with the bruised and broken, the poor and powerless, can we Christians claim that ours is a God of justice.\u00a0 [Coffin, William S.\u00a0 \u201cThe Eternal Rider\u201d, The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, Vol 2, <\/em>Westminster: 2008, p. 381.]<\/p>\n

In the Gospels\u2019 accounts, the circumstance that must have felt to the religious authorities as a ridiculing of their hopes and convictions, and then leads, of course, to the rest of the enthronement and coronation story, \u00a0a bloody, agonizing, seemingly a\u00a0 rout and defeat of this upstart, foolish young man from Nazareth.<\/p>\n

It IS\u00a0 an enthronement story,\u00a0 the crowning glory of a secret king born in humble circumstances, but having all the right lineage, placed in a wooden trough for a crib rather than a golden basket, and eventually enthroned on rough wooden beams at the last, when he truly became our king.\u00a0 Crowned with thorns of the field, anointed with his own blood, arms spread wide, but nailed down\u2014because, after all, the world doesn\u2019t like a God to be so willing to include everyone.\u00a0\u00a0 Such generosity must<\/span> be pinned down.\u00a0\u00a0 He becomes the king of glory not in transcendence, but in condescendance.\u00a0 He became as a grain of wheat, cast to the earth, buried under the sod, suffered and died.\u00a0 His glory, his exaltation, was when he finally got his opportunity to be \u201chigh and lifted up.\u201d\u00a0 Did not he say, \u201cI, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so he does\u2014and the question continues whether the world that goes after Jesus on Palm is cheering a man who has searched their consciences, convinced their minds, and won over their hearts to God?\u00a0 Or are they following a political leader whose power has been proved by the stories circulating the streets of Jerusalem that he raised a man named Lazarus from the dead?\u00a0 Had someone asked them why they were carrying palms, half might have replied, \u201cBecause they symbolize peace,\u201d and the other half, \u201cBecause the Romans forbid our carrying spears.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps now, as then, \u00a0the danger to a people lies less in becoming a \u201csecular humanist\u201d or atheistic society than in becoming a repressive, reactionary religious one.<\/p>\n

Still, across the centuries, there continues to be\u00a0 something magnetic about this Jesus.\u00a0 From the very beginning he drew people to him from all walks of life, from lowly shepherds to the learned magi;\u00a0 from the elderly Simeon and Anna in the temple to the little children who scampered alongside as he and the twelve walked from village to village; from a rich\u00a0 intellectual Pharisee named Nicodemus who comes in the night\u00a0 to one like Paul who at first would try to destroy the little group that tried to live by his way,\u00a0 and later would build the church, from the people of Galilee to the people of all nations, to people like you and me.<\/p>\n

There is something magnetic, something very hard to resist in this condescending, stooping, humiliated God of Glory, riding a donkey, for God\u2019s sake,\u00a0 into Jerusalem, praying in agony in the garden, standing trial on trumped up charges, and at last put up on that cruel throne without benefit of narcotic to dull the pain.\u00a0 George Bernard Shaw, who claimed no religious faith whatsoever, and who was condemned by many Christians of his era, once wrote:\u00a0 \u201cI am no more a Christian than Pilate was\u2026gentle hearer;\u00a0 and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus of Nazareth to Annas or Caiaphas, and I am ready to admit that I see no way out of the world\u2019s misery but the way which would have been found by his will.\u201d\u00a0 Even the writer H.G. Wells says of Jesus, \u201cIs it any wonder, that to this day, this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever our doubts and misgivings, whatever our fickle minds might imagine, we cannot hear this story without knowing in some mysterious way that the pounding of the hammer on the nails going into those wrists and feet– that pounding echoes in our heart as TRUTH\u2014ultimate and total.<\/p>\n

So we join the parade to find ourselves with Peter and James and John, betraying him with our inattention, with Mary and Martha and the other women, near the cross, accepting the forgiveness that he offers for our half-hearted following, the little betrayals, the big denials\u2014and we keep going after him. <\/span><\/p>\n

Along the way of this pomp and circumstance, we discover the promise comes true.\u00a0 Where he is, we one day find ourselves\u2026no longer concerned about what the world values or thinks, only convinced that as we have lost all of those<\/span> concerns, that when we lose our lives, as he said, we\u00a0 have somehow found the life we sought in the first place.\u00a0 Perhaps Bernard of Clairvaux, in the 12th<\/sup> century, expressed our devotion best:<\/p>\n

What language shall I borrow<\/em><\/p>\n

To thank Thee, dearest Friend.<\/em><\/p>\n

For this Thy dying sorrow, <\/em><\/p>\n

Thy pity without end?<\/em><\/p>\n

O make me Thine forever;<\/em><\/p>\n

And should I fainting be,<\/em><\/p>\n

Lord, let me never, never<\/em><\/p>\n

Outlive my love to Thee. <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Amen.<\/em><\/p>\n

(attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux,, 1091-1153)<\/em><\/p>\n

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It all began with a parade, a very modest one that over the years has grown in the imaginations of centuries of believers.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0As Mark tells it, this particular parade must have drawn only a\u00a0 small crowd. If it had\u00a0<\/p>\n

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